Lopez Brings Nicholson and His X-Games to Florida

There’s a natural distrust of anything Californian there, and the last thing Andy Lopez needed at Florida was some kind of stereotypical escapee from Venice or Malibu or Central Casting.

He had moved in from Pepperdine as Florida’s coach four years ago, had taken the Gators to the College World Series in his second season at Gainesville, and people had forgiven him his roots in their headlong rush onto the bandwagon.

But those roots are deep, and among them lay the answer to a question about Florida’s hitting two seasons ago.

Lopez needed a bat, but he needed a special kind of bat and the laid-back need not apply, dude.

“I’m always going to be kind of prejudiced about a kid from Southern California, from L.A., from the South Bay,” said Lopez, who is still all of those things, even though he draws a paycheck 2,500 miles away. “I like a kid with a ‘good’ chip on his shoulder, a tough kid who is used to fighting traffic and smog.”

You want a chip on the shoulder? How about a kid who is thrown out of a game while crossing home plate after hitting a home run?

“That’s a [Los Angeles] Harbor kid,” Lopez says, laughing. “I know that because I’m a Harbor kid.”

So is Derek Nicholson, a transplanted Gator from Harbor Junior College and West Torrance High, and an answer to the bat problems in Gainesville, where Lopez had taken his Pepperdine run-and-catch-and-pitch game and found himself watching Louisiana State and Alabama home runs flying overhead. Lopez needed a bat with some pop and Nicholson needed a place to play.

The last thing Lopez needed was a kid who would come in with a la-la attitude, and that’s the last thing he got with Nicholson, who runs up laundry bills in Florida the same way he runs out home runs: as fast as he can.

“A lot of people say my style of play is about going to extremes,” he said. “But that’s the fun of it. I want to be sweaty. I want to have bruises on my body.

“It’s those things that show we’re doing the extra things to win. . . . Just give me a uniform and I’ll throw it on.”

Said Lopez: “They love him here. You should see them when he’s rounding first on a double. People know he’s going headfirst into second and they love it.”

Nicholson, a senior, has given them 20 such thrills this season in batting .365, and has added four triples. He also has hit 15 home runs, each run out as fast as those doubles--”it’s what we were taught at Harbor,” he said--and one, hit against Mississippi on April 6, that resulted in an ejection.

“[The umpire] had called a couple of pitches that I didn’t agree with, and then I caught one [and hit it out],” he said. “I was still yelling at him when I crossed the plate and he got me.”

Nicholson also bunched some of those hits in SEC games at Tennessee on March 29 and Kentucky on April 3, hitting for the cycle at each port. He missed doing it three times in row, against Mississippi on April 10, when he had a double, triple and homer in three at-bats, then grounded out in his last two.

He also has two grand slams and 66 runs batted in.

Most of that was accomplished after a slow start in which he tried his hand at third base. The knock on Nicholson is that he is slow afoot, and Lopez was trying to find someplace to put him to keep his bat in the lineup.

“I was embarrassed,” Nicholson said of his play at third base. He started 28 games there and made most of his 22 errors. He was hitting about .250 when the experiment was pronounced a failure and he went back to right field, where he began hitting again.

“I didn’t take it to the bat,” he insisted, “but I take a lot of pride in the way I play. I think everybody does, and I didn’t do a good job. It wasn’t because I didn’t try hard.”

He may yet have a future at the position, or possibly at second base. Nicholson is eligible for the June draft, and “a couple of independent clubs have told me they’d like to have him if he isn’t drafted,” Lopez said.

But that’s down the road. First comes Omaha and the College World Series, in which Florida is top-seeded.

The Gators earned that right by winning the South I Regional at home the hard way, through the losers’ bracket. Nicholson hit two home runs to get them to the championship game, then singled home Brad Wilkerson with the winning run in the 11th inning of a 7-6 victory over Illinois to get them to Omaha.

All three hits were run out with equal verve, because it’s the only way he knows how.

“He’s a South Bay and a Harbor kid,” said Lopez, who is recruiting three Southern California players now that Nicholson has knocked down the door in Gainesville.

And now that he’s the 10th Harbor kid to reach the College World Series in the past 11 years.

LASTING IMPRESSIONS

One of the things Loyola Marymount accomplished in its trip to the West Regional, besides beating top-seeded Stanford and putting pitcher Michael Schultz on the all-regional team, was to focus attention on its baseball program with the future in mind.

The Lions were freshman-led this season and the outlook is bright. Coach Frank Cruz is trying to enhance that outlook with a clubhouse at George Page Stadium.

Loyola players dress at Gersten Pavilion, then walk the 100 or so yards to the ballpark, something Cruz is trying to change with the help of a fund-raising effort to drum up $400,000-$500,000 for a baseball facility.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Long Beach State’s Terrmel Sledge was the most valuable player in the West Regional after hitting a grand slam in the 49ers’ 5-3 win over Alabama in the championship game. Sledge, catcher Bryan Kennedy, outfielder Jaron Madison and pitcher Mike Gallo made the all-tournament team.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

In the prophecy department, Stanford Coach Mark Marquess had talked in March about the difficulty of staying No. 1 all season: “It’s hard when you play out here because all of the teams are so good.”

Still, the Cardinal was No. 1 in most of the polls for 14 weeks until stumbling, losing six of its last seven games.

“It was just one of those things,” Marquess said. “Unfortunately for us, it came at the end of the season.”