Johnson gets his cuts for MWC leader UNLV

Monday, May 10, 2004 | 9:13 a.m.

He and his teammates had just received a postgame tongue-lashing from coach Buddy Gouldsmith, but UNLV slugger Brent Johnson seemed nonplused by it all.

"We're all right," Johnson said in a shrug-your-shoulders kind of way after Mountain West-leading UNLV was outplayed by San Diego State Sunday, dropping the rubber game of a three-game series at Wilson Stadium, 14-8.

"We scored some runs, they scored a lot of runs. They played pretty well and we could have played better. They beat us two out of three.

"But hey, that's baseball."

Johnson should know, because when it comes to playing baseball at UNLV, few can top him.

It's a good thing he plays a lot of positions. The grass at Wilson would be more worn out than it already is, if Johnson were limited to one path from the dugout to his position on defense.

After a sensational career at Durango High, the infielder-outfielder hit .340 as a freshman at UNLV, starting 51 of 54 games in which he played in 2001.

As a sophomore, he hit .313, starting all 60 games. Last year, he upped that to .350 and started all 64 games in which he played.

This season, he has appeared in 41 more games as the Rebels' clean-up hitter and third baseman and/or center fielder, and is batting .376 with five home runs and 60 RBIs. He was tied for the team lead in the latter department until Sunday, when Eric Nielsen, who hits one slot above him in Gouldsmith's batting order, added one to his total with a three-hit game.

The UNLV media guide does not list career leaders in games played, or Johnson almost certainly would be closing in some sort of milestone. But it does list the career leaders in base hits, which will have to be updated next year.

With 311 (so far), Johnson already has moved past Steve Moser (1983-86) on UNLV's all-time hit list.

Part of the reason the record has stood for almost two decades is that many of the Rebels' outstanding hitters have elected to turn pro after their junior seasons. The other part is that outstanding hitters such as Johnson, a strapping 6-foot-2 and 190 pounds, just don't come down the pike that often.

"I was fortunate to be able to play all four years," Johnson said, shrugging off the record as if it were ... well, a 14-8 loss to one of the Rebels' closest pursurers in the MWC.

Not that the record doesn't mean a lot. But after UNLV bumbled away Sunday's game to the Aztecs, Johnson was having trouble recalling when and against whom he moved to the top of the hit list, finally settling on the BYU series April 8-10 at Wilson.

For the record, Johnson got the record on April 9 with a double in the second inning.

"I did get the ball," he said. "And the crowd applauded, which was nice."

With a big four-game series against Utah set for Wilson next weekend and the conference tournament scheduled here May 19-25, Johnson figures to hear plenty more cheers before his UNLV career is done.

After that, he'll most likely begin endearing himself to minor league fans in one of pro baseball's rookie leagues. He was drafted in the late rounds by Toronto after his junior year, but probably would have been selected in the first 10 rounds had he been interested in leaving school early.

Instead, Johnson elected to play summer ball in the prestigious Cape Cod League, where he admits the learning curve was steep, most likely because the bats were made of wood.

The stat he remembers most was two -- his broken bat total. Smiling, he said that was a little below the league average.

Johnson saw only one really hitable pitch on Sunday, and he hit it a long way. He belted a towering drive in his next-to-last at-bat that SDSU center fielder Landon Burt hauled in with his shoulders rubbing against Matt Williams' retired jersey No. 15, just to the left of the 400-foot marker in straightaway center field.

Just before he stepped into the box, winds that had been gusting to about 30 mph suddenly died. Or Johnson's drive might have landed in the parking lot at Grumpy's Exxon station on Flamingo Avenue.

"Yeah, that's what we were saying on the bench," Johnson said, smiling ruefully at his bit of bad luck.

But hey, that's baseball.