CAL STATE FULLERTON BASEBALL PREVIEW : Titans Will Remain Competitive : Fullerton: Despite losing all his starting pitchers and some top players from last year, Garrido expects team to be a contender.

FULLERTON — The pitching is mostly untested. The team doesn’t have the speed it had a year ago. And only one regular who hit above .300 is back.

Sound like a gloomy outlook for a college baseball season? Not if you’re talking about Cal State Fullerton, where Coach Augie Garrido always seems to come up with a team that is a threat to win the Big West Conference championship and make the NCAA playoffs.

The Titans have reached the College World Series twice in the past three seasons. Garrido definitely has had to regroup this year, but the Titans again are regarded as one of the nation’s top 20 teams.

Garrido believes his 20th team at Fullerton will evolve during the season. “We’ll be using a lot of different combinations early in the season to see what works best,” he said.

For several months, Garrido--with his associate head coach George Horton and assistant Rick Vanderhook--have been considering various ways to reshape the team after the departure of the entire staff of starting pitchers and many of its top players, including talented outfielder Dante Powell and gutsy second baseman Jeff Ferguson.

One of the key pieces in the puzzle is outfielder-pitcher Mark Kotsay. Platooned most of the season in the outfield, Kotsay started 34 of 63 games and finished as the team’s top hitter at .372, two points better than Ferguson, who shared conference player of the year honors.

Kotsay also has shown ability as a pitcher. When the Titans learned that Big West pitcher of the year Matt Wagner had been declared ineligible for an unspecified violation of NCAA rules, they considered Kotsay as a potential starter.

“We had several meetings regarding Kotsay, and all of us were of the opinion that he needs to be able to do both,” Garrido said. “But the fact is that we consider him our best center fielder and our best leadoff hitter.”

The coaches decided they could get the maximum out of Kotsay by anchoring him in center and using him occasionally as a reliever.

“He could still go into a starting role at some point,” said Horton, who handles the pitchers. “We want to give him quality innings, but still keep his main focus on his hitting. A lot will depend on how Silva, Ward and Dixon do. If we do start him, it would be most likely on a Sunday, which would give him plenty of time to come back.”

Horton is optimistic that the pitching will be solid. Right-hander Ted Silva, the team’s top relief pitcher last season with a 2.29 earned-run average and 13 saves, has moved into a starting role. “We think he’s adjusted very well,” Horton said. The two other starters at this stage are right-hander Jon Ward, who had a limited role last season, and left-hander Tim Dixon, a transfer from Arkansas Little Rock.

Horton expects other pitchers to help, particularly right-handers John Mitchell and Steve Cardona. Both are transfers, Mitchell from UCLA and Cardona from San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton.

“If they all pitch like they’ve been pitching in the preseason, we’ll be fine,” Horton said.

Garrido expects the team to be strong up the middle with Kotsay, Brian Loyd at catcher, Jack Jones at shortstop and Joe Fraser at second. Jones is especially strong defensively but needs to improve on his .180 batting average last season as a freshman. Garrido expects Fraser, a transfer from Rancho Santiago, to be an asset at bat as well as in the field.

D.C. Olsen, who started 31 games in 1994, is expected to be a full-time player this season at first base and junior Tony Martinez is the likely regular at third.

Garrido considers the outfield potentially “the deepest and most talented area” on the team with Tony Miranda in left and Jeremy Giambi in right. Freshman C.J. Ankrum could be platooned in the outfield or at first base.

The Titans don’t have the speed they had a year ago, especially without Powell.

“We have a lot of players with 7.0 speed for the 60, which is about average baseball speed, and a few 6.8s and 6.9s, but we don’t have any 6.4s like Dante,” Garrido said. “We’ll have to make an adjustment for that. We’ll be using more of a bat control game, trying to get our runners started more often with the hit and run and stuff like that. We can’t rely on the stolen base as much as we have in the past.”

Garrido is enjoying coaching a team that is not as settled as last year’s. In some ways, it will be more of a challenge.

“We definitely need to develop this season if we’re going to be where we want to be,” Garrido said. For the Titans, the goal of playing in the College World Series never changes.