In the West Coast League of baseball, there are the Corvallis Knights and then there is everybody else.
The Knights won their seventh consecutive WCL title and 10th overall on Monday night with a 5-0 victory over the Victoria HarbourCats.
The championship game was scheduled to begin at 6:35 p.m. but that was pushed back to 8 p.m. due to the 39 C high on Monday in Corvallis.
The Knights, named for the wife of Nike co-founder Phil Knight and primary sponsor Penny Knight, didn’t seem to mind the delay and blanked Victoria handily despite leaving the bases loaded to end the bottom of the fourth inning.
It was a reprise of the 2017 and 2019 league finals between Corvallis and Victoria, which were best-of-three series, both won 2-1 by the Knights.
The 2023 single-game WCL championship final was played at Goss Stadium in Corvallis, Oregan, an historic and compact brick-lined jewel of a ballpark, which also hosts the Oregon State Beavers of the NCAA Pac-12.
The Knights’ dynasty has produced nine alumni currently playing in the MLB, including Adley Rutschman of the Baltimore Orioles.
The HarbourCats had dispatched the Wenatchee AppleSox and Bellingham Bells in going 3-0 through the North Division playoffs. The Knights went 3-1 through the Cowlitz Black Bears and Portland Pickles in the South Division playoffs.
Corvallis (39-15) and Victoria (38-15) finished 1-2 overall in the regular-season standings and could have finished tied if a rained out HarbourCats game in Kamloops against the NorthPaws had been played and not cancelled outright. That left Victoria with one less game played in the regular season than Corvallis and that may have proved the difference in the overall race. If the clubs had tied atop the table, a coin flip would have been held regarding the venue for the league final and it might well have been played at Wilson’s Group Stadium at Royal Athletic Park, where Victoria was 27-2, instead of at Goss Stadium.
Corvallis gave the ball to pitcher Merit Jones, a touted sophomore from the University of Utah, to start the championship game. Victoria went with lefty Davis Franklin, who made his second start of the playoffs after holding Wenatchee to five scoreless innings in the first round, following a regular-season record of 2-1 mostly as a reliever with a 1.44 ERA in 13 appearances. Both put in strong efforts as Franklin gave up only two hits and an unearned run in going four full innings for Victoria and Jones just three hits in 5.2 scoreless innings for Corvallis.
Dallas Macias, returning to Corvallis where he plays in the NCAA for Oregon State, led the HarbourCats offensively with two hits, including a triple.
The WCL is a summer-collegiate league featuring NCAA players extending their playing seasons after their university seasons conclude in the spring.
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