Winners of six straight and seven of its last eight games, Stanford baseball hopes it can continue to move its way up the conference standings in its final regular-season series outside of California this year when it heads to Eugene this weekend to take on the Oregon Ducks.
Currently tied for fifth-place in the conference, the No. 25 Cardinal (27-16, 9-9 Pac-10) comes into the series following two mid-week blowout victories over Pacific and UC-Davis after sweeping Washington over the weekend. The theme of the win streak has been offense, as the Cardinal has hit .364 en route to a 7.7 runs per-game average in that span.
The Cardinal freshmen have been impressive over that streak, especially first baseman Brian Ragira and outfielder Austin Wilson. Ragira, who leads the team in RBI with 38 this season and is second in slugging at a .471 clip, was named Pac-10 Player of the Week after hitting .571 with six RBI in the games against San Jose State and Washington. Ragira is the second Cardinal freshman to garner the honor this year, after second baseman Lonnie Kauppila won the award for the week of April 4.
Wilson followed up Ragira’s performance with some excellent play of his own. The right fielder comes into the weekend having raised his average to .331 in the midst of his current eleven-game hitting streak. During the stretch, Wilson is batting .462 with a .641 slugging percentage, and with his homer on Monday, Wilson is now tied for the team lead in homers with Ragira and senior catcher Zach Jones, who all have 4.
Sophomore starter Dean McArdle, the beneficiary of the Cardinal’s recent offensive success in the team’s victory over UC-Davis on Tuesday, remarked how much easier life is for a pitcher with a lot of run support.
“You just go out there and try to throw it in the zone,” he said. “The last couple of weeks it’s been really nice to have the run support every night.”
The Cardinal’s opponent, Oregon (24-23-1, 5-13 Pac-10), comes into the weekend hoping to spur some late-season momentum that could garner them an NCAA invite. The Ducks were swept at home last weekend by UCLA in a series that severely damaged their postseason hopes, but with another nine Pac-10 games still left on the slate, Oregon has plenty left to fight for. The Ducks enter the weekend following bad weather on Wednesday that forced them to end their game against Seattle in a 7-7 tie, a rarity in baseball. The Ducks defeated the Redhawks 10-5 in their game on Tuesday, which snapped their three game losing streak.
Although the Ducks have at times struggled to score runs this season, they have been paced by junior second-baseman Danny Pulfer, a 2010 All-Pac-10 honorable mention who leads the Ducks in hitting with a .330 average to go along with 11 doubles. Freshman catcher Aaron Jones is second on the team in hits with 44 and doubles with eight. Oregon is hitting just .245 as a team this season, while Stanford is hitting at a .304 clip.
The Ducks have offset their spotty offense with outstanding starting pitching. The Oregon rotation is led by junior lefthander and preseason All-American Tyler Anderson, who is the all-time leader in strikeouts at Oregon and has a 1.73 ERA this season. Anderson has been backed up in the rotation this year by junior Madison Boer, junior Alex Keudell and sophomore Christian Jones, all of whom have an ERA of 3.26 or lower.
The Cardinal-Ducks series opens today at 7 p.m. in Eugene and continues with games at 2 p.m. tomorrow and 1 p.m. on Sunday. Expected starters will be sophomore Mark Appel, senior Danny Sandbrink and junior Jordan Pries for Stanford, and Anderson, Keudell and Jones for Oregon.