OMAHA, Neb. - Oregon State's baseball team has won 109 of 127 games it has played over two seasons with mostly the same cast. Yet the Beavers see winning a national championship as the only way to validate their body of work.
"Ultimately," Beavers coach Pat Casey said Sunday, "nobody cares how many games you win unless you win the last one."
Standing between Oregon State (53-11-1) and that goal is Arkansas (47-19) in the best-of-three College World Series finals. ESPN will televise Monday night's opener starting at 7 EDT.
The Beavers lost their CWS opener on June 16, then staved off elimination four times - including a 5-2 win against Mississippi State on Saturday - to reach the finals for the first time since 2007, when they won the second of two straight championships.
The Razorbacks swept through their bracket in three games, knocking off 2017 champion and No. 1 overall seed Florida on Friday to make the finals for the first time in the best-of-three era. Arkansas was runner-up in 1979.
Oregon State showed up in Omaha last year as the No. 1 seed and with a 54-4 record, the highest winning percentage (.931) of any team entering the CWS since Texas came in 57-4 (.934) in 1982. The Beavers won their first two games, then lost two straight to LSU in a shocking ending to the season.
The Beavers have been on a redemption tour in 2018 with an everyday lineup that includes all but one player from last year and a pitching staff that returned two weekend starters.
Arkansas coach Dave Van Horn is in awe of what the Pac-12's Beavers have accomplished.
"To win that many ballgames, it's almost amazing to me, because I know how hard it is to win," he said. "We talk about it all the time. How are they doing it? It's not like they're in Houston, where they can just run down the street and grab players. They're going all over the place and they're doing it with kids from their region."
The Razorbacks, previously in Omaha in 2015, have been ascending since going 26-29 and failing to make the NCAA tournament in 2016. They lost in a regional final last year, but now they're trying to become the fifth Southeastern Conference program to win the national championship since 2009.