Bill Oram: Seriously, who is going to beat the Beavers?

CORVALLIS — All sports love their cliches and their poetically romantic metaphors for life, but none more than baseball. No sir.

Here’s an example: Until the final out, you’ve got a chance. As long as there’s a strike left, there’s hope.

Sure. Right. How often does that

really

work out?

Then here come the big, swinging Oregon State Beavers to remind you how these chestnuts catch on in the first place. Down to their last strike on Friday, trailing by two runs in a grueling game where every run came like the final dollop of toothpaste from the tube, it actually did work out.

The Beavers suddenly find themselves one win away from a return to Omaha and the College World Series after a defibrillator-level thriller — an improbable 5-4 win over Florida State in 10 innings. The adage is real. There’s always a chance.

So now you have to wonder: Who on earth is going to be able to knock down these Beavers and keep them down?

Because it wasn’t Saint Mary’s in last week’s regional after the Gaels managed to beat the Beavers in the opener but weren’t good enough to beat them twice. It wasn’t USC, which was outscored 20-4 over two games by the Beavers.

And it sure wasn’t the Seminoles on Friday.

Not even after they held the Beavers bats at bay for eight innings and carried a 4-1 lead into the bottom of the ninth. Not after it looked like Wilson Weber would be stranded on second base once his leadoff double was followed by two quick outs.

Were you ready to count the Beavers out? To join the handful of fans who had started for the exits?

“Everything from this game and from this season, it’s all kind of part of the same theme,” Mitch Canham said.

The Beavers run into hardship time after time, but in the dugout, Canham claims, he only sees excitement.

“Not fear,” he said. “Not an ounce of being timid.”

Resilience begets resilience. It builds like scar tissue. It becomes a habit. An instinct.

“Those moments,” Canham said, “tend to happen more and more.”

They happened fast on Friday. Pinch hitter Bryce Hubbard drew a walk. Then Dallas Macias, who has been mired in a season-long slump, pinch hit for Canon Reeder and drove a single into right field. It loaded the bases for Jacob Krieg.

After a wild pitch scored Weber to cut the lead to two, the Beavers were a swing away from tying the game — or winning it.

“I just took a deep breath and kind of listened to the crowd,” Krieg said, “and realized it’s bigger than myself.”

Krieg fell behind in the count. He was down to his last strike.

He hammered a single into left field. Two runs scored. Tie game. Extra innings. Momentum flipped.

At that point you could have almost written how the rest of the game would go: The Beavers loaded the bases in the bottom of the 10th inning and second baseman AJ Singer, who nearly homered in the seventh inning with a double off the top of the left field wall, hammered a single over the center fielder’s outstretched glove.

“We learn from our past,” Canham said. “These guys don’t forget about that. We have the capability of scoring a ton of runs in any given moment.”

So again, I ask: Who is going to beat the Beavers? With confidence like that, who is stopping them?

Belief is a drug. It is a superpower.

Oregon State will face FSU’s lefthanded ace Jamie Arnold on Saturday. Had the Beavers not stolen a win on Friday, taken advantage of the sliver of hope that one final strike provided, their odds of getting to Omaha would have felt incredibly slim.

Pack it up. Another fine season that got pretty darned close.

Instead, it was Florida State’s players and coaches who were left shaking their heads.

“That’s awful,” coach Link Jarrett said. “It doesn’t get much worse than that.”

The Beavers are a win away from Omaha, with two chances to punch their ticket.

All they need is one.

—


Bill Oram


is the sports columnist at The Oregonian/OregonLive.

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