UCLA Baseball: Pac-12 Tournament Preview

This year marks the second annual Pac-12 Baseball Tournament. The games will be played at  Scottsdale Stadium in Arizona on May 23-27.

This year’s tournament will be different from the 2022 tournament as the 2023 Pac-12 Baseball Tournament goes from eight teams to nine teams as well as switches to pool play. Pool play will happen for three straight days on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with three games being played per day. Each pool will have each team play the other two teams in round-robin play.

There are three pools of three teams each in this tournament. In Pool A there are seeds No. 1 Stanford, No. 6 Oregon, and No. 9 Cal with Pool B having seeds No. 2 Oregon State No. 5 Arizona State, and No. 8 Arizona. Finally, In Pool C play Seeds No. 3 Washington, No. 4 USC, and No. 7 UCLA.

The winner of each pool will move forward to the single-elimination semifinals that will take place on Friday as well as one Wild Card team.  The determining factor for the Wild Card spot will be the best record of the non-advancing teams. The higher-sided teams will have an advantage in this tournament as any tiebreaker will be given to the highest-seeded team.

In the semifinal contests, the highest-seeded team will face off against the lowest-seeded team, for example, the No. 1 seed Stanford would play No. 7 seed UCLA on one side of the bracket with the second-highest seed let’s just say No. 2 seed Oregon State and second-lowest seed No. 5 seed Arizona State on the other side of the semifinals bracket. The only outliner or other possibility to a different semifinal match-up would be if teams that were in the same pool will not play each other in the semifinals of the tournament. With all that being said, let’s take a look at UCLA and how they may fare in this year’s Pac-12 tournament.

Conference Records: USC 17-13 and UCLA 12-16-1

Head-to-Head Records: UCS 2-2 and UCLA 2-2

Series History This Season: UCLA defeated USC back on March 5th by a final score of 5-3 and then the Bruins defeated the Trojans again on April 21st, 9-3. However, USC has won the last two games beating UCLA 5-1 and 6-5.

Prediction: UCLA 5 USC 4

Conference Records: Washington 17-12 and UCLA 12-16-1

Head-to-Head Records: Washington 2-1 and UCLA 1-2

Series History This Season: UCLA defeated Washington in the first game of a three-game series on March 24th by a final score of 5-1 and but then the Huskies defeated the Bruins by final scores of 3-0 and 11-10 thus winning the last two games of the series.

Prediction: Washington 8 UCLA 5

If UCLA defeats USC and loses to Washington, the Bruins can still advance to the semifinals as the Wild Card team. It has been a roller-coaster season for UCLA baseball but they still have an opportunity to make a run in the PAC-12 tournament. The Bruins have defeated both Washington and USC this season and even in their losses to both teams, two of those defeats have been one-score games. Time will tell how the UCLA baseball team season will end but there is still hope of the Bruins getting a bid to the NCAA Tournament.