COMMENTARY : For These Teams, Image Is Nothing

Cal State Fullerton weathered a hurricane, and the Miami Hurricanes, to get here.

Pepperdine waded through waves of higher seeded teams and higher profiles to get here.

CBS really didn’t want either of them--come back, come back, Ron Fraser--but as long as all of them were stuck in Omaha together on the day the College World Series championship game was to be played, they figured they might as well make the best of it.

Pepperdine and Fullerton held up their ends of the deal, which gave CBS a better deal than it either expected or deserved. In order to play this game at its appointed, TV-decreed starting time, Fullerton was forced to beat Miami Friday night amid monsoon conditions, without snorkels, and dry out in time to take on Pepperdine 14 hours later.

And play they did, slamming into catchers and outfield fences and fellow outfielders and providing the kind of high theater the network had to love, even if the marquee did read like the Junior College World Series.

Pepperdine defeated Fullerton, 3-2, on a home run by a shortstop who hadn’t hit one since 1991; on a dive by a second baseman who came out of high school thinking Pepperdine was an East Coast school; on 6 2/3 innings by a pitcher who has taken Orel Hershiser hero worship so far that it hurts to watch; and in spite of a violent home-plate collision that nearly produced a totaled Wave.

“Image Versus Substance” were the words that buoyed the Waves throughout their postseason ride and if ever there were two schools that could identify the difference, they were the ones in Rosenblatt Stadium Saturday.

Image: Pepperdine and Fullerton are decent baseball schools from Southern California, but they’re not USC or UCLA and they both lost 11 or more games, pre-Omaha, so they can’t be all that good.

Substance: Pepperdine, seeded seventh out of eight teams, shut out Texas and Wichita State and qualified for the final with a 3-0 record. Fullerton, seeded fourth, beat top-ranked Miami by consecutive scores of 7-5 and 8-1 to complete the championship field.

Image: Southern Californians are too laid-back and Pepperdine is nothing but a surfer school.

Substance: Fullerton catcher Jason Moler and Pepperdine’s Mark Wasikowski meet head-on in front of home plate in the first inning. Wasikowski lowers his shoulder and rattles Jason’s molars, but the catcher doesn’t budge and Wasikowski is sent flying, head over heels and head over home, missing the plate and getting tagged out by Titan pitcher Dan Naulty, who was backing up the play.

“Unreal!” exclaimed Wasikowski, a freckled blond from Seal Beach who still talks the talk. “It was a bang-bang thing, a good collision. Man, I was flying.”

Image: Eric Ekdahl is a .229-hitting shortstop who shouldn’t be allowed to do anything more strenuous than a bunt during a College World Series final.

Substance: Ekdahl hits Paco Chavez’s fifth-inning pitch over the fence in left. “I hit one a year,” Ekdahl said. This is the first, however, to decide a national championship.

Image: Steve Rodriguez is a squat little second baseman who got lucky with that grand slam that eliminated Texas on Thursday.

Substance: Rodriguez makes lots of big plays--the two biggest in this World Series. The grand slam got the Waves to this point, but Rodriguez’ grand dive in the eighth inning took them over the edge.

Tony Banks’ hard ground ball through the right side of the infield seemed to be all Fullerton needed to tie the score, with Jeremy Carr breaking from third. But Rodriguez belly-flopped on the dirt and snagged the ball before it could reach the outfield. Then he scrambled to his feet and threw to first to end the inning and, essentially, any last hope of a Fullerton victory.

“That was it,” Fullerton Coach Augie Garrido said. “I thought that ball was through, from where I was sitting. But Pepperdine’s infield was making those plays all day long. And that one cut down our momentum, cut down our chances of winning.”

Before that, Patrick Ahearne, the Pepperdine pitcher with the Orel fixation, did most of the prime cutting down. For 6 2/3 innings, Ahearne too-convincingly looked the part--from the 55 on his blue-and-white shirt to the slouched shoulders while straddling the rubber to the rubbery leg kick that sends his long, lean arm into action.

Ahearne limited the .322-hitting Titans to a solitary run (unearned) and three singles before giving way to the bullpen tag team of Derek Wallace and Steve Montgomery.

Taking their cue from Moler, the Titans played physical baseball, if not physically perfect baseball. Carr, the Fullerton right fielder, crashed into a wall while tracking down Keven Dell-Amico’s seventh-inning drive. Banks and Chris Powell, the Fullerton left and center fielders, crashed into each other while chasing Wasikowski’s deep fly before Banks held up his glove and found the baseball inside.

It was a triumph of substance over image, although one lasting image will be Pepperdine pitcher Sky Lasowitz shouting at Lopez, “What seed are we now, Coach?”

Lopez imagines life as a Wave is about to change.

“Before,” Lopez said, “when people looked at us, they said, ‘A pretty good program, but . . . . Now, I hope they look at us and say, ‘Hey, that’s a pretty good program.’ ”

No buts about it.