Columnist Ron Kantowski: Rebels catch a break with draw of regional

Friday, June 3, 2005 | 10:02 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

When it comes to the NCAA baseball regionals, the UNLV baseball team is like Mario Mendoza: 0-for-9.

Actually, .000 is even worse than the batting average of Mendoza, the light-hitting Pirates shortstop who hit .215 in nine big league seasons during the 1970s and is responsible for the Mendoza Line, which is what baseball writers call a .200 batting average.

While the Rebels have had some pretty good teams and some pretty good players who have gone on to the majors, they've never made it out of a regional. Like some of my teammates used to say when our fastpitch softball team got bounced from a tournament, thanks for the entry fee.

In 1980, the legendary (in my mind, anyway) Fred Dallimore guided the Rebels to a 53-13-1 record, which remains the best season in school history, and UNLV advanced to within one game of the College World Series. That was in the days when you didn't have to win a Super Regional against some powerhouse team from the West Coast or Arizona to get there.

But UNLV's all-time record in the postseason is just 9-18, which means the odds are probably stacked against this year's team reversing the trend.

The bracket, however, is not.

The Rebels may have started the season 3-14 and were it not for the caliber of competition in the Mudville Six, aka the Mountain West Conference, chances are they wouldn't have made it to a regional. Yet, this may be as good a chance as they've ever had to take that difficult next step on the Road to Omaha.

The Rebels open play today in the Tempe Regional against the Coast Guard -- er, Coastal Carolina. Coastal calls itself the Chanticleers, which is the small-school way of saying Gamecock, its big-school South Carolina neighbor down in Columbia already having dibs on the best rooster nickname in sports.

Believe it or not, these Chandeliers -- er, Chanticleers -- are the No. 1 seed in Tempe, which may be a good thing or a bad thing for Buddy Gouldsmith's UNLV bunch. Maybe these guys are the second coming of Murderers Row in rooster suits. Then again, considering they lost to Winthrop last week in the Big South tournament, maybe they're just a half-cocked excuse for a top seed.

Coastal is the only No. 1 seed not hosting a regional this weekend. And its not exactly complaining about the prospect of having to play ASU's Rockerfellers, the No. 2 seed in Tempe, on their home turf.

As Baseball America magazine put it, Coastal Carolina's selection as a top seed raised eyebrows all over the country -- even on its own campus.

"I'm still sitting here pinching myself," said Coastal coach Gary Gilmore upon being sentenced to the firing squad out West. "I'm not sure I'm still on the planet. This was totally unexpected. We just hoped to get in and didn't care about the seeding. We just wanted a good draw."

They probably got one in UNLV, a young and rebuilding team, but then so did the Rebels, regardless of how good No. 25 Coastal may turn out to be.

For instance, given its proximity to the Left Coast, the Rebels could have been sent to the Long Beach Regional, where No. 12 Long Beach State and always tough Southern Cal are playing; or Fullerton, where the defending national champions and two other conference kingpins (Pepperdine, another former College World Series titleist, and Minnesota of the Big Ten) will be knocking the cover off the ball with their aluminum tomahawks.

You can thank UNLV athletic director Mike Hamrick for the Rebels' luck of the draw. Hamrick denied this week that he had anything to do with where the Rebels would play and against whom, but do the math: As a member of the NCAA baseball committee, he certainly had the opportunity to lobby for the old Scarlet and Gray.

In fact, judging from the brackets, Hamrick is either living right or has more stroke than Tiger Woods and Annika Sorenstam combined. Not only are the Rebels matched against the one No. 1 seed that nobody has heard of, but the Tempe bracket also includes East Carolina, where Hamrick still has a lot of barbecue buddies. He was the Pirates' athletic director before accepting the same post here.

The Rebels may not have quite enough pitching -- who does at the college level? -- to make it out of the blazing Arizona sun with their first regional championship banner.

But as far as the stars being lined up for a nice little postseason run, Galileo couldn't have done a better job.