Much like his 34 other teammates, Oregon State pitcher Bryce Fehmel awoke Monday morning expecting an announcement that the baseball season would last at least one more week.
But when the final four teams were announced for the Coral Gables regional Monday during an ESPNU broadcast, the Beavers had not heard their name called in the field of 64.
“When the last teams were announced, the room went pretty much dead silent,” Fehmel said.
The news marked the end of Oregon State’s school-record streak of seven consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances. It was also the first time since the field expanded from 48 to 64 teams in 1999 that no Pac-12 teams from either California or Oregon qualified for the postseason. No Pac-12 teams were named regional hosts Sunday night, also a first since tournament expansion.
Prior to NCAA Tournament selection show, the 2016 season had already earned its place as one of the wildest years in Pac-12 baseball history. That was only magnified by the Beavers’ surprise exclusion from the postseason.
“Life sometimes isn’t fair and this is a very unfair decision made by a group of people that don’t play the game,” OSU head coach Pat Casey said.
Oregon State entered the season as a consensus top 10 team with the expectations of a marquee year. The conference coaches picked them nearly unanimously as the preseason Pac-12 favorites, which would have been their third conference title in four years.
Save for outfielder Jeff Hendrix and pitcher Andrew Moore – both selected in the first four rounds of the MLB draft – OSU returned a majority of the youthful team that made a surprise late run to finish second in the league last year.
After a 16-2 start, which included a three-game sweep of Arizona State, Oregon State looked well on its way to meeting expectations. But the team was dealt a sizable blow when No. 1 pitcher Drew Rasmussen went out for the year in late March following Tommy John surgery.
His injury forced the coaches to jumble an already thinning pitching staff. Sam Tweedt, who went 8-1 with a 2.35 earned run average in 47 1/3 innings as a freshman, missed the year after offseason Tommy John surgery. Christian Martinek, a 6-foot-5 lefty who sat out his freshman season following Tommy John, dealt with a setback in his recovery and pitched 2 2/3 innings.
The reformed staff, built around senior Travis Eckert as the Friday starter, initially performed admirably. But cracks emerged amid a stretch in which the Beavers lost six of seven games, five in a row for the first time since 2011 and saw their 25-game win streak over Portland snapped.
During the seven-game stretch, starting pitchers had a 6.00 ERA. The once powerful offense that hit .329 in non-league action went 48 for 225 in that span (.213) and finished Pac-12 play with a .232 average.
Yet despite a regular season that fell below expectations, the mood around the team after the finale Sunday was that the Beavers were all but a lock for one of 33 at-large bids.
While the offense continued to struggle, scoring 18 runs in its final six games, the pitching staff appeared to be coming into its own. The Beavers shut out UCLA over a three-game series, the first time that had occurred in the history of the program. Eckert, Fehmel and sophomore Luke Heimlich all threw complete games in that span.
Oregon State won five of their final six games to work its way into a three-way tie for third place in the conference with Arizona and Arizona State. Among the factors working against the league was that Utah – a team projected to finish last – won the Pac-12 with a losing overall record. That gave the Utes an automatic tournament bid and took away an at-large berth from a bubble team.
“Utah beating Washington and other dominoes around the country falling the way that they fell, you’re losing losing at-large opportunities,” said Joel Erdmann, the chair of the selection committee and South Alabama athletic director. “When evaluating and detailing and comparing the best the committee could, (Oregon State) just came up a little short.”
OSU finished 44th in the Rating Percentage Index (RPI), which is a catch-all metric the NCAA uses to rate all Division I teams. Casey had criticized RPI during the season for how it rated West Coast teams, given their challenges in scheduling nonconference games that would increase strength of schedule, but their end-of-year mark appeared to be in a safe zone.
Ultimately five teams with lesser RPI numbers earned at-large bids over Oregon State: Nebraska (48), South Alabama (50), Minnesota (51), Long Beach State (53) and Washington (55). Three teams with higher RPIs did not make it in: North Carolina (19), Georgia (37) and Michigan (38).
“The RPI is a starting point,” Erdmann said. “It’s not the end-all, be-all.”
Fehmel said the news had still not set in and imagined it would not until the remainder of the week rolled by without practice. The once toiling pitching staff appeared to hit its groove heading into the postseason, but will not get to test itself against the best offenses in the country.
With a majority of the roster set to return in 2017, the focus can only shift toward the following season.
“I think this is a lot of motivation for next year,” Fehmel said. “It will leave a lot on our mind to get that one thing done. … To make it to the tournament and go to Omaha.”
— Danny Moran
