UCSD run-rules Cal Poly to force winner-take-all Big West Championship game

At the beginning of this year’s baseball season, Head Coach Larry Lee posed a question to his team: “If you could play in a winner-take-all game to get to the regional, would you take that?”

The team said yes.

Now, Cal Poly baseball is living that in real time. Saturday’s 12-2 loss to UC San Diego set up a winner-take-all championship game on Sunday.

The Mustangs won two Big West Tournament games to reach Saturday’s final but couldn’t hold off a UC San Diego team that had already knocked out the tournament’s top seed that same day.

The Tritons eliminated UC Santa Barbara in a win-or-go-home game just hours earlier. That upset over the No. 1 seed foreshadowed what was to come Saturday night.

Lee said the message on the bus before Cal Poly’s championship game was simple: Don’t be relieved that they weren’t facing UC Santa Barbara.

“If any of your mind is thinking that,” he told the team, “then you’re going to get beat bad.”

Despite Cam Hoiland’s RBI that brought in Cal Poly’s Alejandro Garza for the Mustangs’ first run of the game in the first inning, not much else came after that.

The Mustangs’ strategy to switch Hoiland from eighth in the lineup to fifth in place of Casey Murray Jr. seemed convincing after that RBI, but UCSD’s infield kept them contained by fielding grounders cleanly and holding Cal Poly to a string of singles that never materialized into runs.

Cal Poly only scored an additional run in the seventh after a home run over the left field wall by Gavin Spiridonoff.

The Tritons came out in a similar fashion to the early threat they posed to the Gauchos after a five-run first inning in that game.

Against Cal Poly, a four-run second inning proved decisive.

UCSD drove a pair of RBI singles to bring two runs across and take control early. The inning continued with a sacrifice fly that pushed the Tritons’ lead to three before a steal of home capped a four-run frame.

“San Diego played better than us in all facets of the game,” Lee said.

A run in the fifth extended UCSD’s lead, but the Tritons weren’t done.

The seventh inning is where the game slipped fully out of reach. Another four-run frame turned a deficit into a blowout and drained whatever hope Cal Poly had left.

​San Diego didn’t need to manufacture runs because Cal Poly kept doing it for them.

Wild pitches in the seventh from Chris Downs moved UCSD runners over. A balk advanced others, and the Tritons kept finding holes in Cal Poly’s infield by driving runs across every time the ball found grass.

“Good teams capitalize on other teams’ mistakes,” UC San Diego’s Head Coach Eric Newman said. “If you want to be a good offensive team, when teams make mistakes, you’ve got to capitalize on them.”

Three more runs in the eighth brought the run rule into effect, closing the book on Cal Poly’s Saturday and giving the Tritons exactly the kind of blowout win they needed heading into a winner-take-all game.

A familiar script flips on Cal Poly

A year ago, UC Irvine handed the Mustangs their first loss of the 2025 Big West Tournament via run rule. Cal Poly responded, fought back through the bracket and eventually met Irvine again in the championship game.

The Mustangs beat them, forced a winner-take-all Sunday and won the whole thing.

Now, UCSD is running the exact same script.

The Tritons dropped their second game of the tournament to Cal Poly on Thursday and have clawed their way back by beating the Mustangs in Saturday’s championship game to force Sunday’s decider.

Cal Poly is no longer the team with the momentum, but they do have the memory of succeeding here before.

Now they’re the ones who have to answer.

The question is whether the Mustangs can write a different ending, or if UCSD finishes the story Cal Poly started.

“Same thing happened to us last year, we got run-ruled,” Lee said. “We were able to come back ... see if this year (we) can do the same.”

Championship game on the line

Cal Poly and UC San Diego meet one final time Sunday at noon, a winner-take-all championship game between two teams who know each other well after two meetings this tournament.

“Pitching is gonna be stretched for both teams,” Lee said. “So you’re trying to figure out from our end, how to shorten a game, how to play with a lead and get to where you can match the latter third of the game.”

Cal Poly burned through four pitchers in Saturday’s loss. A taxed bullpen is now facing the biggest game of its season, less than 24 hours later.

How much is left in the tank on Sunday could be just as telling as anything that happens in the batter’s box. Cal Poly and UC San Diego meet at 12 p.m. in Irvine. The game will be streamed on ESPN+.

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