Titans, Cardinal Lose Game to Bad Weather

College baseball fans are going to have to wait to find out whether Cal State Fullerton or Stanford wins the deciding game of the series between two of the three highest ranked teams in the preseason.

Rain forced postponement of Sunday’s third game. Fullerton Coach Augie Garrido and Cardinal Coach Mark Marquess tentatively agreed to play the game later in the season, either at Stanford or Fullerton.

“This series wasn’t going to establish who’s No. 1 or No. 2 in our mind at this stage of the season anyway,” Garrido said. “The important thing right now was to get good experience against a good team. And what I think we saw was two top-10 teams with some fine athletes.”

Stanford won the opening game, 5-0, and Fullerton came back to win, 7-0, Saturday. Garrido said he had no problem leaving it at that for now. The Titans play Wednesday at Pepperdine and open a three-game series at home Friday against Fresno State.

“We weren’t willing to miss Monday’s classes on the chance that we could play the game on Monday,” Garrido said. “The semester is just starting and we felt our players needed to be back in school. It could still be raining Monday anyway. We’ll play the game on a Monday when one of us already is in the other’s neighborhood.”

Fullerton has a three-game Big West Conference series April 19-21 at San Jose State, and Stanford plays Feb. 23-25 at UCLA and April 12-14 at USC.

Garrido was thankful the teams were able to play Saturday’s game. Morning rain also threatened to postpone it, but groundskeepers were able to get the field playable after a three-hour delay. “That’s one of the reasons we play teams like Stanford,” Garrido said. “They have good facilities. Some people would have given up on the game, but they didn’t.”

Garrido and associate head coach George Horton came away with some good feelings.

Garrido said he was especially pleased with the play of sophomore Mike Lamb, who caught both games. Lamb filled in for senior Brian Loyd, whose throwing arm has not returned to full strength after an injury. Loyd was the designated hitter in both games.

Horton also saw some good signs in the pitching corps. Brent Billingsley pitched a seven-hit shutout in eight innings of work Saturday. Friday’s starter Kirk Irvine gave up five runs in 4 1/3 innings, but Scott Hild, Todd Singelyn and Mark Chavez had a total of 4 2/3 innings of scoreless relief over the two games.