Oregon baseball coach George Horton is taking his team back to his old stomping grounds this weekend for a series against No. 17 Cal State Fullerton.
Horton played for Cal State Fullerton as a student athlete before coaching there for 11 years. He took the Titans to six College World Series appearances, winning the title in 2004. Horton has faced his alma mater twice, the first in the opening game of the 2010 season when the Ducks beat the Titans 7-3 in Fresno, and the second coming last season when the Ducks beat the Titans 7-5 in NCAA Regional play in Eugene.
This weekend will mark the first series between the teams.
Horton told the media Wednesday that he was excited to face his former team and that he still has a lot of love for the Titans fans and coaching staff.
“It’s a great opportunity from some aspects,” Horton said of playing a top-tier team. “But you don’t like competing against your friends sometimes because one of us has to lose. The coaching staff there I love, so it seemed like a natural to get a home-and-home with them. The circumstances for the regional last year just sort of happened … It will be interesting.”
Aside from Horton’s relationship with the team, this matchup is intriguing purely because it will be Oregon’s first taste of a ranked team in a season where many games will come against ranked opponents, and it will be played in another team’s confines.
The Ducks (7-1) have gotten off to a successful start, but possibly not the most productive one. They have struggled to hit the ball and seem to have an uncanny ability to get wins regardless of poor offense. Take, for example, last Saturday’s matchup against Loyola Marymount when they managed to grind out six runs on only two hits.
However, it isn’t often that a team can count on five players reaching base from being hit by pitches, as was the case in the game against LMU. Teams are ranked because they limit their mistakes. Cal State Fullerton should act as a clear indicator of where Oregon stands nationally.
“This is going to be challenging and a little definitive of where you’re at, at least for a report card,” Horton said. “It’s not a finish line by any stretch of the imagination, but make no mistake about it, this weekend with Fullerton and then the following weekend here against Vanderbilt, sandwiched between a challenging comeback and play Monday-Tuesday with North Ridge, that will be a pretty good barometer of our pitching staff and how good we are.”
Those three series include eight games that will be stretched over just 10 days. Horton said that he has faced similar situations with the Ducks, and the outcome was less than desirable.
“We’ve done this before,” Horton said. “Quite honestly, we didn’t handle it well. It was on the road with Texas State. We kind of just showed up and weren’t very present and energized. These guys all want to eventually play major league baseball and minor league baseball and it’s a fairly good comparison of some of the challenges that brings about.”
Second baseman Aaron Payne has more familiarity with Cal State Fullerton. He grew up in the area and spent some time as a bat boy for some of Horton’s teams. Payne said the on-field ability of the Titans isn’t the issue the Ducks will face during the series.
“They draw some pretty big crowds,” Payne said. “It will be wild, it will be a fun place to play. They have some pretty good fans over at third base that will probably be all over (Oregon third baseman) Ryon (Healy).”