Two-Sport Standout Nevin Alive and Kicking for Titans

The best argument yet for keeping football alive at Cal State Fullerton is provided by a 19-year-old third baseman named Phil Nevin.

Nevin bats leadoff for the Fullerton baseball team. At this, he is slightly more successful than Devon White. Nevin, a freshman, is batting .353 overall--.432 in the Big West Conference--and shares the conference leadership in home runs with 14. He has appeared in every inning the Titans have played this season, or enough of them to turn the Titans into the surprise champions of the Big West.

For this, Gene Murphy must be held responsible.

Nevin had his pick of baseball scholarships coming out of Placentia’s El Dorado High last summer. He also had a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, who made Nevin their third-round draft pick.

But only Murphy, who coaches football at Fullerton, told Nevin what he wanted to hear.

“You’re the kicker.”

It was a great moment in recruiting history. In order to get the man capable of turning around its baseball team, Fullerton had to guarantee Nevin an off-season job.

On the football team.

“Whenever a college baseball coach would call me, I always told him the same thing--’I’m going to college on a football scholarship,’ ” Nevin says. “I never let it get past that point. I got a lot of calls and a lot of letters, but only three or four schools said I’d be able to play both sports.”

And none could promise Nevin what Murphy did.

“He said, ‘I was the kicker,’ ” Nevin says. “He really didn’t have anyone else. There was nobody else. I was going to be it.”

Nevin’s meal ticket may be baseball, but his ticket to ride is football. He was hooked ever since he watched a Punt, Pass and Kick competition on TV, entered it the next year and reached the national finals.

The obsession took him far--his 57-yard field goal at El Dorado is an Orange County high school record--but rarely wide. As a Fullerton freshman, Nevin converted 15-of-21 field goal tries in 1989, the best single-season performance ever by a Titan.

“I love it,” Nevin says. “I’ve always loved kicking. That’s a big reason why I’m here. I didn’t want to stop.”

Even during baseball season, which caused some temporary complications. At third base, Nevin kept right on kicking--a one-hopper here, a shoe-topper there. He committed nine errors in his first 10 games, not quite the conversion rate Fullerton baseball Coach Larry Cochell was seeking.

The mistakes were the results of a rookie mistake. After spending a lifetime playing shortstop, baseball’s fast lane, Nevin admits he underestimated the demands of playing third.

“I didn’t think it was going to be that hard of a move,” he says. “You figure shortstop is the toughest position on the field and when I moved to third base, I didn’t work as hard as I should have.

“But I got a little bit smarter.”

Nevin received an education at Stanford, where the Titans played their first road series of the season.

“They’ve got a bunch of hitters up there,” Nevin says, “and they were hitting shots right at me. I was having balls ripped by me right and left. I started to realize that third base is a lot different in college.”

The Titans struggled right along with Nevin. Coming off 1989’s fifth-place finish--Fullerton’s poorest showing since 1973--the Titans lost three of their first four games and were still at .500 after 18 games.

After 22 games, Cochell decided to shake up his lineup. Nevin had the team’s best on-base percentage, but he was batting third, behind Mate Borgogno, who did his best hitting with runners on base. It made more sense to try it the other way around, so Cochell moved Nevin to leadoff and kept him there.

All the way to the Big West Conference championship.

Nevin provided instant offense. Home runs tend to do that. His 14 home runs tied him with San Jose State’s Jeff Ball for the conference lead, but more than that they recharged a lineup whose battery seemed dead when Dave Staton (18 home runs in 1989) signed with the San Diego Padres. Fullerton’s top returning power hitter? Paul Bunch, who had six home runs last season.

Somewhat more slowly, Nevin has provided defense, too.

In his last 43 games, Nevin has committed just six errors, serving as the final piece in Cochell’s rebuilt infield. Last season, the Titans fielded a dismal .947 as a team, with second baseman Borgogno (29 errors), shortstop Randy Graves (20 errors) and third baseman Ralph Ramirez (23 errors) ranking as the leading culprits. This season, Borgogno is the lone holdover in the infield and Fullerton is eighth in the nation with a .970 fielding percentage.

In other polls of note, the Titans are first in the Big West and 17th in the country, bound for the NCAA regional playoffs and the road to Omaha.

In other words, baseball is back at Fullerton. Alive and kicking, you could say.