When your baseball team gets back to .500 your coach can say with a straight face, “We aren’t as bad as people think we are, and we aren’t as good as people think we are.”  At 6-6 in a roller-coaster season, Troy Buckley’s kiddie corps Dirtbag bunch has now won three in a row, just the tonic to make that long bus ride to AT&T Park in San Francisco a bit more mellow. After all, the Beach has four wins over Top 25 teams (Fullerton, Arizona and twice over Oregon) and brings a resume on their first road trip that reads 6-6.

The rare Monday night outing developed in an odd fashion with the Beach taking a 3-0 lead through two innings after leadoff Brennan Metzger and lightly used Matt Hibbert led off the game with back-to-back singles, followed by the first in a series of mishaps by Rainbow catcher David Peterson and a grounder by Matt Duffy spotted the Niners a 2-0 lead. Which grew to 3-0 after two complete. But Dirtbag fans insist on some anxiety with their baseball and in the fifth they got a gut check. Hawaii got another in the sixth on an RBI triple by Pi’ikea Kitamura, tying the game, but Friedrichs was special the rest of his turn. The winning stuff came in the 8th when Mike Marjama hustled out an infield single, took the sac ride to second and then, eyeing Peterson wobbly behind the dish, stole third and figured Why not score and just win this thing. Josh Frye got in a jam in the ninth, loading the bases when the old Lakewood connection on right side got fooled by the wind and, well dropped the ball. But you don’t get these win streaks without settling down, and Frye got the save when Kirk Singer made another great play at short.

The Sunday highlight was a quick and drama-free 4-1 win over Oregon, who fell from the Top 15 to out of the polls after the ‘Bags took the series. Sunday, the Rainbows allowed four runs on seven hits. A new name also emerged, when Buckley decided pre-game to stretch Shawn Stuart (2-0), from his closer role to starter. The powerful right-hander allowed only a first-inning run over seven, scattered three hits and four walks, fanned four of the feathered friends and with suddenly settling down team mates behind him got three double-play balls off the bats of the Ducks and for the first game in a long time, no errors. Not as dramatic as the five-run ninth on Saturday, the Beach got it going in the sixth, with three hits including a two-run double by Matt Hibbert. The third LBSU score came thanks to another Duck wild pitch, the problem that cost them the previous game.  In the eighth the Bags added an insurance run then turned matters over to calm, cool and collected Eddie Magallon who recorded the final six outs including two via the K.

NOTES ON MY NAPKIN—First, your homework this week is on the law of transitivity. Logic describes a given relation between terms such that if it exists between “a” and “b” and between “b” and “c,” then it also exists between “a” and “c.” Typical transitive relationships include “is greater than,” “is equal to,” and “is similar to.” So one of my web wizards did this calculation for Niner men’s basketball which plays UCI Thursday at Noon. “We beat CSUN by 17; CSUN beat DePaul by 22; DePaul beat Providence by 3 and Providence beat Villanova by 15.” Therefore, by law, the Beach would clobber Villanova by 57!”… I prefer just to play ‘em one at a time… Buck now spends some time in the pen with his talented but young pitching staff… “I think that we are making everything harder for our opponents now and certainly our defense is better.”…

And how confident are the new young guns, “Eddie (Magallon) shook off the fast ball I called and went with his changeup and that turned in to a huge out for us!”… Eddie says he loves the work, “I’ve got a rubber arm”… So where was I in the 12-inning deal Saturday night, well on the move… First, I moved to the front row behind the plate. Of course an Oregon guy comes right next to me and says “Wow you really have a great seat”… I said it wasn’t mine but that I was just a writer looking at another angle… Since he couldn’t chat me up he left. By the ninth, Oregon had pulled their starting catcher and then all hell broke loose on our feathered friends! Best spots in the rally might have been Marjama’s hustling slide into first, Michael Hill (in his first AB of 2011) driving in two on his ringing double left side and the GWRBI by Yama… Defensively, it was the 14 Ks by LB vs 7 by OU… Oregon asked for extra time on Sunday moving the start to 12:30pm since the team had a 6:15pm flight from LGB to Portland. Game time was a mere 2:34, leaving the head Duck Mr. Horton and his Duck flock with a lot of time stewing in the gift shop. Oregon plays at rival Oregon State Tuesday…

Wrapping up, two ex-49ers are heading to the postseason in basketball… One of them is a longtime favorite, Cypress College head coach Margaret Mohr, who was a star guard in the LBSU glory years. She will be trying to guide the Chargers to their second State Championship since they cut down the nets after winning the 2004-05 State Title… Marg takes her team to the State Championship Final Four in Ventura this weekend. And the other ex-Niner, that would be Cypress sports information guy Tom Sheridan who recently transitioned from the 49er staff to run the Charger SID operation… Back to the Beach, Jody Wynn and her hoop ladies are at Riverside Tuesday night in a BWC quarter final. On the weekend, baseball is at the Cal tourney (Rice, USF and the host Cal)… Tennis is back at home for Boston College Friday and then the long, awaited debut of Klaudia Malenovska Saturday vs. Sac State; softball hosts their tourney at Mayfair Park and men’s volleyball has Penn State and Lewis in for the weekend.