Oregon State baseball vs Florida State: Pitching showdown looms large in Corvallis Super Regional

CORVALLIS — As the

Oregon State

baseball team

mashed and mauled

its way to the

Corvallis Super Regional

, tantalizing record-setting Goss Stadium crowds with record-setting offensive eruptions, a notable development was lost amid all the fireworks.

The Beavers’ pitching staff put on one heck of a show.

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“I was telling some guys at breakfast this morning,” junior outfielder

Gavin Turley

said Wednesday. “I think we just showed the whole country that we have the arms to do it, that we have the arms to really make a real run here. And I think that that’s huge when you’re trying to do something like win a national championship.”

As the old baseball adage goes, pitching and defense wins championships, and the Beavers unleashed plenty of both as they won four elimination games over three days to advance in the

NCAA baseball tournament

.

Dax Whitney

and

Nelson Keljo

threw

masterpieces

to dismiss the TCU Horned Frogs.

Ethan Kleinschmit

had one of the best performances of his young career to exact a little revenge over the Saint Mary’s Gaels. Wyatt Queen, Kellan Oakes and Zach Kmatz throttled the USC Trojans to force a winner-take-all regional final. And then

James DeCremer

,

Eric Segura

and

Laif Palmer

carried the Beavers into the super regionals by tossing the program’s first postseason shutout since 2018, which, ahem, is the last year they won a championship.

“That was a good year,” OSU coach

Mitch Canham

quipped, noting the significance of the shutout.

And it was a good tournament for Beavers’ pitching. In four do-or-die regional games, they surrendered just six runs and 28 hits, an average of 1.5 and 7.0, respectively, per game. In the win-or-go-home final, OSU delivered a three-hit shutout, as

DeCremer pitched the game of his life

in his second career start, and Segura and Palmer rebounded impressively from

rocky openers

.

“Makes me look pretty smart, doesn’t it?” Canham said. “It’s a really good problem to have when you look down at your (lineup) card … and you have multiple options to go to. I love the depth. I love the growth that they’re making.”

But that depth and growth will be tested like rarely before this season at the Corvallis Super Regional, a best-of-three series pitting the eighth-seeded Beavers (45-13-1) against the ninth-seeded

Florida State Seminoles

(41-14).

The Seminoles’ lineup is one of the most lethal in the nation, featuring seven regulars who are hitting .310 or better and four who have blasted 16 or more home runs. Florida State ranks among the top 20 nationally in batting average (.311, 19th), slugging percentage (.528, 15th) and home runs (100, 19th). At the heart of the production is shortstop

Alex Lodise

, one of three finalists for the Golden Spikes Award, given annually to the best amateur baseball player in the United States.

The 6-foot-1 junior shortstop is hitting .405 and slugging .736, with 17 homers, 18 doubles, 67 RBIs and 61 runs scored. He leads all Power Four hitters in batting average and ranks among the top 12 nationally in hits (91) and total bases (167). He became just the second player in ACC history to win the conference’s Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the year awards in the same season.

Lodise hits second in the Seminoles’ powerful lineup, sandwiched between leadoff spark plug Gage Harrelson, who is hitting .335 with 63 runs scored and 15 stolen bases, and No. 3 hitter Max Williams, who is hitting .318 with a team-high 18 homers and 49 RBIs. Freshman first baseman Myles Bailey (.328, 17 homers, 53 RBIs), third baseman Cal Fisher (.320, eight homers, 11 doubles) and all-ACC first-team second baseman Drew Faurot (.308, 16 homers, 51 RBIs) round out a formidable top six of the lineup.

Florida State shortstop Alex Lodise (1) is a finalist for the Golden Spikes Award. (AP Photo/Gary McCullough)

AP

“Their offense has the ability to really do a lot of damage,” Canham said. “We’ve seen it. They can string together offense throughout the entirety of the game, and they can also put together some really big innings.”

Canham refused to divulge how he will stack rotation for the series. But after making two appearances in the regional and throwing 56 pitches in Monday’s final, Segura, the Beavers’ Friday night starter, isn’t likely to start Game 1. The smart money is on Whitney (6-3, 3.78 ERA), a 6-foot-5 freshman right-hander who, before the season, was dubbed a

“young phenom”

before by pitching coach

Rich Dorman

.

