Titans Hope May Madness Continues Deep Into June

OK. Spencer Oborn admits it. He can hum the Michigan and Notre Dame fight songs. He isn’t even sure if Cal State Fullerton has a fight song.

And, yes, Oborn, a junior outfielder and national player of the year candidate for Fullerton, says he will absolutely check out the Golden Dome and Touchdown Jesus. Good thing Oborn’s parents will be coming to South Bend, Ind., this weekend too, Oborn says, because maybe they can help fund some of his souvenir purchases from the Notre Dame bookstore.

As the Fullerton baseball team heads off to Notre Dame and the first round of the NCAA Division I baseball tournament, there is a sense of adventure about it all. A little bit of awe maybe, and some gee-whiz tourist spirit. For even though the Titans are top-seeded in their regionalNotre Dame, Michigan and Creighton also will be in town and, let’s face it, it seems a little weird to see Fullerton at the top of that list. In anything. Even baseball.

“Yeah, I guess it does,” Oborn says. “There’s a lot of tradition associated with a couple of those schools. But this is baseball. We’ve got some tradition too.”

Yes, the Titans do. They have three national baseball titles to their credit, not Notre Dame or Michigan. And so, as the 64-team tournament begins Friday at 16 college fields across the country, it will be teams such as Michigan and Notre Dame, Nebraska and North Carolina that will be the underdogs. There is a Cinderella too. Providence has been invited. The Friars have a 47-14 record, a No. 2 seeding at the Florida State regional and the knowledge that whenever they suffer their final loss this year, it will be the final loss ever. Providence has chosen to drop baseball for the greater good of Title IX compliance and you will certainly see and read stories about this gutty little team.

You should hear and see more stories than ever about the NCAA baseball tournament. This is the first year the tournament has gone to a 64-team draw. There will be two rounds of regionals instead of one and the expansion to 16 first-round sites and 64 teams is bringing college baseball excitement to places like South Bend and Columbus, Ohio, and is giving teams like Monmouth, Florida Atlantic, Bethune-Cookman and Eastern Illinois a chance to experience a little May Madness.

May Madness. That’s what Fullerton Coach George Horton is calling it.

The NCAA collegiate baseball pairings were announced live Monday on ESPN and the Titans gathered nervously around a television the way so many basketball teams do in March, eager to see where they would be sent, who they would be paired against.

With 64 teams, a full-scale bracket appeared, taking up half a page in the newspaper, just like the basketball one. “You can have a baseball office pool now,” Horton says while his hyper kids are working off excess energy that comes from anticipation and a 10-day layoff since their last game. “It’s a little bit like our own little May Madness.”

Of course, this will never turn into March Madness. Not unless, as Horton says, “Channel 2 [CBS] televises every game,” but maybe it’s better if this doesn’t turn into March Madness.

There is something charming about the unabashed excitement that the Titans, seeded No. 3 overall, have about going to the Midwest instead up the 91 Freeway to the 5 to the 110 to USC (OK, maybe it will be easier to fly to Chicago and take the toll road to South Bend).

Horton wasn’t afraid to admit it. Yes, he said, the Titans were happy to be going to Notre Dame instead of ending up, even as the No. 1-seeded team, in Trojanland, as happened to Pepperdine.

“USC is the defending champion,” Horton says, “and that is a team which is coming on strong at the end of the season. The crowd would be on their side even with our fans coming up. Yes, it would have been hard to feel like a No. 1 seed there.”

Let’s face it, and these are not Horton’s words or Oborn’s words but both of them couldn’t help smiling at hearing these words: Joining three teams from the Midwest is about as good as it gets for a team like Fullerton, a team full of Southern California kids who have grown up playing baseball practically all day, every day, all four seasons. “We have kids who have just played more baseball,” Horton says. “It’s never bad to stay away from the Florida, Texas, Arizona, California teams.”

If things go according to plan, Fullerton and Ohio State would play a best-of-three series in the next round for the right to go to the eight-team College World Series in Omaha. The Titans have put in a bid to host that next series, assuming they are playing in it. Horton thought that since Fullerton was seeded higher, overall, than any team in the Columbus regional, that the Titans could count on playing at home in the next round.

But, it turns out, that’s not a given. “I heard today that since Ohio State is a No. 1 seed in its region, if Ohio State wins, they’ll have just a much of a shot to host as us,” Horton said. And since the teams bid for these games, in other words guarantee a certain profit for the NCAA no matter what, “Ohio State might have an edge,” Horton says. “Ohio State has a lot more money than us. A lot more everything than us.”

Well, maybe. Or maybe not.

The Buckeyes don’t have a lot more kids who play baseball in December and January, February and March. So home or away, that makes the Buckeyes underdogs to Fullerton. May Madness. Be the first to start the pool and hum that Fullerton fight song. Somebody?

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