At the beginning of the season, anyone who cared about Pac-12 baseball would have circled this series on their calendar.
UCLA and Oregon State entered the year as the top two Pac-12 teams in four separate preseason polls – Collegiate Baseball, National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association, the ESPN/USA Today Coaches Poll and the Pac-12 Preseason Coaches Poll. They finished last season with a combined 84 wins.
The two teams’ lone regular season series – scheduled for this weekend – was supposed to be a marquee matchup, a de facto Pac-12 title series.
Instead, the matchup will have no real say in the final Pac-12 standings.
Oregon State (32-19, 13-14 Pac-12) enters the series ranked No. 6 in the conference standings, and UCLA (25-28, 12-15) ranks No. 10.
At least for Oregon State, there’s still a chance for an NCAA Tournament berth. The Beavers’ RPI sits at No. 49 going into this weekend’s three-game series.
UCLA’s chances of attaining a bid to the tournament ended a couple weeks ago when the Bruins lost two out of three games in a key series against USC.
Since that series, UCLA has only compounded its troubles, losing three of four games. Heading into this weekend’s matchup with Oregon State, the Bruins’ RPI sits at a season low – No. 96.
“We should be further back than we are,” said coach John Savage. “We’re not that far off, is the scary part. For really not playing very well.”
Overall, Savage said that the Pac-12 is wide open this year, which is why he’s disappointed that his team hasn’t taken advantage of several key opportunities.
There were three key series this season that could have turned the Bruins’ season around – at Washington in mid-April, at conference-leader Utah in late April and at home versus USC two weeks ago. UCLA lost all three series, two games to one.
The Pac-12 has been closely contested all year, with no clear front-runners, so any one of those three series could have turned the tide in the conference.
“We just haven’t won any series,” Savage said. “We’ve only been swept once. But if we had won a couple series (it could be different).”
As it stands now, UCLA is 2-7 in its nine Pac-12 series this year. The team hasn’t lost that many conference series in a single season since Savage’s first year as coach in 2005.
Bright spots
Although the season hasn’t turned out according to plan for UCLA, a few players on the roster have stood out on the stat sheet.
Junior first and third baseman Luke Persico has emerged as one of the best hitters in the Pac-12, batting at a .372 clip over the 18 conference games. In each of his three years at UCLA, Persico has increased his batting average by at least 30 points.
“I think he’s played with more confidence,” Savage said. “He’s been three years in our program, he’s been to Cape Cod, he went to the West Coast League, he went to the North Coast League. This is the culmination.”
As Persico has been the standout at the plate, fellow junior Grant Dyer has been a recent standout on the mound. The righty starter has pitched three-straight quality starts, each of which has yielded a win for the Bruins.
This kind of pitching was what UCLA had planned for Dyer earlier in the season, when he was designated as the team’s ace. An oblique injury early in the season put Dyer’s ascent on hold, but he appears to be back to full strength now.
“He’s certainly pitched the way we thought he’d pitch from the beginning,” Savage said. “But we need more than one guy.”