Young UH squad showing strong foundation and hope for future

Forget the Titans.

Perhaps easier said than done for the University of Hawaii baseball team. It lost a frustrating series finale to Cal State Fullerton 6-2 on Sunday at Les Murakami Stadium after UH had knotted the three-game set the night before.

This was a game Hawaii really needed to win to keep any slim postseason hopes alive as the Rainbow Warriors (7-8, 25-17 overall) and the rest of the Big West head down the stretch, with nine games left to play for Hawaii.

Mathematically, the ’Bows could still finish ahead of top dog Long Beach State in the conference standings. But the No. 8 team in the country would have to lose the remaining six of its league games (including three at UH), and Hawaii would have to win out.

Fullerton sweeping Long Beach State to end the season is another requisite for that scenario to develop. Since the Titans are three games ahead of the Rainbows in the standings now, UH would also need big-time help against Fullerton from middling conference members UC Santa Barbara and CSUN.

Trust me, that ain’t gonna happen — not that many of you thought it would.

As good as the ’Bows have looked at times this season, they’re still a middle-of-the-road Big West team. Maybe a bit better than the squads that went 12-12 in both 2015 and 2016, but lacking the consistency to win regularly in a tough conference. This is a young team, so there’s a foundation to build upon and hope for the future.

For now, there is a magic number.

It is one.

One win.

That’s all they need to clinch their first overall winning record since the 30-25 season of 2012, back when they were still in the Western Athletic Conference.

Of course, this team should be shooting for — and is capable of — much better than winning just one game of its last nine; a sweep against UC Irvine, which comes to town later this week, is not out of the question.

That is unlikely, though, if the Rainbows don’t execute better than they did on Sunday when they left 10 runners on base.

Some of it was freakish and unlucky.

There was a weird dropped foul fly ball play with the bases loaded early in the game off the bat of Adam Fogel. It was interpreted by the umpires as just a long strike rather than an error on a sacrifice fly that would’ve tied the game at 4 and kept a promising rally alive. Instead, Fogel grounded into a double play to end it. As much as a sequence of events can influence a game’s outcome in the third inning, those did.

Then, another UH rally stalled when Eric Ramirez’s knee gave out between second and third in the sixth. Losing the veteran first baseman for the stretch run would be a tough blow for Hawaii.

Fogel and Josh Rojas both homered Sunday, but they were both solo shots.

“We had 10 hits, we just didn’t take advantage of it,” said Rojas, who had three of them. “It was a hard-fought game, the whole game. We make a couple key plays here and there and we win the game.”

Johnny Weeks, who homered in Saturday’s win, also had three hits on Sunday, which happened to be his 21st birthday.

“A three-hit birthday. The thing that makes Johnny such a great kid is that he’d trade it for an o-fer if it meant a win for the team,” UH coach Mike Trapasso said.

A solid crowd hoping to see UH take two-of-three from the nationally prominent program for the second year in a row left disappointed. At least three people among the 1,746 attending were happy with the outcome, though.

“We always root for UH, except when they’re playing Fullerton in something,” said Tracy Donovan, the wife of Titans athletic director Jim Donovan.

It’s a case of seven degrees of separation, since that’s how many Manoa sheepskins Jim, Tracy and their son Joshua and daughter Jackie now possess.

After the “Wonder Blunder” fiasco at UH, Jim Donovan has bounced back nicely at Fullerton, developing winning programs in sports other than baseball.

He hopes to develop another in women’s basketball, where he recently hired Hawaii Baptist Academy and Hawaii Pacific University product Jeff Harada.

“I was happy to hire a local boy, “Donovan said. “He’s turned it around at HPU and at Central Washington. I just need to have him do it a third time.”

UH is back on the upswing in several sports, too, and Donovan is happy for his friend and former associate when he ran the Hawaii Bowl: Manoa athletic director David Matlin.

“I think he’s doing a great job. I think he’s made several good hires, with the focus on head coaches who know Hawaii but also know how to win,” Donovan said.

UH baseball looks like it could be back on the track in the long term. But Donovan — the man who long ago managed what was then called Rainbow Stadium, before being in charge of all of the Manoa sports programs — was happy to see that progress delayed for one weekend.

Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783. His blog is at Hawaiiwarriorworld.com/quick-reads.