Oregon baseball’s series opener against Oregon State, previously scheduled for Thursday at 7 p.m. at PK Park, has been postponed due to rain.
The series will now open Friday at 7 p.m. The postponed game will be made up Sunday at noon, with Saturday’s game still set for 3 p.m.
Not only is this a rivalry series, but it’s a key conference slate for both teams. The Ducks have won 10 games in a row, tying their longest streak since the program came back in 2009. The most consecutive games the team has ever won, in the entire history of the program, is 12 games in 1964. A sweep of the Beavers would break the all-time school record.
Oregon sits at 19-7 after the streak, improving its conference record from 1-3 to 6-3 during that span as well. That puts the Ducks fourth in the Pac-12, behind Stanford, Arizona State and USC. They reentered D1Baseball’s top 25 list this week, coming right in at the No. 25 spot.
Oregon State, meanwhile, isn’t the force it was last year. The Beavers are just 5-7 in conference play and have fallen out of the top 25. They lost several of last season’s key players to the MLB draft, most notably Cooper Hjerpe, Jacob Melton, Wade Meckler and Justin Boyd. The linchpins of their lineup are Travis Bazzana, Garret Forrester and Micah McDowell.
In the rotation, they’ll be trotting out Jaren Hunter, Trent Sellers and Jacob Kmatz — all of whom possess a sub-4.00 ERA. The Ducks are familiar with Hunter and Kmatz, but Sellers is a transfer. While that trio is solid, it lacks a superstar type like Hjerpe last year, and Oregon’s offense has been on fire, scoring 118 runs over the 10-game winning streak.
The Ducks will be countering with the same rotation they’ve gone to over the last couple weeks: Jace Stoffal, Logan Mercado and Leo Uelmen. Stoffal had his best outing of the season last week against Arizona, giving up three runs in seven innings, while Mercado struggled mightily on Saturday when the Ducks came back from a 10-0 deficit to win 13-11.
The Beavers had the Ducks’ number last year, winning all five matchups. They were consistently one of the highest ranked teams in the country, but this year hasn’t been the same for them. In D1Baseball’s weekly predictions, eight of the 11 staff members forecasted Oregon to have the upper hand this time around.
It’ll all kick off Friday now instead of Thursday. Oregon’s previously planned Greek Night, which was scheduled for Thursday, will now occur on Saturday with no rain in the forecast that day.
