Oregon baseball unleashed its most proficient offensive performance of the season Monday evening with a 15-4 beatdown over University of Portland at PK Park.
For a team that is fighting for its playoff life, the offensive outburst was a positive sign and could serve as momentum to carry Oregon through its seven remaining regular season games.
Following the Ducks’ series-clinching win over Oregon State in Corvallis last Sunday, Oregon head coach George Horton reaffirmed his belief that Oregon is still a team bound for the postseason.
“We probably kept our season alive,” Horton said. “The last nail is not in the coffin.”
But it may indeed be too little too late for the Ducks.
Oregon is 26-22 on the season and 12-12 in Pac-12 play. That puts them in a two-way tie with USC for fifth place in the conference and three games back of first-place Utah (21-25, 15-9).
The Pac-12 champion will automatically qualify for the 64-team NCAA Division I Baseball championship, and champions from the other 30 conferences in the country will gain automatic qualifiers as well. That leaves 33 at-large spots available for team’s that don’t win a conference title.
When taking recent history into account, Oregon’s best – and only – shot at locking up a postseason spot may be by way of winning the Pac-12. 
In the most recent NCAA Division I RPI rankings, the Ducks ranked No. 84 in the nation, with five other Pac-12 teams ahead of them. First-place Utah isn’t one of those teams. Last season, the NCAA selection committee awarded at-large bids to five Pac-12 teams, but the conference was much stronger then. All six Pac-12 teams that reached the tournament won at least 34 games, though it’s possible that not one team from the conference could win that many games this year.
Arizona (No. 24) is the only Pac-12 team currently in the RPI top-25. 
Following a game in May last season when the Ducks were fighting for a tournament spot, Horton told reporters that the “magic number” for a team to receive an at-large bid was 35 games, and he was almost exactly right.
The average number of wins for an at-large team coming from a Power Five conference (Pac-12, SEC, ACC, Big-12, Big-10) over the last two seasons is 36. With 26 wins and seven games remaining this year, the best Oregon can hope for is 33. Last year, only Clemson (32) and Ole Miss (30) won fewer than 33 games and reached the tournament.
Oregon hasn’t made much of a case for an at-large bid — the Ducks are batting .239 as a team, which ranks 279th out of 290 Division one teams — and winning the conference may be their only way in at this point.
The Ducks host Arizona (32-18, 15-12) at PK Park this weekend. The following weekend they’ll play at Stanford to finish the regular season schedule, and will host Saint Mary’s for a nonconference game in between those two series.
With just four games separating tenth place from first place, Oregon still has a shot at vaulting to the top of a messy conference and grabbing a title that would save its season. But it will need to win out, and receive a ton of help from other teams in the process.
Follow Jarrid Denney on Twitter @jarrid_denney