Waves Baseball Coach Maintains Winning Tradition

Before Pepperdine began its baseball season, first-year Coach Andy Lopez said that he didn’t expect to revolutionize the school’s program--and he didn’t.

He simply maintained the same sort of power over the West Coast Athletic Conference that his predecessor, Dave Gorrie, usually exerted before he retired after last season.

The Waves made four straight NCAA tournament appearances in Gorrie’s last four seasons, won another WCAC title this season under Lopez and will be making their fifth straight NCAA appearance, their seventh since 1979, on Friday.

Pepperdine (41-17-1), is seeded fourth in the NCAA West II Regional at Fresno State’s Belden Field and will open against third-seeded Michigan (46-14), the regular-season Big 10 Conference champion, at 3:30 p.m. in the double-elimination regional.

On Saturday, the winner of the Pepperdine-Michigan game will face the winner of Friday’s game between second-seeded Fresno State (42-17) and No. 5 Notre Dame (47-17), and the loser will meet the winner between top-seeded Wichita State (58-14) and No. 6 Portland (32-22).

Like Pepperdine, Michigan has dominated its conference in recent years. In Bud Middaugh’s 10 years as coach, the Wolverines have won 462 games, six regular-season Big 10 championships and five conference tournament titles.

This year Michigan finished in first place in the Big 10 at 21-6 but lost the conference tournament final, 2-0, to Illinois, which had tied Iowa for second place in the regular season.

The Waves and the Wolverines overcame what was viewed as a lack of pitching.

Three of Michigan’s top four starters in 1988 signed contracts with major league teams, including ace Jim Abbott. Abbott went on to star with the U.S. Olympic team and is in the starting rotation of the California Angels.

Pepperdine lost its top two starters from last season. Doug Simons, who was 11-3 with a 2.42 earned-run average, was a ninth-round draft choice of the Minnesota Twins. Dennis Burbank, who was 11-2 with a 3.75 ERA, transferred to Cypress Junior College.

But both teams managed to find good pitching, much of it right on their rosters.

Michigan’s top pitchers have been left-hander Ross Powell and right-hander Mike Grimes. Powell, the team’s best relief pitcher in 1987 and 1988, replaced Abbott as Michigan’s ace, and Grimes, the other starter from last year, also had an excellent season.

Powell (9-0, 2.05 ERA, 87 2/3 innings) became only the second pitcher to lead the Big 10 in conference victories (seven), strikeouts (53) and ERA (1.53). The first was Tom Fletcher of Illinois in 1962. Powell has 192 career strikeouts, surpassing Abbott’s school record of 186.

Grimes, picked as a preseason All-American by Baseball America magazine, was 8-3 with a 4.12 ERA and fanned 66 batters in 74 1/3 innings.

Pepperdine’s best hurler has been right-handed junior Britt Craven. Last year Craven was 5-3 with 28 strikeouts and a 5.26 ERA in 65 innings; this year he is 10-3 with 85 strikeouts and a 2.84 ERA in a team-high 126 2/3 innings. He was named the WCAC Pitcher of the Year.

Lopez, the WCAC Coach of the Year, also received strong pitching from three other right-handed juniors: Sean Casey, who played for Pasadena and Santa Rosa junior colleges; Wayne Helm, who was 4-2 with 35 strikeouts and a 2.92 ERA in 37 innings last year, and John Kuzmic, a transfer from Orange Coast College.

This year Casey pitched 83 innings and was 7-2 with a 3.14 ERA and 37 strikeouts, Helm went 102 2/3 innings and was 6-4 with a 4.12 ERA and 99 strikeouts, and Kuzmic was 7.4 with a 5.45 ERA and 36 strikeouts in 62.7 innings.

The leading relief pitchers for Lopez have been junior righty Randy Hacker, right-handed sophomore Jeff Graham and lefty Rick Hirtensteiner, better known as the team’s center fielder and this year’s WCAC Player of the Year.

Hirtensteiner led Pepperdine with a .371 batting average and 12 home runs, and four other Waves hit well above .300: junior left fielder Richard Barnwell (.354), senior second baseman Matt Howard (.346), senior first baseman Scott Shockey (.342 and a team-high 61 runs batted in) and sophomore right fielder Jalal Leach (.325). Hirtensteiner, Barnwell, Howard and Leach each knocked in more than 40 runs. Shockey also had 11 homers and Barnwell 10.

Barnwell led the team in stolen bases with 27, and Howard had 24 and Leach 22.

Michigan’s top hitters have been All-Big 10 second baseman Matt Morse (a team-high .358), freshman third baseman Tim Flannelly (.343 and a team-leading 50 RBIs), designated hitter Kourtney Thompson (.340, five home runs) and right fielder Phil Price, who topped the squad with seven homers and hit .322 with 41 RBIs.

Lopez, whose team won 24 of its last 29 games, thought before the season that it would be difficult for Pepperdine to get this far. “We didn’t have a lot of people on the pitching staff,” he said.

“But as the season wore on I would have been more surprised if we (hadn’t). Things have worked out OK. I think, for the most part, we started playing well at the right time, which made it a lot easier for things to be taken care of.”

He said that either Craven or Helm will start against Michigan and that the other will pitch the second game.