Long Beach State Stays in West; Titans Head to Louisiana State : College baseball: Fullerton, top-seeded at South Regional in Baton Rouge, starts against Northeast Louisiana.

Cal State Fullerton, the nation’s top-ranked college baseball team, will begin its bid for a third national championship in the NCAA South Regional at Louisiana State, where the second-seeded host team with its spirited fans loom as the most formidable roadblock for the Titans.

Coach Augie Garrido can almost hear those yells of “Tiger bait” already in Fullerton.

The Titans (49-9) are bidding for their third trip to the College World Series in the last four years, and will open play at 9 a.m. Thursday against sixth-seeded Northeast Louisiana (37-18) in the double-elimination tournament.

USC (41-18) and Long Beach State (35-23-1), which finished second to Fullerton in the Big West Conference regular season as well as the postseason tournament, were assigned to the West Regional at Fresno State, where USC is the top-seeded team.

Garrido said he had no complaints with his team’s assignment, although he regards Baton Rouge, La., as “one of the toughest sites” for a visiting team because of the Tigers’ enthusiastic home crowd.

“They’re definitely aggressive fans,” Garrido said. “And they’re right in there close to you in that ballpark. You can hear them yelling at you from the time you walk on the field.”

It will be Fullerton’s second regional appearance in Baton Rouge. The Titans won there in 1992 and went on to finish second in the College World Series, losing to Pepperdine in the title game. LSU has won five of the six regionals it has played host to in the last 20 years.

Ron Maestri, the chairman of the NCAA selection committee, said Fullerton was assigned to the LSU regional, primarily to separate the Titans from Long Beach, and to avoid sending USC to Baton Rouge for the second consecutive year.

“We try to keep the assignments along geographical lines when we can, and we felt Long Beach would be a strong No. 2-seeded team in the West, which meant we couldn’t send Fullerton there,” he said. “We also try to avoid having a team playing in the same regional for two years in a row, so it was logical to send USC to Fresno.”

Fullerton was one of the eight seeded teams that could be moved to one of the other regionals where a home team was not seeded first.

Florida State, Clemson, Miami and Tennessee are the top-seeded teams in the regionals to which they play host. Florida State won the automatic bid in the Atlantic Coast Conference and Tennessee in the Southeastern Conference.

Texas Tech, the Southwest Conference champion, was seeded first at Wichita State ahead of the host team, and Auburn was top-seeded at the other Midwest regional in Oklahoma City, where defending national champion Oklahoma is the host.

The Fresno regional might be the strongest of the eight with Fresno State and Pepperdine also among the six teams.

“We don’t have any of the glitter names in our tournament other than LSU, but we know they’ll all be good,” Garrido said of the field. “We certainly can’t think it will be easy, because it definitely won’t.”

In the other first-round games at LSU, the host team meets Central Michigan (40-17) and third-seeded Rice ( 40-17) faces fourth-seeded James Madison ( 42-15) in first-round games. The championship game is scheduled for Sunday.

Garrido says the atmosphere at LSU will be similar to what the Titans faced last year in Stillwater, Okla., in the Oklahoma State-hosted regional. The Titans won that championship, 6-5, with a 10th-inning rally against the host team.

Titan catcher Brian Loyd said he expects the Titans to face a tough test there, especially after he talked with former Fullerton pitcher Mike Parisi, who was with the team in 1992.

“It’s going to be a challenge going there, from what Mike tells me about their fans,” Loyd said. “He said the crowds are really amazing there, the way they support their team. But if we can win the regional in a place like that, it will make it even more special.”