Winners Hail From Loserville

Yet another sports team has left Orange County for greener Midwestern grass, for the chance to play in a bigger, better facility, for the opportunity to play in front of rabid, obsessed sellout crowds.

There is one difference this time around, however.

This time, the team will be coming back.

Maybe in a couple of weeks.

Maybe with its third College World Series trophy in tow.

Cal State Fullerton has moved its baseball operations to Omaha for the next four to 11 days--depending on the number of Titans not left on base--for the third time in four years, the fifth time in eight years and the ninth time in 21 years.

This is rich stuff, almost too rich for the system.

Take a look around the place.

The Rams are gone, first having broken our hearts, then stomping all over them on the road to St. Louis.

The Angels are the Angels, now in the 35th year of a five-year building program.

The Ducks have finished ninth and 12th in their two seasons in the NHL’s Western Conference and are treated like royalty-- Les Habitants des Anaheim --because they try hard.

The Clippers will play 10 games at The Pond next season, which means The Pond could possibly play host to a Clipper victory next season.

The high-profile college teams, the basketball squads of UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton, are rehabbing neck injuries from spending so much time looking up at seventh place.

Loserville.

Draft Lotteries R Us.

Cleveland By Balboa.

A Town Called Last Place.

Every year would be 12 long months of yawning and snoring if not for the clank of aluminum bats reverberating from Titan Field.

They ought to print it on the county charter, or on the base of John Wayne’s statue at the airport.

“Titan Baseball. We Do One Thing Right.”

The Angels have made the postseason three times since 1961. The Rams last made them in 1989. But Fullerton has been to the NCAA baseball playoffs 17 times since 1975, the Titans’ first season at the Division I level. Fullerton has advanced beyond the regionals nine times--a success rate of better than 50%--and has done so without playing a single regional game at Fullerton.

How difficult is that? Consider that the University of Miami has played host to a regional 13 times and won 11 of them. Arizona State is 10 for 12. Stanford 4 for 4. LSU 5 for 7--the only two defeats coming against the Titans in 1992 and again last week.

The Titans have been a road team 17 times in 17 regionals, venturing into hostile environs, stepping into the box with catcalls ringing in the earholes of their batting helmets, and have wrested the World Series plane ticket away nine times.

“Phenomenal,” Fullerton sports information director and play-by-play announcer Mel Franks assesses.

“Our choices are bad,” Fullerton Coach Augie Garrido deadpans from his hotel room in Omaha.

“Either we win on the road . . . or we’re not going to be here.”

The Titans do it without fanfare, without a completed baseball facility, without blanket media coverage--or even so much as a few stray threads--and without, truth be told, blue-chip baseball talent.

The thumbnail view of Fullerton’s baseball success is that, by this late date, Garrido does by reputation alone. He built the program into a national power in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s--back when a Cal State Fullerton could still pop up out of nowhere and pull such a trick--and by 1995, it runs on auto-pilot. By now, the top teen-age players know about Titan baseball, respect Titan baseball and have made the program a top-10 perennial by ringing Garrido’s phone off the hook.

Garrido plays up that angle, saying, “You can go out and mine for gold wherever you want, but if you go mining in the desert, you ain’t gonna find any. You have to go to where the gold is. And we’re sitting in the middle of a gold mine.”

Yet, Phil Nevin is the only Titan chosen first in the draft and his selection was based, largely, on money. Houston didn’t want to pay Jeffrey Hammonds all that money, so the Astros went with the more signable Nevin instead.

“We’ve sent 21 guys to the major leagues,” Franks says, “and Tim Wallach is a star, but beyond that, we don’t have another. We don’t get the blue-chip guy ticketed for the majors here, the guy who goes to Stanford knowing that in a couple years he’ll be drafted in the first round.

“Twenty of 21 guys came here without the best tools in the world, went through our program and after three or four years here, wound up in the major leagues. That’s a credit to Augie and his coaches.”

Baseball succeeds at Fullerton not because Garrido built the program to be the Next USC or the Next UCLA, but because he was able to create The Best Available Second Option.

“We get guys who, as baseball players, are as good as [Steve] Beuerlein, the Servite quarterback who went to Notre Dame,” Garrido says. “That kind of kid is available in baseball, too, but Notre Dame doesn’t know where the hell he is.

“We get a lot of guys who are overlooked. . . . The kids who have the aspiration to play for the glamour and glitter schools still do that. But there are still enough Scott Hilds and Phil Nevins and Mike Harkeys and Tim Wallachs--very talented players who want to play somewhere.

“A lot of our kids come here with the mentality and work ethic that comes from being told, ‘You’re not good enough.’ They say, ‘Hey, I’ll go to Cal State Fullerton and show you how good I am.’ ”

You can see 25 of them Saturday afternoon.

They will be playing Stanford in Omaha, in the first round of the College World Series.

You can see them on CBS.

Good enough?