2020 Pac-12 Conference Baseball Stock Watch

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Five years can tell you a lot about a college baseball program. That’s long enough for a full recruiting class to come and go, and enough time to see how long the effects of a particularly strong group of players last. And if you take any five-year period, you’re likely to be able to clearly see an upward or downward trend.

The same can be said of larger conference-wide trends. Over five years, you can observe the ebb and flow of talent and performance in the conference and get a read on where things are going in the future.

So that’s what we’re going to do during this extended offseason in college baseball. We’ll dig into all 31 conferences, looking back at data from 2015-2019 to paint a picture of where the league has been and where it will go. Next up is the Pac-12.

For all the hand wringing about the Pac-12, and the west coast more generally, being down in college baseball, the league hasn’t had much trouble fielding teams at the top of the sport.

Oregon State was the No. 1 team in the country for almost all of the 2017 season, won a national title in 2018 and hosted a regional in 2019. UCLA spent most of 2019 at No. 1. Stanford has hosted each of the last three years, the first two years as a top-eight seed.

Rather, the issue has been building consistent depth in the conference. Certain programs have made noise nationally in spurts. Arizona made a College World Series final in 2016 and Washington went to Omaha in 2018, but both programs have spent a lot of time around the NCAA Tournament bubble in the last five seasons and each has just two regional appearances in that time.

In fact, Arizona State is the only Pac-12 program other than Oregon State, UCLA or Stanford that has been to more than two regionals in the last five full seasons, and those appearances are sandwiched around consecutive 23-32 seasons that count among the most trying seasons in ASU baseball history.

If the last five years have shown us anything, it’s that you can probably count on some team in the Pac-12 competing for a national title, but there aren’t any teams in the middle tier of the conference that you can reliably count on to get to regionals year after year.

With new coaching regimes in place at Oregon, Southern California and Washington State, and the likes of Arizona and Washington clearly showing high-end potential, to say nothing of Arizona State, perhaps that will change in the coming years.

Five Year Standings
*2020 records not included

Team	Pac-12 Record	Winning Pct.	Overall Record	Winning Pct.
Oregon State	103-44	70.07	219-77	73.99
UCLA	96-53	64.43	190-106	64.19
Stanford	89-60	59.73	188-97	65.96
California	80-68	54.05	157-113	58.15
Washington	77-72	51.68	153-124	55.23
Arizona	73-76	48.99	184-115	61.54
Arizona State	71-78	47.65	155-129	54.58
Southern California	66-82	44.59	139-140-1	49.64
Oregon	64-85	42.95	150-134	52.82
Utah	55-94	36.91	102-160	38.93
Washington State	43-105	29.05	99-166	37.36

Oregon State, on the strength of a dominant 56-6 (27-3) campaign in 2017 and another similarly gaudy record in 2018, tops the standings in Pac-12 play and overall. UCLA and Stanford also have strong showings in this sample, but deeper valleys—like Stanford’s 24-32 season in 2015 and UCLA’s 25-31 record in 2016—prevented them from keeping up with the Beavers. These standings track pretty well with the overall themes previously discussed. The top three teams in the conference are well-defined. Unfortunately for Utah and Washington State, so are the bottom two teams. Everything in the middle is jumbled, with teams for the most part hovering right around the .500 mark. With just five teams sporting above .500 records in conference play over the last five full seasons, you can clearly see the struggle of the Pac-12 middle class to rise above mediocrity with consistency.

Team-by-Team Five-Year Trends

The following are summations of how each Pac-12 program performed over the last five full seasons. The arrow designation of up, down and to the side represent the results of the last five seasons, not a projection of the years to come.

Oregon State—??

The last five years have seen nothing but success for Oregon State. A national title, one season as the most dominant team in the country, a regional host three different times and a regional participant on four occasions is a pretty good stretch. For that matter, the one “down” season, a 33-21 (16-14) campaign in 2016 that saw the Beavers as one of the first teams outside the Field of 64, was still pretty solid. The next five years might be a bit more up in the air for the Beavers, as the program endured an awkward coaching transition from Pat Casey to Pat Bailey on an interim basis to Mitch Canham. There’s plenty of reason to believe that Canham will be a worthy successor to Casey, but it was a strange way to punctuate this run of success and the former Oregon State star still has to prove himself as a college coach.

UCLA—??

