If Mother Nature cooperates, the University of Hawaii baseball team will have a barometer to its progress when it plays an alumni team in today’s exhibition at Les Murakami Stadium.

“It’s finally a chance to play anybody but each other,” UH coach Mike Trapasso said. “That’s always fun when you’ve only been playing each other for (the past) four weeks. It gets old. It really does. It’s a chance to put on the real uniform instead of the practice uniform, and do something with the scoreboard turned on.”

The exhibition is scheduled to start at 1 p.m. There is no admission charge.

If the game is played — the forecast calls for a probability of rain — the Rainbow Warriors will treat it as a glorified practice.

“I used to force our guys — ‘we’re going to play this like a regular game, stay focused’ — but it’s not, so you can’t,” Trapasso said. “The intensity level just isn’t there. We’ll treat it like a practice, rather than a game, but a fun practice that’s a little different because you’re going to have the music turned on and some people in the stands.”

Trapasso might employ a 10-batter lineup, utilize re-entry rules, and play as many position players as possible. But he will stick to the pitching schedule, giving the ball to Brendan Hornung, who also will start the Feb. 17 regular-season opener against North Carolina State.

Hornung threw 85 pitches in a scrimmage the past weekend, and is targeting 90 pitches today. That would allow him to expand his pitch count to 100 for the opener. After the first week of pre-season training, he added a curveball and split-fingered fastball to his fastball and change-up.

As a kid, Hornung used to place a softball between his index and middle fingers to widen his baseball grip. That inadvertently led to his first splitter while playing catch with his father.

“It just fell right under him,” Hornung recalled. It is now his out pitch.