Overachieving Fullerton Wins National Title

A Cal State Fullerton baseball team that began the season with “no goals and no expectations” climaxed it with a remarkable, whirlwind ride to a national championship.

“I didn’t want to build any fences around this team,” Coach Augie Garrido said.

He didn’t.

Instead, Garrido told the players to have fun, and Saturday in Rosenblatt Stadium, the Titans won the College World Series, the third Fullerton team to do so. Only five other teams have won the title three times.

The Titans did it with an 11-5 victory over USC, whose college baseball tradition is also rich. USC has 11 national championships, although the Trojans were back in Omaha for the first time since 1978.

Sophomore All-American Mark Kotsay, who was chosen the tournament’s outstanding player, again was a charismatic catalyst. He had two home runs in the first two innings, driving in five runs in the game. Both tied records for a championship game.

Kotsay’s batting average was .563 for the four games, raising his career Series average to a record .517 over the past two years of the tournament.

Win or lose, this team had become special for Garrido because it accomplished much more than he expected.

“This ballclub has done its best more consistently than any team I’ve ever been around,” he said.

Garrido compared the season to a painting.

“It would have been easy for us to have painted it by the numbers,” he said. “But if we had, it would have been just another painting. We wanted it to be more than that, and that’s what the players have made it. We wanted it to be the picture that was inside of them.”

That turned out to be an insatiable will to win.

The victory was the Titans’ 18th in a row and their 57th in 66 games. No team in school history has been more successful, including the ones that won national championships in 1979 and 1984 under Garrido. Fullerton won the title with a team Garrido didn’t expect to peak until a year from now, and one that was not gifted with players who dazzle major league baseball scouts.

The player drafted highest among those eligible, junior pitcher Jon Ward, wasn’t chosen until the eighth round by the St. Louis Cardinals.

Another of the team’s top pitchers, Tim Dixon, won only four games last season at Arkansas Little Rock. This year at Fullerton he was 13-0.

The Titans’ top pitcher, Ted Silva, won 18 games this season, including the one that decided the national title, and lost only one. But he wasn’t selected until the 21st round of the draft by the Texas Rangers, apparently because he isn’t what pro scouts look for in a major league pitcher.

Florida State had two pitchers chosen in the first round, but the Seminoles left Omaha several days ago, unable to make it to the tournament’s semifinals.

According to Garrido, overachieving became the fiber of this team.

“I really wanted this team to win because I felt these players really deserved it,” Garrido said minutes after left fielder Tony Miranda caught a fly ball and ignited a piling-on celebration at the mound.

Later, Garrido would add: “This team is about attitude and work ethic. This team has talent too, but not enough individually to make this happen without them pulling together. This is a player’s team, not a coach’s team. This is all about teamwork.”

Kotsay wasn’t drafted out of high school, and as a sophomore was not eligible for the draft this season. He will be eligible next year, and George Horton, the Titan associate head coach, laughed and said: “Any team that doesn’t draft him in the first round will be making a big mistake.”

Garrido said he was afraid something surprising might step in the way of Fullerton winning, but it didn’t happen. The Titans became the first top-seeded team to win the tournament since the NCAA began ranking the teams in the Series in 1988.

It also turned out to be a special day for Fullerton fans who made the trip to Omaha. They joined the celebration along the third base dugout, with university President Milton A. Gordon among them.

“This was a big thrill for me, one of the biggest ever,” Gordon said.

Most of them were parents and friends of the coaches and players.

Steve Kotsay, Mark’s father, probably spoke for all of them Saturday.

“This whole season,” he said, “has been a blessing to us.”

* IT WAS KOTSAY’S DAY: Titans’ Mark Kotsay hit two home runs, pitched in relief. C1

* COVERAGE: C1, C8