Spent a good part of a perfectly lovely Saturday afternoon in Corvallis to watch the Pepperdine Waves and Oregon State Beavers finish their series at Goss Stadium at Coleman Field. My parents have season tickets, and my father somehow wound up working on Saturday, so I wound up going with my mother to see how the Beavers looked this year.
Yes, I wore an Oregon sweatshirt and hat, but my mother's colleagues, as expected, were very good natured in their ribbing of me (though I did get a "Go Ducks!" from a lady handing out the Powerball tickets before the game!). Of course, there's always one in every crowd, and as we took our seats in front of the radio booth, a man standing next to us, who'd noticed what I was wearing whilst talking to another man, began to voice his displeasure about Oregon, Pat Kilkenny, etc. etc. etc. Just shut the hell up, I thought to myself, not wanting to take his bait, I'm just trying to finish my sudoku puzzle, thankyouverymuch!
It was a great game of baseball, for the first six innings anyway, as the Waves put together a 7 run inning in the top of the 7th to rally from a 2-1 deficit and grab the lead at 8-2. A couple of errors from third baseman Drew George were the keys to the big inning for the Waves, and it seemed to me most of the damage came with two outs in the inning, which always make such innings extra painful (I could be wrong about the number of outs though, as I didn't keep score but the Beaver fan next to me, a very nice guy, agreed with me on that point).
The Beavers rallied with two in the seventh and another one in the ninth, with two out and the tying run at the plate in Jordan Lennerton, but he struck out after working the pitcher up to a full count. I must say that the thoughts of most people around me were that the Beavers had rallied before to win in this series, and could do it again, so optimism was high until that final strike.
I've got to agree with the local views that James Nygren, making his first collegiate start, looked pretty good in his effort, I remember thinking early that he was able to hit the corner for some strikes early on.
The Pepperdine short stop did make a wonderful throw from deep in the hole to throw out an Oregon State batter, for which he got a nice ovation from the home crowd.
I'm not going to say that I'll attend every Beaver baseball game in similar situations in the future (lucky for me that there were no good soc....err, football games going on at that point) but there are many good things to like about this team, as young as it is.
G-T VIEW
OREGON LIVE VIEW
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