Florida Turns Northridge Into Gator-Bait : College baseball: Host team has all the fun in sun by battering Matadors with 19 hits, 14-2.

Co-eds in the stands wore skimpy attire. Everyone else was in shirt sleeves. The weather was in the high 70s and had been all weekend.

Yet the pinkish tint on the faces of the Cal State Northridge baseball players had nothing to do with the fact that central Florida has been blessed with prime sunning weather.

Only their hides were tanned.

“This was embarrassing,” outfielder Kevin Howard said. “Very embarrassing.”

Florida racked up season highs in hits and runs Saturday to roll over Northridge, 14-2, before 2,230 in the second day of round-robin play in the Florida Gator Slug-Fest.

Northridge (4-8) has lost five games in a row for the first time in Coach Bill Kernen’s six-year tenure, and more trouble looms. In the final day of tournament play today, the Matadors will face 16th-ranked Ohio State in a doubleheader. The Buckeyes already have beaten 22nd-ranked Florida and sixth-ranked Oklahoma State in the Slug-Fest.

“We got blasted by a better team,” Kernen said.

Florida (10-2) blasted off, all right. The Gators banged out 19 hits in eight innings, seven for extra bases. Northridge starter Keven Kempton (0-3) didn’t last three innings, partly because of shaky defense and largely because he served up a pair of two-run homers.

Over 2 2/3 innings, Kempton, a senior right-hander who won 10 games last year, gave up nine hits and eight runs, three earned. He has given up 22 earned runs in 25 2/3 innings over four starts.

It was a group effort, however. Northridge made three errors--leading to seven unearned runs--and added a handful of other blunders (three hit batters and four wild pitches) for bad measure.

Florida left-hander John Kaufman (3-0) avoided trouble over the first four innings, and by then, his mates supplied him with him an 8-0 lead. In the fifth, Howard doubled home Josh Smaler and Keyaan Cook to pare the lead to 8-2.

Howard snapped Kaufman’s string of consecutive zeros at 21 2/3 innings, which is even more impressive in light of the fact that Kaufman, who gave up five hits and struck out eight over six innings, is a freshman.

In the sixth, Florida (10-2) banged out five consecutive hits off sophomore reliever Evan Howland, including a 410-foot home run to dead center by Brian Duva, his second of the game. Howland, in fact, gave up the cycle in the inning as Florida scored four times to take a 12-2 lead.

By then, the boisterous crowd was breathing down the Matadors’ collective neck. Northridge strikeout victims were serenaded, step by step, as they trudged back to the dugout. Third baseman Tyler Nelson, who committed two errors to give him a team-high nine this season, was razzed when he finally made a routine play.

The public-address system piped in sarcastic tunes during Matador pitching changes. The scoreboard flashed E-R-R-O-R in six-foot letters.

In short, Northridge had its nose rubbed in the dirt.

“That’s good,” Kernen said. “That’s why we’re in this thing, to see what it’s like to play in front of a crowd like this.

“It’s time for this team to grow up. We’re not ready to handle this level of competition in this type of environment.”

The rate things are going lately, every pitcher the Matadors have faced looks like a world-beater. Northridge has scored 12 runs in its past five games and has more than six hits in only one.