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Show susc baseball team readies for playoffs The last chance to pull things together before the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference playoffs comes this weekend for the Southern Utah State College baseball team. The Thunderbirds, who started the week with a disappointing 3-19 record, will host hard-hitting Northern Nor-thern Arizonz University Friday in a 1 p.m. doubleheader and Saturday in a single game scheduled to start at noon. No admission will be charged for the games to be played on Thunderbird Field. Following the NAU series, the T-Birds will hit the road for Pueblo, Colorado, and the May 1-3 RMAC playoffs. The double elimination conference tournament will determine at least two of the entrants in the NAIA District Seven Tournament set for May 15-17 on the SUSC field. "NAU doesn't have the flossy record (18-24) that some of the schools we have been playing have," Stan Jack evaluates, "but it does have one of the hardest hitting clubs we've faced all year." NAU whipped SUSC three times in bitter cold games at Flagstaff earlier this season. Scores in those games were 6-1, 11-8, and 14-1. The Lunber jacks were hurt early in the year by the same bad weather plague which hurt the T-Birds. They are now working their way back from a 11-22 record at one time. In their last nine games, they have won seven and lost two. One of those seven wins was over powerful University of Arizona. The top hitters for NAU are shortstop Jeff Maltese (.399), center fielder Mark Seeger (.358), and third baseman Jim Coppola (.347). Seeger, an NCAA ail-American ail-American last year, also has eight home runs to lead the team. Meanwhile SUSC is struggling somewhat with its fielding (.863 team fielding average). The T-Birds T-Birds commit an average of 4.36 errors per contest. The 'Birds are continuing to get good hitting from the Pappas Brothers-Tony and John-and from Cliff Christensen and Gary Cowart. T. Pappas hits .372 and is tied with Cowart for the homerun lead with five roundtrippers. Christensen is getting more playing time lately and has responded with a .348 average. J. Pappas and Cowart hit .333 and .286 respectively; they also share the team lead in runs batted in with 14 apiece. Things are still somewhat tentative (because of a scheduled doubleheader Tuesday-April 22-at , University of Utah), but Jack will probably call on Greg Bird (0-6) to go against the Lumberjacks. All are righthanders. NAU is expected to also send all righthanders to the noumd in the series. Probable starters will be Kirk Primas (4-4 with a 4.22 ERA), Kernan Ronan (5-5 with a 7.28 ERA) and Steve Wolfe (3-1 and a 6.49 ERA) or Scott Lindquist (2-6 and a 6.75 ERA). "We've made some improvements im-provements in several aspects of the game in the past two weeks; the better weather has been invaluable," in-valuable," Jack says. "If we can tighten up the fielding and get some consistently good pitching, we can still do alright in the conference playoffs. We hope to show some of that improvement with some wins against Northern Arizona this week." |