Baseball, Softball Teams Hit Slumps

It has been a strange turn of events.

Cal State Fullerton’s baseball and softball teams made it to their College World Series last season. Each got off to good starts this year and has been ranked high nationally. Suddenly, however, both fell into slumps in the final weeks of the regular season.

“For a while, I wondered if there was something in the water,” softball Coach Judi Garman said.

The Titan softball team had lost seven of eight games and 11 of 14 before winning twice, 9-0 and 6-2, last Saturday at Santa Barbara to close out the regular season. Garman is optimistic that the 39-26 record will get the Titans into the 32-team NCAA postseason field.

The baseball team has lost six of its last nine games and three consecutive conference series, two games to one, heading into the Big West Conference postseason tournament beginning Friday at Fullerton.

The baseball team is expected to get into the NCAA regional field regardless of what happens this weekend in the tournament, but Coach Augie Garrido thinks it won’t matter if the Titans don’t start playing better. “We’ve been playing out of character,” Garrido said. “Now it comes down to what we do about it.”

Fullerton was 7-8 in its last 15 conference games and finished fourth in the Big West.

The Titans did show signs of better hitting last weekend against Santa Barbara. During the last nine games of the slump, Fullerton has hit .268, but the Titans batted .311 in the series against the Gauchos.

Pitching coach George Horton’s headache is that the Titans gave up 22 runs in the three games. “We need to get that back where it needs to be,” Horton said. “ But I’m confident that we can do it. Even in that last game we lost to Santa Barbara Sunday, the three pitchers [Kirk Irvine, Mark Chavez and Mark Kotsay] did what I asked them to do, so maybe the pitch selection was a big part of the problem, and I have to blame myself for that.”

Regardless, Fullerton can’t afford to go into regional play with an unstable pitching staff.

“What we really need is for all of us to have a good week at the same time,” said Fullerton relief pitcher Mark Chavez. “We need to build some momentum and feel good about ourselves.”

Starter Scott Hild agrees. “It was good to see our hitting come back against Santa Barbara, but the pitching still needs to be a lot more consistent,” he said.

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The softball team hasn’t missed making the regional tournament field in the 16 years since Garman started the program, and she doesn’t expect to be left out this year despite dropping seven games behind Big West champion Long Beach State into fourth in the conference.

“Our record this year is better than it was two years ago (35-29), and we made it then,” Garman said. “I think those last two victories at Santa Barbara should help.”

Garman said Fullerton has bid to host one of the eight regionals, but he has no indication how it might be received. Garman said Cal State Northridge, the site of the Southern California regional last year, isn’t bidding this year, although Garman expects UCLA to be a contender for one of the sites.

Garman expects one regional to be at Fresno State. “So it becomes a question of how many they put on the West Coast,” she said.

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Garman is optimistic her team has broken out of its hitting slump. The Titans were shut out twice by 1-0 scores at Long Beach last week and scored a total of four runs in three other games in the last two weeks.

The improved hitting of Senetha Thomas gave the Titans a lift against Santa Barbara.

“Senetha was batting up close to .400 for a while, but then dropped off sharply,” Garman said. Thomas finished the regular season at .337, still the team’s leading hitter. She also is tied for the Big West lead in home runs with 12.

“I talked with her on the bus going over to Santa Barbara and pointed out that she had been over-striding a little,” Garman said. “It seemed to help right away. She had a home run in her first at-bat at Santa Barbara. Now she’s really attacking the ball.”

Garman said the team didn’t panic during the slump. “Even when we were losing, we were playing well,” she said. “We just weren’t getting many hits. And a lot of those losses were against teams that are nationally ranked.”

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Titan Notes

Cal State Fullerton already has sold more than 800 all-tournament passes for the Big West baseball playoffs this weekend. Additional bleacher seats have been added to bring the seating capacity of Titan Stadium to slightly more than 2,000. . . . Titan outfielder Jeremy Giambi is second in the Big West batting race with a .416 average. Mark McNelly of New Mexico State leads at .419. Mark Kotsay has the conference lead in homers with 17; two others have 16.