College World Series

BATON ROUGE, La. — The UC Irvine baseball team showed a little small ball, a little long ball and, if not showed, at least executed a little hidden ball to stun streaking LSU and earn an 11-5 victory Saturday in the first of a best-of three NCAA Super Regional. All nine spots in the Anteaters lineup had at least one hit to back junior All-American starter Scott Gorgen’s strong 6 2/3 innings, to help No. 8-ranked UCI (42-16) come within one win of a return trip to the College World Series.

Mike Gillespie knows what it’s like to have Ted Silva competing against him. The most memorable of those instances came in the College World Series championship game in 1995, when Silva pitched Cal State Fullerton to an 11-5 victory over Gillespie’s USC squad. So, when Gillespie was named to take over the UC Irvine baseball program in September, he lured Silva away from Fresno State to guide his pitching staff. The results have been impressive, as the Anteaters have posted a team earned-run average of 2.88, second best in the nation, heading into the best-of-three Super Regional series that begins today at LSU’s Alex Box Stadium.

NORTHRIDGE — They call him Grandpa Lowey. And while fifth-year senior catcher Aaron Lowenstein has caught a no-hitter, as well as all the victories of a watershed postseason that ended in the 2007 College World Series, the good-natured banter surrounding one statistical omission in his 151-game UC Irvine baseball career was getting, well, a little old. “Everybody has always given me [grief], asking me ‘When are you going to get one?’ ” Lowenstein said of his 382 career at-bats without a home run, heading into the ninth inning of UCI’s 4-1 Big West Conference win at Cal State Northridge on Friday.

As the attendance totals for the three-game baseball series with Cal State Fullerton over the weekend attest, ’Eater Nation is not merely a marketing term. A program record 3,176 came out Friday night, while 2,608 were there for the beginning at least of the dramatic 12-inning victory Saturday that stirred memories of Omaha and the 2007 College World Series. Finally, 2,965 turned out Sunday for the Titans’ series-clinching 6-4 win. But though they were strong in numbers, for the most part, the UCI rooters could have often been mistaken for a golf gallery.

IRVINE ? Cal State Fullerton Coach Dave Serrano was reluctant to say his Titans had regained what Big West Conference baseball rival UC Irvine had taken from them last season, after erasing a 4-0 deficit to win the rubber game of the three-game series, 6-4, before 2,965 at Anteater Ballpark Sunday. UCI Coach Mike Gillespie, however, didn?t hesitate in saying his team gave away a game in which, for the first five innings, his team had established firm command. ?My first thought is that we let one get away that was gettable,?

On his way to pick up new baseball uniforms at a local sporting goods store recently, one thing stood out to Coach Matt Sorensen about his Estancia High team. “We’re going to look sharp,” said Sorensen, a first-year varsity head coach. “We haven’t even gotten the five different uniforms that I plan for us to wear in the future.” The Eagles really don’t need to impress anyone with so many colored outfits. They’ve already done that with solid play at the start of the season.

UC Irvine junior pitcher Scott Gorgen’s one-hitter against San Francisco Friday was picked as the West Region Performance of the Week Award from InsidePitching.com. He was also named CollegeBaseballInsider.com’s National Player of the Week Gorgen recorded a career-high 12 strikeouts against USF, surrendering the lone single in the third inning after fanning five of the first six Dons he faced. Gorgen, a third-team All-American as a sophomore, then retired the next 19 straight and faced just two over the minimum to record his seventh career complete-game and fourth complete-game shutout.

UC Irvine attained unprecedented heights as a Division I baseball program last season. But one of the top returners from a 2007 campaign that featured a 47-17-1 record, and the school?s first trip to the College World Series, believes the Anteaters? third-place finish in Omaha ultimately meant coming up short. ?We haven?t done anything yet,? said junior center fielder and preseason All-American Ollie Linton. ?We made it to Omaha, but we still need to accomplish the entire thing [winning a national championship]

Like the most ardent of fans, last season, Bryce Stowell watched the UC Irvine baseball team succeed nearly to the level of its wildest dreams. Interspersed between the awe and inspiration of the postseason odyssey that brought the Anteaters to the College World Series, however, there was, for Stowell, torment. For, ever since he could recall, Stowell was happiest in the throes of competition, be it baseball, board games with his family, or even the unknown depths of an Olympic-size pool, in which he agreed to play high school water polo without first having learned how to swim.