It’s harsh to have the arrow point down for UCLA over the last five years, given that it has been to four regionals in five seasons and was the top team in the country for much of the 2019 season, but compare that to the previous five seasons, when the Bruins made three trips to Omaha and won a national title in 2013. When play was halted for 2020, UCLA looked the part of a CWS contender once again, so things are clearly looking up as it stands now, but there was just very little way for this program to live up to what it did from 2010-2014.

Stanford—??

The Cardinal returned to form in a big way in the last three years of this sample after missing regionals altogether in the first two years. Late in the Mark Marquess era, Stanford found it difficult to compete at the very top of the league year after year as it so often had in the past, but in Marquess’ last season and in the first two years of Dave Esquer’s tenure, it did just that, hosting all three times and winning the Pac-12 in 2018. Now, the challenge for Esquer is to build things back up after losing a lot of talent to pro baseball. The 2020 season was just four weeks old, but the Cardinal was really struggling. How deftly it avoids valleys in between the high peaks of success that Stanford is clearly capable of will determine how well the next five years go.

California—????

Quietly, Cal has been the most consistent program in the conference outside of the top three, and consistent really is the key word there. The Bears don’t have peaks like Arizona or Washington have in getting to Omaha, but there are also no valleys to speak of. In this sample, Cal finished under .500 overall just once and its worst Pac-12 record in the five years is just 14-16, nothing to be ashamed of. What keeps this from being an arrow up is that the 2011 CWS appearance is unlike anything the program has accomplished in the last five years. Just two regional appearances in five years keeps this from feeling like a runaway success for Cal, but it wasn’t far off from having at least one more. A couple more wins in either 2016 or 2018 and the Bears could very easily have been playing in June those years as well.

Washington—??

The Huskies came into this five-year window having made one trip to regionals in the previous decade. They made two trips to regionals in the last five full seasons alone, in 2016 and 2018, and in 2018, they made the program’s first trip to the College World Series. Having established a baseline of quality under Lindsay Meggs, the next challenge for Washington is to put itself in position to get to the postseason more consistently. It hasn’t been to back-to-back regionals since going three times in a row between 2002-2004.

Arizona—????

It’s tough to know what to make of the last five seasons for the Wildcats. The highs of 2016 were very high, when they came just one or two hits away from winning a national title. On the other hand, they had more seasons out of postseason play (three) than they had participating in the postseason (two—2016 and 2017), thanks in large part to being on the wrong side of the bubble in 2018 and 2019. It ends up being not all that dissimilar to the previous five years, when Arizona won a national title in 2012 and went to three regionals in five years. The Wildcats showed promise for the 2020 season with a stout offense and a pitching staff led by new pitching coach Nate Yeskie, so there are plenty of reasons for optimism going forward, but like Washington, the challenge is getting a very capable program to the postseason more often.

Arizona State—??

Arizona State has to be as disappointed as any team in the country that the 2020 season was canceled. Brimming with tremendous talent, it had a chance to definitively turn its fortunes around at the end of what had been a roller coaster five-year period for the program that included two losing seasons, only the second and third losing seasons in the history of the program. Even in a shortened draft, ASU will likely lose a good portion of its most impactful players, starting with potential first overall pick Spencer Torkelson. Still, it feels like Tracy Smith has found his footing at Arizona State and is now recruiting at the high level necessary to keep the program among the conference’s best.

Southern California—????

The Trojans began this five-year sample on a high note, getting to a regional in 2015, the team’s first since 2005. But they weren’t able to parlay that into a run of extended success and missed the postseason in each of the next four seasons. A 10-5 mark in the abbreviated 2020 season, the first under coach Jason Gill, with wins over Texas Christian and Vanderbilt, perhaps creates some positive momentum. Even with all of its struggles for what has now been the better part of two decades, to say nothing of the drama that has unfolded in the athletic department and university at large, USC has the latent potential to be an annual regional team once again. It just has to figure out how to unlock that success.

Oregon—??

The 2015 season, the first in this sample, was the last in a streak of four postseason appearances in a row and five in six years. Since then, the Ducks have missed the postseason four years in a row and have finished right around .500 overall. Coach Mark Wasikowski, whose first season at the helm was cut short due to the coronavirus pandemic, was an assistant under George Horton during some of the Ducks’ best seasons since the program was re-started and recently engineered a quick and successful rebuild at Purdue. He’ll look to do the same at Oregon in 2021 and beyond.

Utah—??

