A ‘wall of memories’: Oregon State baseball reaches the College World Series, one Polaroid at a time

OMAHA, Neb. — In an

Oregon State

baseball season filled with fireworks, home runs have been celebrated with cathartic screams and high fives. Bear hugs and bat flips. Kisses to the crowd and fist pumps.

Oh, and Polaroids. Lots and lots of Polaroids.

One hundred and three to be exact.

You see, as the Beavers have

bashed

their way to the

College World Series

for the eighth time in school history, they’ve documented perhaps the most exciting part of the voyage — their towering home runs — with a Polaroid camera. Every one of Oregon State’s 103 homers has been memorialized with a Polaroid picture, often in the Beavers’ dugout during the emotional height of the celebration.

In recent years, OSU teams celebrated big moments by donning

construction-style hard hats

and

fox hats

, but the 2025 club has replaced these traditions with a camera.

“It’s our kind of special thing,”

Gavin Turley

said. “It’s like a time stamp of history, so it’s pretty cool.”

The idea was hatched before the season by senior catcher

Wilson Weber

, who was searching for a way to galvanize the team and document the season. Weber, who has blossomed into one of the

most respected leaders and voices inside the Beavers’ locker room

, wanted something unique, something meaningful. And as he racked his brain for ideas, he was inspired by a memory.

When Weber was a sophomore, a pair of diehard Oregon State fans — a father and his son as he remembers it — gave the Beavers a home run chain during their annual season-opening trip to Surprise, Arizona. After one of the games, Weber was signing autographs when the father casually mentioned that he thought it would be cool if players slipped on the chain and posed for Polaroid pictures after some of their more memorable homers.

“That’s it,” Weber thought, two years later. “I want to do something like that.”

But he didn’t merely want to snap pictures. Weber wanted to display all of them on a massive memory board in the team’s brand new hitting facility beyond center field at Goss Stadium, filling it game by game, week by week, and month by month.

He checked the pulse of a few teammates to see what they thought of the idea — “I kind of wondered, like, would it be weird to do this? Would it be cheesy?” — and the feedback was unanimous.

“They said, ‘No, that would be sick!’” Weber said.

And so, the next thing Weber knew, he was surfing Amazon for a Polaroid camera and a gigantic corkboard, and formulating a plan to document the Beavers’ season, one home run at a time. He sought out help from the

DAM Analytics Squad

, Oregon State’s analytics department, and they decided to label each picture with the home run’s exit velocity, the date it was hit and what number it was for the player.

Polaroid photographs marking home runs from Beavers baseball players on display on a cork board inside the Oregon State hitting facility in Corvallis.

Joe Freeman/The Oregonian

After each home game and long trip, Weber has dropped a stack of photos on the desk of Amelia Moir, a Dam Analytics Squad intern, and she has pinned them on that gigantic corkboard in the hitting facility.

Weber totes the camera from game to game and snaps nearly all of the photos, except, of course, when he’s batting or standing in the on-deck circle or waiting in the hole. Before those moments, he hands off the camera to Dawson Santana, a starting pitcher who has the day off or another player on the bench, and they are assigned to take a snapshot of history.

“I kind of wanted to get the guys on board with one little thing that was just ours,” Weber said. “I wanted us to kind of have a little thing that’s our own thing that nobody else is doing it in the country. So I thought this would be different.

“Plus, I knew we were going to hit a lot of homers.”

There have been a few technical difficulties and minor mishaps along the way — the camera batteries died during the Beavers’ March trip to Nebraska and a homer or two have been overlooked here and there — so all the photos are not live-action shots. But it only adds to the authenticity and fun.

When

Easton Talt

blasted a

walk-off homer to beat San Diego

in March, he was swarmed by teammates in right field and didn’t immediately make it back to the dugout. So Weber snapped a picture of him as he conducted a postgame television interview wearing headphones. No one snapped a picture of the home run Turley hit against rival Oregon in April, so Moir printed off a media day picture of Turley

hoisting a flock of ducks he bagged during a hunting trip

.

Carson McEntire’s

first home run is memorialized with a shot of him gnawing on a slice of pizza. And one blast during a midweek game against the Portland Pilots is so dark and blurry, you can’t even make out who the subject is.

But most are clear as day, featuring smiling sluggers flashing double thumbs up or posing with crossed arms or being mobbed by teammates. Occasionally, a pitcher will sneak in and pose with a hitter, as

Nelson Keljo

did on

Jacob Krieg’s

11th homer of the season.

AJ Singer

didn’t realize his second homer was being captured live in the dugout, so he’s not even looking at the camera in that shot. More than once,

Canon Reeder

and

Trent Caraway

stuck out their tongues to memorialize a homer. And one shot features the back of

Aiva Arquette’s

head.

Polaroid photographs marking home runs from Beavers baseball players on display on a cork board inside the Oregon State hitting facility in Corvallis.

Joe Freeman/The Oregonian

“There’s some random photos here and there,” Weber said, chuckling. “And more than one photo has disappeared. But the goal has been to take one at some point to remember the moment. It can even be after the game, if we forget. But we try to at least get the picture on that day, to capture the moment and celebrate it.”

Everyone has their favorite, and most carry some kind of significance.

Turley can’t help but savor the picture that celebrates the day he

broke the school’s all-time

home run record and became

Oregon State’s Home Run King

. Arquette said he loves the photo of his first homer at Goss Stadium, which did not come until the Corvallis Regional. Talt, unsurprisingly, said he cherishes that shot of his walk-off postgame interview. Reeder’s favorite is one he took with coach

Mitch Canham

, which depicts the two standing back-to-back and flashing silly faces.

And Caraway will never forget his

record-setting surge through the regional round

, when he belted a program-record five homers to fuel the Beavers’ berth to the super regional round. After one of them, he charged into the dugout, stuck out his tongue and screamed, which Weber captured for posterity.

“I don’t remember which game it was,” Caraway said, smirking. “I was blacked-out during those home runs.”

It’s unclear what’s going to happen to the corkboard when the season ends. It could be auctioned off to raise money for the program, with one lucky Oregon State fan snagging a priceless piece of memorabilia. It could be taken down and replaced with a new batch of photos, snapped by a new collection of players. Or it could stay in the hitting facility forever, honoring a group that became the eighth in program history to reach the College World Series and maybe, just maybe, the fourth to win a national championship.

And after a memorable season with 103 memorable homers, some are rooting for the latter.

“It’s like a wall of memories,” Singer said. “I stop in and look at them every now and then and I try and find my, like, one out of 100-whatever we have. I don’t know if they’ll do it every year and keep the same wall or add on different walls, or if this will be it. But it’s pretty cool.”

—

Joe Freeman

|

jfreeman@oregonian.com

| 503-294-5183 |

@BlazerFreeman

|

@freemanjoe.bsky.social

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