COLLEGE BASEBALL / NCAA MIDWEST REGIONAL : Northridge Watches Lead, Season Slip Away in Loss to Minnesota, 7-6

The Minnesota baseball team didn’t know it at the time, but the hole the Golden Gophers dug for themselves on Sunday actually served as a trap.

And Cal State Northridge fell right into it.

Up by six runs after their first five at-bats, the Matadors fell to Minnesota, 7-6, and were eliminated from the NCAA Midwest Regional before a crowd of 1,500 at Wichita State’s Eck Stadium-Tyler Field.

And so the record will show that Northridge won 38 games and spent much of the final month of the regular season ranked in the national Top 10. That record, and rating, might have been deceiving.

“We won exactly half of our last 18 games,” Northridge Coach Kernen said. “We were just another team.”

There was resignation rather than bitterness in Kernen’s voice as he patiently fielded questions about the Matadors’ collapse.

“It came to a merciful end,” Kernen said of Northridge’s season. “Really, we got what we deserved, and it’s too bad, too. At one point this team was pretty good.”

But not at the end.

Northridge’s offense was out-hit in each of its three playoff games. The Matadors did not hit a home run and had just four extra-base hits--all doubles.

Half of those doubles were produced by Scott Richardson in his first two at-bats Sunday against Minnesota starter Andy Hammerschmidt.

The first, a line-drive into the gap in right-center field, came on the first pitch of the game.

“We wanted the first pitch of the game to set the tempo for how we were going to play the rest of the day,” Richardson said.

It didn’t happen.

Northridge built its six-run advantage with two runs in the third, three in the fourth and another run in the fifth.

In the third, Richardson’s second double scored Chris Olsen from first. Richardson then advanced to third on a passed ball and scored on an infield out.

In the fourth, the resourceful Matadors turned three hits, a stolen base, a walk, a hit batter, an error and a passed ball in a three-run inning. In the fifth, Northridge scored its final run on an infield out that followed two walks and a hit batter.

But Minnesota came back quickly against Northridge starter John Bushart, who did a tight- rope walk for four innings before the Gophers knocked him off.

Bushart, stranded runners in scoring position in each of the first four innings before pushing over its first run on a two-out single by George Behr in the fifth.

The Gophers added two more runs in the next inning on a walk, a single, a run-scoring bunt by Ryan Lefebvre and an RBI double by Mark Merila to make it 6-3.

That set the stage for freshman Mark Vandersall, who was called off the Minnesota bench with two on and two outs in the seventh. Vandersall knocked Bushart’s fourth pitch, a fastball, over the left-field fence. The three-run, game-tying hit was only his second home run of the season.

CSUN freshman Jason Van Heerde came in from the bullpen on to get the final out of the seventh, but in the following inning Minnesota pushed over the winning run on another RBI-single by Behr.