Monday, June 2, 2003 | 9:31 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
TEMPE, Ariz. -- A few minutes after Arizona State had finished twisting the spunky but outmanned UNLV baseball team into the shape of a Joshua tree in an NCAA West regional final Sunday, the interview room at Diablo Stadium turned into a complaint department.
With the exception of Rebels slugger Fernando Valenzuela, a regular on the postseason dais, everybody had one. And if Valenzuela weren't such a nice kid, he could have squawked about having to answer 1,001 questions about his old man, and nobody would have blamed him.
It was UNLV coach Jim Schlossnagle who got off first. When I asked him if the double-elimination format used in the NCAA postseason, combined with the 12.7 baseball scholarship limit, makes it impossible for college teams to assemble the pitching depth it takes to battle back through the loser's bracket, he jumped on the question as if it were a batting practice fastball.
"You're asking a big question there," he said. "It's a travesty in college baseball. It's the most under-scholarship sport in the NCAA. (The limit) is 12.7 and the average roster size is 34. I mean it's a joke."
Schlossnagle, who is nice guy, managed a thin smile when he complained about the lack of aid available for baseball players, as did Arizona State coach Pat Murphy when someone asked about beating the Rebels and avoiding a rematch with UNLV, which would have started less than two hours after completion of the first game.
That former ASU slugger Bob Horner, who was not exactly what you'd call svelte, enjoyed a long and prosperous major league career shows that you don't have to be in tip-top shape to play baseball well. But with the relative humidity up over 30 percent for much of the weekend, even the chiseled guys were reaching for the bottled water and a cold compress.
"If you lose that first game, it's brutal," Murphy said. "It's the worst part of the NCAA format, having to play two games on the last day.
"Everybody wants to go home early, but we need to stay over a day or play an extra game on some other day ... because there's no way you should have to play two games on the last day. That's a horrible rule that needs to be changed."
But what about having to play two games on the second day of the tournament? That's something New Mexico State coach Rocky Ward might have griped about, had his Aggies not been on their way back to Las Cruces Sunday.
New Mexico State stunned UNLV 14-12 in the first game of the regional, which netted the Aggies a winners' bracket date with Arizona State at 2 p.m. Saturday. New Mexico State trailed just 1-0 after seven innings before allowing two runs in the eighth and 12 more in the ninth.
Their reward for scaring the devil out of the Sun Devils? An elimination game against the Rebels that began at 7 p.m., which again, was less than two hours after their game with ASU.
Since everybody was going off about something, let me get in my whacks: These aluminum bats, which transform the college game into something resembling Nintendo baseball, have to go. I don't care how many trees it takes to make a Louisville Slugger, the college coaches need to plant more saplings before their game morphs into 4-hour batting practice.
When a college pitcher jams a hitter with a perfect pitch, and a college batter is still able to fist what should be a popup to shortstop into left field for a two-run single because the sweet spot on the aluminum bat is slightly wider than Anna Nicole Smith's hips, that ain't baseball.
And while they're at it, the rules committee either needs to shorten the games to seven innings, adopt the 10-run mercy rule or appease Schlossnagle and increase the scholarship limit.
There simply aren't enough pitchers to complete a double-elimination tournament comprised of 18-14 games.
And speaking of 18-14 games, have you ever seen one played in under three hours? The concession stands in Tempe were running out of sun screen after the fifth inning. If they don't figure out a way to shorten the games, college baseball is going to lose what few fans it has, outside of the parents and girlfriends of the players, who comprised about 90 percent of the crowd when hometown ASU wasn't playing.
And you can forget about a network TV contract, which is what college baseball needs if it is ever to join its football and basketball cousins in the revenue-producing mainstream.
I guess my only other beef was that the kids from Central Connecticut State didn't have one. Oh, I suppose they could have griped about being sent across the country to play ball in an inferno, but instead they seemed happy just to be a part of it.
Several of the Central players were rooming on the same floor as me at the hotel up the hill from the ballpark, and I heard them call out for pizza on Friday night. The delivery guy apparently tossed them a curveball -- a medium pepperoni when they had asked for a large sausage.
But they ate it anyway. I guess that pizza, like the pitchers the Blue Devils faced all weekend, had some serious cheese.
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