COLLEGE BASEBALL : CS Long Beach Seems to Recall the Way to Reach World Series

The start may not be as surprising or as dramatic, but Cal State Long Beach is quietly on a pace to duplicate or improve upon its showing last season, when the 49ers rode an 18-0 start all the way into the College World Series.

With a little more than a week left before the start of play in the Big West Conference, Long Beach is 21-8-1 and ranked 12th by Baseball America.

The 49ers are batting .335 and have hit 19 home runs--three more than all last season.

First baseman Don Barbara is batting .443, and outfielder Alan Burke is batting .417 with a team-leading six homers.

Sophomore right-hander Andy Croghan is the club’s top pitcher with a 7-1 record and a 3.39 earned-run average.

Long Beach and Fresno State are expected to contend for the Big West title, which they shared last season. San Jose State, Nevada Las Vegas, UC Santa Barbara, Cal State Fullerton and UC Irvine should also be in the race, with Pacific destined for last place.

“There’s not really a dominant team going into it,” Long Beach Coach Dave Snow said of the conference. “The sleeper team is Irvine. They’ve done some impressive things and they’re going to be a definite threat for the title.”

Irvine (18-9) is off to its best start since 1981 and is already just two wins away from equaling last season’s victory total.

The Anteaters, under 10th-year Coach Mike Gerakos, open conference play on March 30 against Fullerton. Infielder Osmar DeChavez leads the conference with a .446 average, and senior right-hander Ken Whitworth is 6-2 with a 2.73 ERA.

San Jose State (20-2) is ranked 18th. In both losses, against Stanford and USF, the Spartans left the bases loaded in the ninth inning.

Jeff Ball is batting .391 with six homers and 38 RBIs for San Jose State, which has won 21 consecutive home games dating to last season. The Spartans’ fate will be determined by how well they play on the road and whether left-hander Donnie Rea can come back from an arm injury to rejoin a rotation that features senior right-hander Dave Tellers, who is 5-1 with a 3.35 ERA.

Catcher Todd Johnson is No. 19-ranked Fresno State’s top hitter at .340. Pitcher Steve Wolf is 3-2 with a 3.16 ERA.

Nevada Las Vegas, which plays host to Long Beach in its conference opener on March 30, is ranked 21st and has won 13 of its last 16 games. Tim Johnson, at .418, and Ricky Scruggs, at .392, are the Rebels’ top offensive threats, and left-hander Donovan Osborne is the staff’s standout with a 5-2 record and 73 strikeouts in 60 innings.

UC Santa Barbara has been led all season by senior outfielder Mike Czarnetzki, who is batting .411. Gaucho pitcher Shaun Loucks is 7-1.

Key players for Fullerton include Mate’ Borgogno, who is batting .404, and left-hander Huck Flener, who has compiled a 4-1 record with a 2.89 ERA.

Pacific, under first-year Coach Quincey Noble, was 7-15 entering this week and might figure in the race as a spoiler.

Back on track: Not surprisingly, Stanford is enjoying the biggest turnaround in college baseball this season.

A year ago, the then two-time defending national champion Cardinal was 11-15 overall, 1-7 in the Pacific 10 Southern Division and on its way to a 30-28 finish.

Stanford (21-5) leads the league at 8-3 and is ranked fourth by Baseball America.

Pitchers Stan Spencer and Mike Mussina, perhaps the best 1-2 combination in the country, are among the biggest reasons for the reversal of fortune.

Spencer, a junior right-hander from Vancouver, Wash., was 5-7 with a 4.32 ERA in 1989. This season, he is 6-0 with a 2.37 ERA and has 61 strikeouts in 60 innings.

Mussina, a junior right-hander from Montoursville, Pa., who was considered one of the top prospects in the nation when he arrived in Palo Alto, was 2-3 with a 3.55 ERA in 1989 before a strained tendon in his elbow ended his season after just 45 2/3 innings. This season, Mussina is 5-2 with a 3.11 ERA.

“He takes the pressure off me,” Spencer said of Mussina. “A lot of teams might say, ‘We have to beat Mike Mussina--their big gun.’ Then they look past me. But I think that may be changing.”

Mussina thinks this Cardinal team is better than the 1988 squad that defeated Arizona State for the national title. “The team in ‘88, we were up and down for a lot of the season until it came down to crunch time,” Mussina said. “I don’t see that with this team. I see more consistency throughout the season.”

Thirsting for victory: In its last 20 road games against Arizona and Arizona State, UCLA has lost 18 times.

The Bruins hope to reverse that trend this weekend--and improve their chances for an at-large postseason berth--when they travel to Tucson for a three-game Pac-10 Southern Division series against Arizona in the only conference series that will be played this weekend due to final exams.

UCLA (19-9) is rated 10th by Baseball America, the Bruins’ highest ranking since April 1987. The position, however, is more a testament to UCLA’s 15-2 nonconference record than its 4-7 showing in the Pac-10.

Sixth-ranked USC (9-5) trails conference-leading Stanford (8-3) by a half-game, followed by No. 8 Arizona State (8-5), Arizona (5-7), UCLA and California (2-9).

Streaking: Georgia Tech rode its 20-game winning streak to the top of the Baseball America poll this week.

The Yellow Jackets (23-1), who play in Hawaii Friday, are 11 shy of the Division I record for consecutive victories set by Texas in 1977.

College Baseball Notes

Senior shortstop Chris Martin leads Pepperdine in 10 offensive categories, including batting average at .363, home runs with 10 and runs batted in with 32. The Waves are 8-4-1 in the West Coast Conference, a half-game behind Loyola (8-3). Pepperdine plays host to San Diego this weekend, and Loyola travels to Santa Clara.

Stanford outfielder Jeff Hammonds, a freshman from Plainfield, N.J., has a 19-game hitting streak, is batting .385 and leads the Pacific 10 Southern Division with 19 stolen bases. . . . USC outfielder John Jackson has 48 stolen bases, three shy of the school record set by John Wells in 1976-79.

UCLA pitchers John Sutherland and Mike Fyhrie are out for the season and will petition the NCAA for a redshirt year. Sutherland suffered a torn rotator cuff, and Fyhrie will undergo surgery for an elbow injury. . . . UCLA catcher Paul Ellis has 14 home runs and 41 RBIs for the season, but has no homers and has driven in just one run in the Bruins’ last seven games. Ellis, however, has seven walks--four intentional--and has been hit by a pitch six times.