The player who passed up seven-figures to play in Corvallis

dazzled in his postseason debut

last weekend, allowing two runs on four hits, while striking out 12, in a win over TCU. And he was superb in May, going 3-0 in four starts, during which he allowed five runs, 12 hits and recorded 29 strikeouts over 22 innings.

“That guy is the most dominant pitcher I’ve been able to play behind, I think, in all my career here at Oregon State,” Turley said of Whitney. “And he’s only a freshman. That kid’s got a crazy future ahead of him here at Oregon State.

“I’ve told Dax multiple times, like, ‘Hey, your stuff is literally better than these guys in the box. So just go get ahead and challenge them to hit it because, guess what, they’re not. I don’t care if you tell them what’s coming. I’m not hitting it. No one’s hitting it. Dax, like, you’re good.’ So him knowing that is huge. The sheer stuff is just dominant from Dax.”

Keljo (3-2, 3.63), the experienced junior left-hander, could also start Game 1, but he lost his Friday night job in May and the Beavers like the way his stuff plays out of the bullpen, especially when paired with Whitney or Segura.

Assuming Whitney starts Game 1, Kleinschmit (8-3, 3.70 ERA) would likely take the hill in Game 2. The 6-3 sophomore left-hander has been the Beavers’ most consistent starter all season and he was nails during an elimination win over Saint Mary’s last weekend, allowing two runs and striking out six over a career-high 7 2/3 innings.

“We’re walking into an elite team,” FSU coach Link Jarrett told reporters Thursday. “You look at every aspect of their team. They’re very dynamic. They’re physical. Explosive pitch profiles (and) stuff from the starters and some of the guys they’ve used out of the bullpen. So we’re walking into a situation that is as good as it gets in terms of the level of competition that we’re staring at in their home facility.”

As for the Beavers’ lineup, after erupting for 54 runs and 63 hits in five regional games, it, too, will be tested. The Seminoles feature a trio of accomplished left-handed starters, led by ace

Jamie Arnold

, a 2024 First-Team All-America selection who is in contention to be the No. 1 overall pick of the 2025 MLB draft. The 6-1 junior is 8-2 with a 3.12 ERA and 110 strikeouts in 78 innings this season, and he’s coming off a dominant 13-strikeout, seven-inning performance in a win over Mississippi State.

But the Seminoles are expected to start junior Joey Volini (8-5, 3.68) in Friday’s opener and save Arnold for Game 2, which would allow him to throw on normal rest (Arnold pitched last Saturday). Sophomore Wes Mendes (7-2, 4.66) is Florida State’s Sunday starter.

The Beavers have had their issues with left-handed pitching this season, most notably against those who rely on command and off-speed pitches. One needs to look no further than the opening-round upset in the regional, where Gaels’ senior left-hander Dylan Delvecchio struck out 10 OSU batters over 6 2/3 innings in a win.

The Beavers responded by handling USC’s left-handers nicely and, they also note, chased Iowa ace Cade Obermueller after 3 1/3 innings in a key late-season win in Des Moines. So there’s a belief in the Oregon State clubhouse that their left-handed woes are a thing of the past.

“We handled him well,” Turley said of Obermueller. “So I’m excited for this week, and what it has to hold.”

Added senior catcher Wilson Weber: “It’s definitely kind of been a thing for us this year, for sure. But as we kind of saw this weekend, I think we finally flipped … the approach (and started) going the other way. Where we struggle a lot is with the slower lefties … it’s the slower ones that are moving everything every which way that we struggled with throughout this year.”

There’s nothing slow about the Beavers’ staff, which is littered with live arms that throw in the 90s. And its ability to slow down the Seminoles could determine whether Oregon State delivers on its preseason

“Omaha or bust”

pledge in 2025.

“We’re doing everything right,” OSU third baseman

Trent Caraway

said. “I think we have so much momentum going into the super regional. It’s going to be electric and I think all of us are so excited to get out here and put on a show.”

—

Joe Freeman

|

jfreeman@oregonian.com

| 503-294-5183 |

@BlazerFreeman

|

@freemanjoe.bsky.social

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