UNLV tuning up for 13th-ranked Cal State Fullerton

Wednesday, Feb. 18, 1998 | 12:13 p.m.

Coming off a five-game weekend sweep of Nevada-Reno and Southern Illinois, the UNLV baseball team appears to be firing on all cylinders.

But Rebels head coach Rod Soesbe hopes to do a little fine-tuning before his team opens a three-game series at 13th-ranked Cal State Fullerton on Friday.

"We had a real good weekend; the team played well," Soesbe said after his team took three games from UNR and two from Southern Illinois and improved to 11-3. "We had a couple of slip-ups (defensively) in a couple innings but at least on Monday, for 27 outs we were really focused and really played well."

After 14 games, the Rebels are hitting a robust .377 and the staff earned-run average is 4.70. It is the infrequent defensive lapses that have led to 25 errors that Soesbe would like to see vanish.

"Probably the only thing we need to look at is to get maybe another 20 or 25 points better with our fielding average," he said. "We think that's more a lack of concentration than anything else. We just had a couple bad innings through the five games -- one here or one there.

"We're playing good defense, we're just having mental lapses and we'll break down in an inning and not make a routine play that we need to make. Other than that, we're playing sound and we're excited about that."

The Rebels have eight regulars hitting .365 or better, led by junior third baseman Kevin Eberwein (.433, 2 home runs, 16 RBIs) and junior first baseman Tony DeMarco (.420, 1 home run, 14 RBIs).

Junior right-handers Bryan Gidge and Mike Zipser have anchored the Rebels' starting pitching staff, combining for five wins and a 2.18 ERA in seven starts. Gidge has allowed only one earned run in three starts (15 2/3 innings) while Zipser has struck out a team-leading 26 batters in 29 2/3 innings.

While playing a quality team such as Fullerton (6-3) will be a good barometer for the Rebels at this stage of the season, Soesbe said he is being careful not to place too much emphasis on the three-game series, which begins Friday at Titan Field.

"This will be a good test, going on the road again and playing a ranked team," he said. "We're going to see three left-handed starters, probably, and what we need to do is go down there and not play above ourselves but play to our potential and see what happens.

"We're not putting too much emphasis on this series because they're not any different than we are; they're a good ballclub and we feel like we're a good ballclub."