Reliving the Omaha Dream: OSU 7, UC Irvine 1

by Jake Bertalotto on Jun 22, 2008 1:24 PM PDT in Baseball Comment 0 comments

The Beavers ended UC Irvine's marathon run through Omaha on June 20, 2007 with a 7-1 victory over the Anteaters. The game drew the second largest crowd in College World Series History, with 29,921 people on hand at Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha.

The 'Eaters started their week off with a tough 5-4 loss to Arizona State. They bounced back by beating Cal State Fullerton in 13 innings two days later, the longest game of College World Series History. The game lasted five hours and forty minutes.

From there, the 'Eaters rallied once again in extra innings to beat Arizona State 5-4 on a single by Ollie Linton in the tenth inning, eliminating Arizona State from the College World Series.

The win over Arizona State matched the 'Eaters up with the Beavers, a match-up of West Coast heavyweights for the bracket championship. To advance to the championship series, UC Irvine would have had to beat the Beavers twice in a row. However, the Anteaters pitching staff was depleted after three games in four days, two of those going extra innings.

Read the rest after the break.

The Anteaters used four pitchers in the game, with starter Christian Bergman only going four innings.

For the Beavers, Daniel Turpen went eight beautiful innings, only allowing one run and one hit. He struck out five, and gave way to JoePa in the ninth to finish off the Anteaters.

Oregon State scored four runs in the bottom of the third, shutting the door on a tired UC Irvine team fairly quickly. Mitch Canham's two-run homer in the third inning was his tenth of the year, but his first home run in 24 games. Canham was 3-for-5 on the night with 3 RBI's, a run scored, and of course, the home run.

Also: Darwin Barney was 3-for-5 with 2 RBI's and a run scored, Joey Wong was 2-for-4 with 2 runs scored, and Mike Lissman was 1-for-3 with 2 runs scored.

With the win, Oregon State advanced to the Championship Series for the second consecutive year, the first team to do it since Texas in 2003 and 2004. Also, at the completion of the game, the Beavers had not trailed in 52 innings. They would fall behind to North Carolina in Game 1 of the Championship Series, but not for long. We'll get to those games soon, I promise.

For now, enjoy some of my pictures from the game:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.