College of Southern Nevada reprising role as national baseball contender

There is an old baseball movie I watched with my dad called “It Happens Every Spring.”

Ray Milland plays a chemistry professor, and one day a baseball comes crashing through the window of his classroom. The ball lands in some goop. Milland’s character, Vernon J. Simpson, discovers the baseball now repels wood. Then Vernon K. Simpson becomes King Kelly, the baseball pitcher.

It happens every spring, lowercase, also describes the baseball team at College of Southern Nevada.

Almost without fail, the Coyotes lose a few games, but then they a win a few dozen en route to becoming a contender on the national junior college scene.

CSN won the title in 2003 when Tim Chambers was coach. They have not won it since, not even when Bryce Harper played there. It’s tough to win the juco title, even when you lose only a few games and win a few dozen, and even when you have Bryce Harper in the lineup.

The breaks have to go your way, and you have to hit the cutoff man, or some of these teams will beat you. Especially the ones from Florida and California.

CSN won two games to start the season, then lost five in a row to fall to a very non-CSN-like 2-5.

The Coyotes have lost only four games since while winning 32. So they are 32-4 since Feb. 6. They are ranked 10th in the nation.

Nick Garritano, the former UNLV field-goal kicker, is in his sixth season as CSN coach. He said if you told him on Feb. 6 his team would be 34-9 on April 21, he would have said you were watching too many old baseball movies.

But here are the Coyotes, battling perennial rival Western Nevada College for another Scenic West Athletic Conference title. Twelve conference games remain — a four-game series at Salt Lake Community College this weekend, four games against College of Southern Idaho at home at Morse Field in Henderson, a final four-game set against Western Nevada.

And I do mean one final set — Western Nevada is dropping its program at the end of the year, because traipsing around the Scenic West playing baseball with wooden bats costs a lot of money, even at the junior college level.

Garritano says he’d like to be five games ahead by then. Right now, he’s up four. There’s still a little work to be done.

Were this last season, he would have just handed the ball to pitcher Phil Bickford, he of the surfer dude long blond locks and pinpoint slider. Bickford was drafted in the first round by the San Francisco Giants last year, and he’s now pitching for the Augusta GreenJackets (great name for a team from Augusta) in the South Atlantic League. Garritano said Bickford has gotten a haircut.

So Bickford’s not an option.

Hitting the ball over the fence is, however. The Coyotes have belted 45 home runs, which is a lot, considering they swing wooden bats. And considering they hit only 23 last season.

Brody Westmoreland, a transfer from San Diego State, leads the CSN fence busters with 11 long balls. Only 20 more and he ties Harper’s school record of 31. Blake Wiggins, a transfer from Arkansas, has eight. Jordan Hand has six.

Hand (Shadow Ridge High) is a local kid. So is relief pitcher Alec Hutt (Green Valley), who has notched 11 saves, a school record. So are a lot of Coyotes — 22 of their 28 players are local kids.

Last year, they were one out from advancing to the championship game of the regional tournament undefeated. But they had to battle back through the losers’ bracket, and sometimes when you do that, the bounces don’t go your way, or you miss the cutoff man.

CSN didn’t make it to the World Series in Grand Junction, Colorado.

The pitching depth is better this season, Garritano said. And as mentioned, the Coyotes hit a lot of home runs. But as Garritano says — and as Bruce Bochy has said, and Tony La Russa before him, and probably Miller Huggins before him — there’s still a lot of baseball to be played.

Nevertheless, “I think we have the pieces in the puzzle to get to Grand Junction. It’s just up to us if we can put the pieces together,” Garritano said.

As he looked out his office window, the Coyotes were on the field warming up. There was lively chatter and banter among teammates. The bounces are going their way, they’re hitting the cutoff man. They’re on another roll, trying to put the pieces together.

It happens every spring.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski