Dietz’s Fears Come True: SDSU Fails to Get NCAA Baseball Bid

SAN DIEGO — Tournament selection day was nothing special for San Diego State baseball Coach Jim Dietz. He swung by the clubhouse. He got a hair cut. By all standards, a rather routine Monday morning.

Dietz did everything but what might have been expected from the coach of a team that won 47 games on the way to the Western Athletic Conference regular-season title: press his ear to a telephone and listen while the 48-team National Collegiate Athletic Assn. field was revealed during a nationwide teleconference.

That might have been the most telling action of all.

Because deep inside, Dietz knew something was wrong. He sensed what might be his best SDSU team since the 1984 team won 66 games and just missed making the College World Series was headed for disappointment.

So when the field was announced--minus the Aztecs--Dietz was probably the only one connected with the SDSU baseball program that was not surprised.

“I just knew we wouldn’t get (a bid),” Dietz said. “I could just tell.”

His intuition, however, did little to calm his disappointment and bitterness at having his team’s season come to what he considered a premature end.

“This team deserves to be in the tournament,” Dietz said. “They don’t deserve to go home. They’ve earned more than that.” The Aztecs won the WAC regular-season title with a 21-5 record, but Brigham Young (41-16-1, 20-5-1 in WAC) earned the conference’s automatic NCAA bid when it defeated the Aztecs for the conference tournament title Saturday in Honolulu.

The Cougars are the third-seeded team in the West I Regional and will play fourth-seeded USC in the first round Thursday at Fresno State. The Aztecs, meanwhile, spent the afternoon at a brief team meeting and then began the process of turning in their equipment.

“I can’t believe it’s over,” said John Hemmerly, a sophomore pitcher from Mission Bay High School who finished 6-4 with 4.30 earned-run average. “I spent the whole morning running around to my professors, telling them we were leaving Wednesday, and that I had to reschedule my finals. I just look silly now.”

According to Missouri Coach Gene McArtor, tournament selection committee chairmen, strength of schedule worked against the Aztecs. McArtor said this is the first year the baseball committee has used a computer-generated statistical comparison of teams similar to what the basketball committee uses to select its tournament field. Using that method, McArtor said, the Aztecs were denied one of the 21 at-large bids.

“For the at-large teams, there was an awful lot of emphasis placed on strength of schedule against major competition,” McArtor said. “It was felt in the case of San Diego State that strength of schedule, in spite of an outstanding record, did not put them in the same caliber as some of the other teams ahead of them.

“A lot goes into the decisions we make about the at-large teams. We just don’t go down the list and see who won the most games.”

Of SDSU’s 66 games, 13 were against non-Division I competition, and the Aztecs had a 10-3 record in those games. They were 5-6-1 against teams that made the NCAA field. They also were hurt by the relative weakness of the WAC. Only BYU, SDSU and Hawaii finished the season with above .500 records.

BYU was the only WAC school selected for the tournament that concludes with the College World Series in Omaha, Neb. The other major western conferences had multiple teams selected, led by the Pacific 10 with five schools. Selected from the Pacific 10 were defending NCAA champion Stanford, Cal, USC, Arizona State, Washington State. The Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. and the West Coast Athletic Conference each placed three teams in the field.

Top-ranked Fresno State, Cal State Fullerton and Nevada Las Vegas were invited from the PCAA. Selected from the WCAC were Pepperdine, the conference champion; Loyola Marymount, which had been ranked in the top 10 most the season before faltering of late, and Santa Clara, which defeated Fresno State twice in Fresno.

“The WAC did not show up well well statistically in terms of this computer evaluation,” McArtor said. “In fact, it was one of the lower conferences in that regard. It was definitely a detriment to (SDSU).”