By MONTE DUTTON

I spent a lot of time Friday watching NCAA baseball playoff games, mainly because I’m presently too broke to do much else..

I had the usual South Carolinian’s interest in Clemson, and some underdog’s affection for USC Upstate, which won the Big South Tournament out of which Presbyterian quickly retired. The daytime Big South games were on local TV the weekend before, and I watched a good bit of the Spartans keeping High Point and Charleston Southern at bay.

I guess the outcome was pleasing, all things considered. Clemson won, and USC Upstate gave it a decent game.

All the region hosts won except the ones in Oregon (Oregon and Oregon State) and Mississippi (Southern Miss and Ole Miss).

Vanderbilt, the No. 1 overall seed, barely squeezed by Wright (Ohio) State, when the Raiders’ head coach pulled Cam Smith, his starting pitcher, who had no-hit the Commodores through six innings. Then Vandy’s game-winning homer was first ruled foul before the umps convened and changed the call.

I knew Vanderbilt head coach Tim Corbin when he coached at PC for six seasons in the 1980s. We were friends way back then. The last time I talked to him was after a game in which David Price beat Alabama. I was in Nashville and was glad Tim remembered who I was.

This bleeding-heart lover of underdogs grieved a bit for Wright State, but Vandy is probably my favorite college baseball team since Furman doesn’t play it anymore.

(Excuse me while I curse under my breath.)

All of the above was nothing compared to what happened in Eugene, Ore., and I accidentally watched it even though I was sleepy because there was obviously the possibility of something magical.

I wouldn’t really call it magical. It was weird. It was harsh. For the third time in a day, I found myself feeling sympathy for the big school.

Oregon, the Big 10 champ, was playing Utah Valley, which I was surprised to learn has the highest enrollment of any school in that state. Utah Valley had not played a ranked team all year, which is a bit startling since PC played six games against them (Clemson, Alabama, Georgia) this very year (and won one of them).

Utah Valley won. By a run. By a run that was disallowed.

It was one of those plays where two players are at fault, like when a fielder misses the tag and the runner misses the base.

This time the Ducks’ runner should have been dead to rights (whatever that means). The throw from the outfield took a high bounce and squirted out of the catcher’s glove. The Oregon runner ran over the catcher, Mason Strong, who was blocking the plate without the ball, which is no longer allowed. The runner, Anson Aroz, ran over him and missed the plate but scrambled back to tag it. Something interesting that none of the announcers noticed was that the pitcher, backing up the plate, caught the ball off the catcher’s glove and could have tagged out the runner had he known he missed the plate.

After roughly the same amount of time the Supreme Court takes to weigh the pros and cons of a case, the umpire announced that the Oregon runner, Aroz, was out for being overly aggressive, and that he was also suspended for the next game.

The Oregon coach, Mark Wasikowski, was hopping mad, and I don’t blame him. I think his runner could have clobbered the catcher far more viciously than he did. The umpires told Wasikowski that it was out of their hands because the call was made in, uh, replay central in Pittsburgh, of all places.

Meanwhile, in Eugene, it was gloom, despair and agony.

That play was not only aggravated by technology. It was damn near Orwellian.

I wish Tommy Spangler had been at the Waffle House this morning. I would have loved to tell him about. I also wondered if Peyton, Tommy’s son and the Clinton High baseball coach, was watching.

Peyton probably did something sensible and went to bed. This morning I had an omelet and went to the laundromat.

The Spartans are tied, 3-3, with Kentucky, to which I haven’t been paying enough attention on account of I’ve been writing this. The WIldcats wound up winning, 7-3.

Kentucky has a player name Kyuss Gargett, who hails from Anderson, Ind. I was thinking Wales or Scotland.

One of the announcers just said USC Upstate was from Spartansburg.

Most of my last few days have been living in TV time.

I love old movies, in major part because I’m old. I have little interest in superhero movies.

My reading has been nothing if not eclectic. I read Mike Hembree’s profile of Richard Petty and David Pearson, then a World War II novel about an American pilot and a German sailor cooperating to avoid the Nazis.

Now I’m reading three, three, three novels in one. It’s a faintly connected set of three novellas set in 1954, 1987 and 2017, together named Catalina Eddy and written by Daniel Pyne, evocative of Raymond Chandler but not quite there. I can only think of two writers who can turn a phrase with Chandler: Dan Jenkins and Kinky Friedman, and for completely different reasons.

I finished the first of the yarns, The Big Empty, at the laundromat.

Meanwhile, I started adding a chapter to The Graduate Transfer, my long-term and much rewritten project. Most of my books are available on Amazon.

While you’re waiting, take a look at my most recent works of faction, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, about political corruption, and The Latter Days, about baseball.

My writing’s pretty eclectic, too.