Utah has the biggest outlier season of any program in the conference—a 26-29 campaign in 2016 that also happened to end with the Utes winning the Pac-12 regular season title, earning them a trip to regionals as the league’s automatic qualifier. That alone is enough to have the arrow pointing up for Utah over the last five years, even if three of the five seasons have ended with the team winning fewer than 10 conference games. Competing with the best teams in the league each year will likely always be a challenge for Utah, but the 2016 season proved that it can pull it off when the stars align.

Washington State—??

The last five years haven’t been kind to Washington State. It hasn’t won more than 11 conference games in any season, and in 2019, it bottomed out by going 3-26-1 in league play. Brian Green, who previously built New Mexico State into a regional team and recruited Nick Gonzales, had the Cougars sitting at 9-7 when the 2020 season was canceled. That might not seem like much, but it’s already clear progress toward the goal of making WSU much more competitive.

Regional and College World Series Appearances by Year

Year	Regional Teams	CWS Teams
2015	6	0
2016	4	1
2017	4	1
2018	4	2
2019	5	0

It’s an interesting statistical quirk that in the two seasons in which the Pac-12 put the most teams into the postseason, it came up empty when it comes to having teams in Omaha. Oregon State does heavy lifting for the league when it comes to CWS appearances, as it has two of the four total trips. Arizona and Washington make up the other two, and those examples are why it’s important for the conference to put more teams into the postseason. Both of those teams caught lightning in a bottle and won regionals and super regionals on the road, but you can’t catch lightning in a bottle if you don’t put teams in that position. The lack of CWS teams in this sample is also due to little more than breaks not going the league’s way. Both Stanford and UCLA have been good enough to get to Omaha in recent seasons, but just couldn’t break through. If each of them had gone once, for example, this data table starts to paint a very different picture. No Pac-12 team has been to regionals in each of the last five full seasons, and Washington State is the only team in the conference not to get to the postseason during that time.

Top Draft Selections

Player	Year	Pick
Adley Rutschman, C, Oregon State	2019	1st overall
Andrew Vaughn, 1B, California	2019	3rd overall
Nick Madrigal, 2B, Oregon State	2018	4th overall
Cal Quantrill, RHP, Stanford	2016	8th overall
Hunter Bishop, OF, Arizona State	2019	10th overall

The Pac-12 has had no trouble producing high draft picks in recent years, particularly in 2019, when three of the top 10 picks in the entire draft came from schools in the conference. It also produced a first-round pick in each of the five years in this sample. In the 2017 draft, Oregon pitcher David Peterson, taken 20th overall, was the highest-drafted Pac-12 player. In 2015, UCLA pitcher James Kaprielian went 16th overall, three spots before Arizona shortstop Kevin Newman. In the 2020 draft, the conference also expects to do quite well. ASU’s Spencer Torkelson projects as the potential first overall pick and the likes of UCLA’s Garrett Mitchell and Arizona’s Austin Wells could hear their names called in the first round as well. For some of the shortcomings the conference might have had in terms of team results at times, it continues to be among the best at producing high-end professional talent.

Coaching Changes

Year	Team	Out	In
2019	Oregon	George Horton	Mark Wasikowski
2019	Oregon State	Pat Bailey (interim)	Mitch Canham
2019	Southern California	Dan Hubbs	Jason Gill
2019	Washington State	Marty Lees	Brian Green
2018	Oregon State	Pat Casey	Pat Bailey (interim)
2017	Stanford	Mark Marquess	Dave Esquer
2017	California	Dave Esquer	Mike Neu
2015	Arizona	Andy Lopez	Jay Johnson
2015	Washington State	Donnie Marbut	Marty Lees

Last offseason was a particularly busy one in terms of coaching turnover in the league, with four changes made, thanks to three programs that had been on a downward trajectory, Oregon, USC and Washington State, all making changes in the same offseason. Three different times, in 2015, 2017 and 2019, the Pac-12 had at least two programs change coaches, and the offseason after 2016 is the only time no changes were made. Two schools, Oregon State and Washington State, made two coaching changes during this five-year period, although the Beavers’ situation, with a one-year interim term for Pat Bailey following Pat Casey’s retirement, is unique. The conference also saw some serious turnover among its coaching veterans. Horton had led Oregon since the program’s reinstatement in 2009. Marquess was the second-longest tenured head coach in the country when he retired in 2017 with more than 1,600 wins. Lopez spent 14 years in Tucson and led Arizona to a national title. Casey is the architect of Oregon State’s rise as a premier program and a three-time national champion. How well their replacements fare will go a long way to determining the conference’s near future.