Arnold Makes Noise With Bat in CSUN Win Over Wyoming : College baseball: Three-run home run by Pierce transfer quiets Cowboys’ growling, helps Matadors to 12-6 victory.

These were the Cowboys of Wyoming, not the grizzlies or the terriers. Yet they were growling from their dugout Friday.

Cal State Northridge center fielder Joey Arnold had never heard a ballplayer growl.

“Must be a Wyoming thing,” Arnold said, nearly growling himself. “We kind of take that personally. We don’t like someone in our yard to pop off. It fired me up.”

Once ignited, Arnold lashed a three-run home run and a run-scoring single to help 13th-ranked Northridge defeat Wyoming, 12-6, in a nonconference game at Matador Field.

Northridge (12-2) has scored 35 runs in its past three games, all victories.

Matador right-hander Keven Kempton (3-1) pitched his fourth complete game, striking out seven and allowing 14 hits.

“The only problem I had was getting the ball up,” Kempton said. “I was just as strong in the first inning as the ninth. The key to my success is keeping the ball down.”

In the first inning, Steve Abbs made Kempton pay for a pitch that was up in the strike zone. Abbs’ two-run home run gave Wyoming (7-8) a 2-0 lead that held up until the fifth, when the Matadors erupted for six runs.

Northridge shortstop Andy Hodgins, batting only .185 entering the game, led off with a single to left and was erased on David Prosenko’s fielder’s choice. After Chris Olsen was hit by a pitch, Jonathon Campbell singled to left to load the bases for the Matadors’ leading hitter, Greg Shepard.

On a 2-2 count, Shepard delivered a sharply hit ground single to right field, scoring Prosenko and Olsen to tie the score, 2-2.

Then Arnold, a 5-foot-10 left-handed hitter, stepped up and belted the first pitch, a knee-high fastball across the middle of the plate, more than 400 feet to center field. The home run, Arnold’s second of the season, gave the Matadors a 5-2 lead.

“That is my favorite pitch,” said Arnold, formerly of Pierce College and Reseda High. “Luckily it got in that wind and got carried out.”

On a 1-0 count, Andy Small followed with his fifth home run, which landed atop the fence in left-center field. Small’s homer total leads the Matadors and surpasses his career high of four, achieved at Washington State in 1991.

The Cowboys pulled within 6-5 in the sixth inning by scoring three runs on four hits and two errors.

Northridge came back, however, when Prosenko led off the bottom of the inning with a double and took third on an error by center fielder Brett Feauto. Olsen reached on an error, scoring Prosenko, and Campbell drew a walk. One out later, Arnold drove in Olsen with a single to center to give Northridge an 8-5 lead.

Wyoming, a member of the Western Athletic Conference Eastern Division, added a run in the eighth, but the Matadors, members of the WAC’s Western Division, put the game out of reach with four runs on a hit by Hodgins and two errors.

“Once we got it going, it caved in a little on them,” CSUN Coach Bill Kernen said.