Cal Sports Report

Cal Loses to USC in Semifinal of Pac-12 Baseball Tournament

Cal faces several nervous days before finding out if the Bears get into NCAA tournament

Jake Curtis

Photo by Robert Edwards, KLC Fotos
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Cal’s bid for a Pac-12 baseball tournament title ended Friday, and that marked the start of three anxiety-filled days for the Golden Bears.

Cal’s six-game winning streak was halted by USC, which beat the Golden Bears 7-4 in the semifinals of the conference tournament in 95-degree afternoon heat in Scottsdale, Arizona.  Cal must hope it has done enough to earn a berth in the NCAA tournament.

The Bears won’t know their postseason fate until the field for the 64-team NCAA tournament is announced on Monday morning.  And it could go either way.

In its report posted Friday morning, Baseball America projected that Cal would be left out of the NCAA tournament field, listing Cal among the “Next Four Out,” after the bubble teams in the “First Four Out.”  However, the D1 Baseball site’s projections posted Friday morning had Cal as the very last team to make the NCAA field.

Other projections have Cal right on the borderline of making the field, with some having the Bears in and some having them out.

Cal (36-19) played like a NCAA tournament team late in the season, going 20-5 over its final 25 games. Cal’s sweep a three-game series last month against Oregon State, which has an RPI ranking of 16, should play in Cal’s favor too.

The Bears would have earned an automatic berth in the NCAA tournament if they had won the conference tournament. But they could not get past a hot USC team, which recorded its ninth straight victory.

So it will be USC facing either Stanford or Arizona in Saturday’s 7 p.m. Pac-12 tournament championship game.

Cal started Friday’s game well, taking a 2-0 lead after two innings, thanks in  part to Caleb Lomavita’s solo home run in the first inning.

However, Cal failed to score in a bases-loaded, no-outs situation in the third inning, and USC took a 3-2 lead in the fourth inning on one swing – a three-run home run by freshman Brayden Dowd. It was Dowd’s first collegiate home run.

After the Trojans took a 4-2 lead in the sixth, Cal tied the game 4-4 with a pair of runs in the seventh inning, the second coming on a Lomavita groundout.

USC regained the lead 5-4 on Austin Overn’s seventh-inning sacrifice fly and added two insurance runs in the eighth.

Cal got its first two batters on base in the top of the ninth, but could do no more damage against USC closer Josh Blum, who entered the game with a 1.76 ERA.

Lomavita, Max Handron and Carson Crawford had two hits apiece for Cal, and starting pitcher Ian May was effective, pitching shutout ball for the first three innings before running into trouble in the fourth.

This was Cal's final baseball game as a member of the Pac-12 conference. And if Bears do not get into the NCAA tournament, they will look back at two moments that ruined things on Friday – failing to score on the bases-loaded, no-outs situation in the third inning and Dowd’s three-run homer off Austin Turkington in the fourth inning.

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Jake Curtis

JAKE CURTIS

Jake Curtis worked in the San Francisco Chronicle sports department for 27 years, covering virtually every sport, including numerous Final Fours, several college football national championship games, an NBA Finals, world championship boxing matches and a World Cup. He was a Cal beat writer for many of those years, and won awards for his feature stories.

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