Gorgen comes up big for UCI

• By JOSEPH SCHIEFELBEIN
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Jun 8, 2008 - UPDATED: 4 a.m.

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UC Irvine pitcher Scott Gorgen had seen bigger crowds before. He’d just never pitched in front of one so loud that he had trouble hearing his infield.

For him to come out after 6 2/3 innings and get a round of applause from LSU fans for handcuffing one of the nation’s hottest teams in front of a crowd of 7,460, that meant the world.

“I always like to go out there in this kind of atmosphere and see if I can win over a crowd,” Gorgen said. “That’s big for me.

“It’s always gratifying coming off the field knowing I gave my all and the fans appreciated it.”

Gorgen’s strong pitching and an opportunistic offense led the Anteaters to an 11-5 win in the first game of a super regional Saturday night at Alex Box Stadium.

Gorgen struck out eight — including fanning LSU slugger Blake Dean all three times — and allowed just one earned run. He left with an 8-2 lead in the seventh.

“He was pretty good,” said Dean, who had never had three strikeouts in a game all season and had 11 of his 19 home runs in LSU’s 23-game winning streak. “He changed speeds a lot and got people to swing. I swung at quite a few pitches out of the zone, which put me in a hole.

“And he’s not the kind of pitcher you want to get yourself in a hole against. He’s got good stuff. His fastball has good velocity and he has a good change up. So when you get yourself in a hole tonight, he’s the kind of pitcher that feeds off that. It’s going to be hard to climb back out of it.”

Gorgen (12-3), who pitched for Team USA last summer and was a fourth-round pick of the St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday, pitched in front of nearly 30,000 at the College World Series’ cathedral last year. The 5-foot-10 right-hander was a bulldog on a sultry evening at the chapel that is The Box.

Gorgen didn’t allow a leadoff hitter in the first six innings and didn’t issue a walk until he suddenly couldn’t find the strike zone with two outs in the sixth, issuing three straight (the first two on eight pitches) and a single before the Anteaters got out of the inning with a hidden ball trick.

“Especially with a hitting team like (LSU), you have to get ahead in the count early,” Gorgen said. “You have to. You have to get that leadoff guy. Even with one or two, these guys can still come back. They’re still in the game. I think that’s why I was on fire at the start of the game.”

Gorgen left after a leadoff walk and a two-out single in the seventh.

“I knew I was getting a little tired, and instead of just throwing the ball like I was, I tried to nibble on the corners, not trusting my stuff,” Gorgen said.