Down-to-Earth Titan Program Produces High-Flying Teams

According to the rankings published by Collegiate Baseball, the Cal State Fullerton baseball team is No. 1 in the country. According to Baseball America, Fullerton is No. 3.

No. 1 or No. 3 or No. 300, it doesn’t matter. When practice is over, the first baseman grabs a hose. The catcher grabs a rake. Everybody gets busy grooming the field, tidying up, hunting down stray baseballs in the grass outside the field, putting away the bats. And then it’s off to the parking lot, where guys duck into their cars or vans to change shirts and shoes and, if they are feeling particularly magician-like, perhaps their pants.

For the Titans might have the best baseball team in the country, but they will never be confused with Texas or Miami or Stanford or most of the teams ranked among the top 10. They will not be confused with those programs that have stadiums with 6,000 seats, or those that have a groundskeeper or a clubhouse or showers at the field. Heck, at LSU there’s even a lounge with a pool table right by the field.

And this, says junior third baseman Ryan Owens, is exactly what attracted him to Fullerton.

Owens, who played high school baseball at Sonora, made recruiting visits to Texas, Miami and USC. What he found at those schools was the big time. “Miami’s field was really something,” Owens says after batting practice Wednesday. “Man, those other programs had everything.

“But you know what? I liked it here. I grew up practically around the corner. I came to all the games here when I was a kid. We do everything here, yeah, but I like that. I like that it is a real baseball school. I think that the guy who comes here instead of some of those other schools, that’s a special type of guy who wants to be here and who wants to be a better player. We don’t have one of those ‘bonus baby’ guys. We just have a bunch of people who make a good team.”

If Augie Garrido, the Fullerton baseball legend, the tough and feisty coach who built the program from scratch into a national champion, will always be the first name that comes to mind when someone says ‘Fullerton baseball,’ George Horton, who played at Fullerton and was Garrido’s former assistant, has quietly and confidently accepted the challenge of maintaining the Titans’ excellence.

And it may be that Horton is the perfect coach for this team of no stars, of no bonus babies, of no sure-fire major league prospects.

Horton laughs when he talks about playing for the first Titan team that went to the College World Series in Omaha in 1975. “We didn’t even have a fight song,” Horton says, “so the organist played ‘It’s a Small World,’ when we played. I think she played it because I was the tallest guy on the team.”

If Horton won’t concede that he will never recruit the absolute cream of high school baseball stars--”Ryan Owens could have gone anywhere and he came to Fullerton,” Horton says in a defiant tone--it is true, Horton says, that mostly his recruiting trips are made by car and that if Stanford or USC wants the same player, Horton probably won’t get him.

And yet, as the Titans bring a 43-9 record and their lofty ranking into the regular season’s final series beginning Friday against Long Beach State at Titan Field, it is the Titans and not the Cardinal or Trojans who can look more confidently at the upcoming NCAA tournament.

“I think it’s why every person on this team came to Fullerton,” pitcher Matt Sorensen says, “to go to the World Series.” Sorensen is 10-0 this season. In the fall of 1997, Sorensen was the quarterback for Cerritos College. He came to Fullerton in January ’99. Now he’s got a perfect record on a team with the perfect attitude.

“This team never thinks it’s going to lose,” Sorensen says. “Against New Mexico State last weekend I was pitching and we were down 8-1 after three innings,” Sorensen says, “and there wasn’t a guy out there who thought we were going to lose. It’s easy to pitch with that kind of attitude around.”

This attitude was built even as the Titans started the season 1-3 and it strengthened even after Rod Perry, the player closest to a marquee name Fullerton had, abruptly quit the team after 16 games. Perry had been a highly touted phenom who had given up, seemingly for good, his promising football career after two knee surgeries and transferred from USC to Fullerton to begin concentrating on baseball.

But after a slow start with his bat, Perry quit the team and has since announced he will go back to playing football--at Penn State. No one on the team will bad-mouth Perry, but everybody will be more than happy to say that the loss of Perry made absolutely no difference.

“This is a team with a lot of good players,” Owens says. “We knew we’d be fine without Rod.”

There’s a consensus here that it was a three-game series at Alabama in February that toughened up the Titans. They lost two of the three games. Each loss was by a run. The weather was cold and rainy. The umpiring was perceived as, um, somewhat biased toward the home team. The fans were boisterous.

“What we learned,” Owens says, “was that we had to work harder and be stronger. That maybe we weren’t as good as we thought we were. Right now, there’s no team in the country that works harder than us. We have to. We found that out.”

The Titans haven’t made it to the World Series since 1995. That’s too long of a break, everybody agrees. And now it’s time to do something about that. “We expect to go as much as the guys at Miami or Texas or any of those other schools,” Owens says. “We might not look like we belong. But we belong.”

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com