Toreros Win a Weird One From Aztecs

Maybe things would have been different had the head coaches been there. Perhaps things would have been different had the umpires shown up.

As it was . . . it was bizarre. Then again, it was college baseball.

With assistants running both dugouts, and a replacement umpire calling “Play ball!” 75 minutes after Tuesday’s 2:30 p.m. scheduled start of a game that wasn’t even scheduled when the season began, University of San Diego reserve outfielder Josh Stepner singled home the winning run in the bottom of the 10th inning, giving the Toreros an unlikely 7-6 come-from-behind victory over San Diego State.

And not to be left out was the performance of Kevin Herde.

Not only did Herde go five for five with a 410-foot home run and three RBIs, he also pitched 3 1/3 innings--his longest stint of the season--and picked up his first victory in 13 1/2 months.

“Quite a game, huh?” asked Herde, who raised his batting average 21 points to .357, his RBI total to 36 and his pitching record to 1-0 with four saves.

Combined, USD’s John Cunningham and SDSU’s Jim Dietz have put in more than 50 years at their respective universities. But neither was able to attend Tuesday’s game. Cunningham was on a recruiting visit to Chicago. Dietz, who had wrenched his knee working on a construction project at SDSU last week, had a doctor’s appointment.

USD was guided in the dugout by assistant Jake Molina, who has missed a number of games this year because of his duties as coach of the Spanish Olympic team. It was only the second time Molina had managed the Toreros. The first came on the last day of the 1990 season, when Cunningham was serving a three-game suspension from the West Coast Conference stemming from an earlier benches-clearing brawl with Nevada. Molina, who served a two-game suspension because of that incident, improved to 2-0 as USD’s skipper.

In Dietz’s absence, SDSU was co-coached by assistants Matt Haar (pitching) and Jim Warner (offense).

What happened to the umpires is anyone’s guess.

Molina said he called in the schedule change weeks ago. When no one showed by game time, USD statistician John Rollo called Steve Lopez, the man in charge of assigning umpires, and Lopez said he would have someone there in about 45 minutes.

So the teams waited, played some pepper, and waited some more.

The Aztecs seemed more adept at the waiting game, and they should have been. The same thing happened to them six days ago at their field.

Finally, Matt Miller arrived. And as luck would have it, Miller spotted fellow umpire Ron Ridd in the parking lot and asked him if he would care to join him. Ridd served as the base umpire in street clothes and a Chicago White Sox hat.

Miller and Ridd then proceeded to watch this:

SDSU (30-11) and USD (22-21) were tied, 4-4, when Herde, who began as the Toreros’ designated hitter but had come in to pitch in the top of the seventh, hit his solo home run to straightaway center in the bottom of the seventh to put USD up, 5-4.

SDSU retook the lead in the eighth, 6-5. But not before SDSU’s Tony Enomoto was ejected from the game for something he said to umpire Miller after a check-swing strike call, and not before Rich Juarez, who is listed as a pitcher, took over Enomoto’s at-bat with an 0-and-2 count and was out on a fouled bunt attempt.

USD retied the game in the bottom of the eighth when Enomoto’s defensive replacement at third, freshman Doug Webb, missed a throw on a stolen base attempt, and USD’s Dave Pingree popped up and trotted home.

Pingree also scored the winning run, after a single, a stolen base and Stepner’s heroic single.

Said Molina: “It was a strange day from the get-go, but I’d have never expected a game like this.”