The kid, it seems, is back.
And the 10th-ranked Oregon State baseball team, it seems, has yet another reliable weapon in its record-setting lineup heading into the postseason.
Freshman Gavin Turley continued his late-season resurgence with another two-home run performance and the Beavers steamrolled the Western Carolina Catamounts 23-5 Friday night at Goss Stadium in Corvallis.
On a night the Beavers emphatically added to their single-season home run record — and nearly set a single-game record — Turley stole the show, belting two homers and driving in five runs in another encouraging illustration that he has found a little May mojo.
The dynamic rookie outfielder, who dropped jaws earlier in the season before settling into an extending slump, has been a force in recent games and practically unstoppable this series.
In two games against the Catamounts, Turley has gone 5 for 8 with four home runs, 12 RBIs, five runs scored and four walks. He followed a two-homer, seven-RBI performance in Thursday’s opener with another prodigious display of power Friday, belting a monster two-run shot 428-feet off the batter’s eye in center field in the sixth and adding a three-run line drive homer to left in the eighth.
“Gavin hammered a handful of balls the last couple of days,” OSU coach Mitch Canham said.
They’ve been the exclamation points of a May surge that has seen Turley bat .360 with five homers, one double, 15 RBIs and nine runs scored over seven games. From Canham’s view, he saw positive signs out of Turley last week, when he hit a home run and a double in a blowout win over the UCLA Bruins, and the good vibes have only continued since.
“He just had good swings …” Canham said of Turley’s at-bats at UCLA. “And he wasn’t letting one at-bat or one swing carry to the next one. He was making quick adjustments. When he draws a walk or when he’s really getting his swing off in the right counts and with the right stuff, you feel really good about that because he can do a lot of damage.”
Turley did plenty of damage early in the year, smashing home runs in his first college at-bat and first Goss Stadium at-bat, to reinforce the widely held belief he was a budding star. After a win over Cal Poly on March 3, he was batting .424 with four home runs and 12 RBIs, and seemed well on his way to a monster freshman season. But then he went into an extended slump, which featured too many strikeouts and too little production, and lost his starting job.
During one tough stretch, Turley went 0 for 17 with 13 strikeouts.
He says his struggles reached a breaking point during the Beavers’ visit to Stanford, when he went 0 for 3 with three strikeouts in the opener.
“I felt pretty lost, just in my head,” Turley said. “But then, slowly, I saw a glimpse of success and where I needed to go back to.”
Behind the scenes, he remained positive and continued to work, even as he struggled to adjust to college pitching, scouting reports and the pressure of expectations. He celebrated walk-off wins by dumping Gatorade buckets on teammates, he crafted rally hats in the dugout and he busted out the Beavers’ fox hat during batting practice. Every now and then, even if he didn’t play, he walked past reporters after games and playfully asked with a smile: “You guys need me.”
Along the way, a realization hit him. He needed to simplify things. The weight of scouting reports and data and pitch tendencies grew too large. Instead of overwhelming himself with information, he needed to free himself and clear his head with basics. See the ball. Focus on the ball. Hit the ball.
“Some guys can handle a lot of information,” Turley said. “Me, it’s like, ‘Hey just generic righty? Generic lefty with run? What do we got?’ I’ll make my own adjustments. See the ball out of his hand, read the game, not look too deep into it. Because, I mean, you might have a guy throwing all fastballs, but on a report it says it’s all sliders.”
The turning point , Turley said, came at Arizona State during the last week of April. He played in all three games and went just 1 for 7 with two walks. But something felt different.
“I started putting some better at-bats together, fouled some pretty good pitches off,” he said. “I was like, “All right, it’s going to start coming back.”
Turley went 1 for 3 with two RBIs in his next outing against Utah and has looked more like himself ever since. His batting average has jumped from a season-low .238 to .254 this series.
“Sometimes guys can go through a struggle and that’s it, (they) stay there,” Canham said. “But I don’t think he allowed that to become a thing. He just kept working, kept talking to guys, worked on staying positive.”
After a terrible March, the Beavers’ offense long ago came alive. But an A-plus Gavin Turley changes the entire dynamic of the lineup, adding another fearsome, run-producing threat that can change the scoreboard with one swing of the bat.
There were many such swings by OSU Friday night — six to be exact — as the Beavers fell one homer shy of the school’s single-game record. Kyle Dernedde hit his first career grand slam, Mikey Kane and Brady Kasper hit two-run homers and Jacob Krieg added a three-run blast as the Beavers’ boosted their school-record season total to 77.
The Beavers batted around in the fifth, sixth and eighth innings and 10 different players recorded a hit, including eight with multi-hit efforts.
It was the third time in four games the Beavers scored 20 or more runs and the 11th time in 18 games they reached double-figures, a run that has seen them average 10.6 runs per game.
“I love how the offense is flowing right now,” Canham said.
Especially the offense of the kid, who has rediscovered his mojo at an opportune time.
“You go through failure, you go through highs, lows, and you learn from it,” Turley said. “You never get too low on yourself and know (the good) will always come back. It’s baseball.”
— Joe Freeman reported from Corvallis
jfreeman@oregonian.com | 503-294-5183 | @BlazerFreeman | Subscribe to The Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
