BATON ROUGE SUPER REGIONAL:

The straight truth about the UC Irvine baseball team’s chances of winning the best-of-three Super Regional beginning Saturday at 3 p.m. at LSU might boil down to crooked numbers.

Coach Paul Mainieri, whose Tigers (46-16-1) are the No. 7 seed, ranked No. 5 by Baseball America and on an NCAA-best 23-game winning streak, said the best way to combat UCI’s brand of baseball (pitching and small ball) is to produce consistently on offense.

That has not been a problem thus far for the Tigers, who have bounced back to national prominence after a 29-26-1 season in 2007. LSU won all five of its national championships between 1991 and 2000 and recently captured the program’s 17th regional title.

LSU ranks No. 17 nationally with 88 home runs, nearly half of which have been produced by junior first baseman Matt Clark (25) and sophomore outfielder-designated hitter Blake Dean (19).

The Tigers are hitting .305 as a team with seven regulars hitting better than .300 and their combined .504 slugging percentage ranks No. 28 in the country.

By comparison, No. 8-ranked UCI (41-16) is hitting .306 as a team with eight regulars at .300 or better. But the Anteaters have hit just 35 home runs and are slugging .430.

Clark, a 6-foot-5, 235-pound left-handed hitter, is a Riverside College transfer who is one of two Californians on the LSU roster. Clark, the son of Terry Clark, who pitched for seven Major League teams, including the then-California Angels, is hitting .340 with 58 runs batted in. He ranks second nationally in homers per game (0.42) and his .770 slugging percentage ranks 10th nationally. He hit three homers in the Baton Rouge Regional, in which LSU was 3-0 and outscored foes, 36-9.

Dean, another lefty, is hitting .351 with 66 RBIs and a .669 slugging percentage. He had three home runs and nine RBIs in the regional.

LSU’s offense also includes sophomore outfielder Ryan Schrimpf, who is hitting .304 with 10 homers, 48 RBIs and a team-best 16 steals in 20 attempts.

The Tigers, who plan to start junior lefty Ryan Verdugo against Scott Gorgen in the opener, are not without solid pitching.

They rank No. 14 nationally with a 3.83 earned-run average, though that is nearly a run higher than UC Irvine’s 2.88, which ranks No. 2 nationally behind North Carolina.

Verdugo is 9-2 with a 3.81 ERA. He was drafted by the Phillies in 2005 (43rd round) and the Giants (47th round) in 2007.

Jared Bradford (10-4, 4.05 and a team-best five saves) and Blake Martin (5-3, 4.88) are other pitching notables for LSU.

Mainieri, in his second season at LSU, is familiar with UCI, since he was the coach at Notre Dame when the Anteaters lost two games in the South Bend Regional at Notre Dame in 2004.

UCI lost, 6-5, to the Fighting Irish in an elimination game in South Bend.

— Barry Faulkner