Pac-12 Baseball Tournament Pivotal for Cal's NCAA Hopes

The final Pac-12 baseball tournament will be an important one for Cal, which is still holding out hope of reaching the NCAA tournament.

The red-hot Bears (34-18) have won eight of their last nine games and have an RPI ranking of 65 as of Monday. Cal gained virtually no ground in the RPI standings with its three-game sweep of Washington over the weekend, and Washington will be Cal’s first opponent in the Pac-12 tournament, which begins Tuesday in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Teams typically need an RPI of 55 or better to be considered for an NCAA berth, so Cal must beat some teams with high RPI rankings this week to be in position for a postseason bid. At the moment Arizona, Oregon State and Oregon are the only three Pac-12 teams projected to make the NCAA tournament. They all have better RPI rankings than Cal, which has the fourth-best RPI in the conference.

The winner of the Pac-12 tournament gets an automatic berth in the NCAA tournament, and the Golden Bears may need to win the conference tournament to reach the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2019.

The nine-team Pac-12 tournament will be played at Scottsdale Stadium, just outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Unlike last year’s Pac-12 tournament, this year’s version separates the nine teams into three, three-team pools to start.

Cal (17-13 in the Pac-12) is seeded sixth and is in the same pool as No. 9 Washington (19-29-1, 10-20 Pac-12) and regular-season champion and No. 1 seed Arizona (33-20, 19-7 Pac-12). Each team plays the other two teams in its pool. Cal faces Washington on Tuesday at 7 p.m., then plays Arizona at 7 p.m. on Thursday. (Washington and Arizona face off on Wednesday).

Stanford, Arizona State and Oregon State are in one pool, and Utah, USC and Oregon are in the other.

The winners of the three pools as well as the top second-place team advance to the single-elimination semifinals on Friday with the winners of Friday’s games meeting in the title game at 7 p.m. Saturday. All games except the title game will be televised on the Pac-12 Network, with the championship game on ESPNU.

The three-team pool play virtually assures that there will be teams tied for the top spot in a pool or tied for the second-best record in all pools with 1-1 records. The team that finished higher in the standings will win all tie-breakers, so, as the No. 6 seed, Cal probably will need to win both of its games in pool play to advance to the semifinals.

Admittedly it is an odd format. It is different from the format the Pac-12 used in its initial conference baseball tournament last year, but it is similar to the format being used this season in the Atlantic Coast Conference, which will be Cal’s conference next year.

The 2024 ACC tournament is a 12-team event divided into four, three-team pools. The top finisher in each pool will advance to the semifinals, and in the case of ties the team with the higher seed will advance.

The format gives a significant advantage to teams that finished high in the regular-season standings, and maybe that’s appropriate.

Cal’s biggest advantage is that it is playing its best baseball of the season right now. The Bears have won 18 of their last 22 games and four in a row, pulling out victories over Washington with extra-inning, walk-off wins over Washington both Friday and Saturday. Now the Bears must beat the Huskies for a fourth straight time to be in position to advance.

Graduate student Luke Short (5-2, 4.86 ERA) and freshman Trey Newmann (4-5, 5.93 ERA) are likely to be Cal’s starting pitchers in the two pool games. Newmann was sharp in his most recent start, pitching 5 1/3 shutout innings against Washington.

However, the offense has been the bigger factor during the recent 18-4 run. The Bears are hitting .294 with 32 home runs while averaging seven runs per game in that span.

First baseman Peyton Schulze leads the team in batting average (.329) and RBIs (54), but the Bears big guns are center fielder Rodney Green Jr. and catcher Caleb Lomavita. Lomavita
has struggled recently, going 5-for-37 with no homers over the past 14 games, but Green has performed better recently after a slow start to his season. He hit .346 with two homers over the past six games.

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