• Box Score
  

The Beavers and Wildcats (20-22, 5-8) continue their series Saturday at 1 p.m. and conclude it Sunday at 1 p.m. Both games can be heard on KLOO-AM (1340).

OSU's Joe Gerber set a school record for total bases in a career when his a first-inning single to center gave him 304, that broke the record of 303 set by Ken Bowen from 1984-87. The biggest hit of the day, though, came later.

Barden's towering drive to left-centerfield highlighted a five-run seventh inning against Arizona ace Ben Diggins, a third team preseason All-America pick, that gave Oregon State a 6-3 lead. The Beavers had guarded a 1-0 lead from the first inning until the top of the sixth, when they gave up three unearned runs to trail 3-1.

"Thad kept us in the game," OSU head coach Pat Casey said of the junior righthander, who has not given up an earned run in his last 15 innings of work. "He threw well inning after inning and didn't let what we were doing on offense distract him. Fortunately, our guys stuck with it, pushed and pushed, and finally something good happened."

With one out in the seventh, the Beavers loaded the bases on a single by Drew Hedges, a walk to Bryan Ingram and a single by Gerber. That brought up freshman third baseman Barden, who had struck out his last time up.

"The at-bat before, I'd missed two curveballs and taken a bad swing at a fastball," Barden said. "The next at-bat, I was thinking I'd get his best stuff, which was his fastball."

With a one-ball, two-strike count, Barden fouled off a pair of Diggins' fastballs.

"Then he threw a curve," Barden said. "That was the pitch I was looking for, and he came with it."

After Barden's grand slam put OSU up 5-3, the Beavers added another run as Andy Jarvis walked and eventually scored on a two-out single by Will Hudson. That was the most support OSU had given Johnson in a while, last week, he had pitched a three-hitter at fourth-ranked Arizona State only to lose 1-0.

"After that (grand slam), Thad seemed to go after batters and be more aggressive," Barden said of Johnson, who didn't walk a hitter and struck out six. "He's real low key, though, so it's hard to tell. But after that, everybody was more into the game."

The Beavers had appeared to be letting another of Johnson's strong outings go for naught before the grand slam. OSU wound up leaving 10 men on base and had two runners thrown out on the basepaths to kill what could have been a big inning in the bottom of the fifth.

Friday, though, OSU overcame both those missed opportunities and the two errors that helped Arizona to three runs and the lead just a half-inning later.

"Outside of one inning, we really played good defense," Casey said. "Nothing is truer in baseball than the saying that if you can pitch and play defense, you can win games. With Thad throwing well and us playing defense, it kept us around ... I thought that it was good for us, when things weren't going our way, to stay confident in what we were doing and it paid off."

After Arizona got its three runs in the top of the sixth, Johnson retired 10 of the last 11 batters he faced.

"Thad is pitching with confidence," Casey said. "He's not getting distracted by what we're not doing on offense or defensively at times. He's just focusing on one hitter at a time."

Gerber finished the day 3-for-4, while Hedges was 2-for-4 with a double. For Arizona, Keoni DeRenne was 2-for-3 and Ernie Durazo was 2-for-4 with a triple.

                   OREGON STATE 6, ARIZONA 3 


                   Arizona         000 003 000 - 3  7 1
                   Oregon State    100 000 50x - 6 10 2