In the end, the Oregon State baseball team needs a sweep.

After three months, 51 games, 109 home runs, numerous Travis Bazzana records and too many highlights to count, the Beavers’ quest for a Pac-12 regular-season championship will come down to a three-game series at the Arizona Wildcats.

And the stakes are clear: Sweep the Wildcats at Hi Corbett Field, win the conference title and earn the No. 1 seed in the Pac-12 baseball tournament.

“We control our own destiny and that’s how we like it,” junior right-hander Aiden May said last week. “It’s very easy. We win and we’re in a really good spot. We don’t, then we’re not. And so that’s kind of a good little bit of pressure. But we like pressure. I think we thrive under it.”

The sixth-ranked Beavers have certainly been thriving lately, as the pressure of the stretch run has intensified. OSU enters the Arizona series having won five in a row and nine of its last 12, riding May’s brilliant pitching and the lineup’s prolific production.

The series opens Thursday at 6:05 p.m. in Tucson.

The Beavers continued their May surge with four victories last week, thumping their way to a midweek win over the Gonzaga Bulldogs on the road and a series sweep over the UCLA Bruins at Goss Stadium. Since suffering a surprising sweep at Cal late last month, Oregon State has won seven of nine Pac-12 games and three conference series.

The Beavers (39-12, 17-9 Pac-12) climbed in all five major college baseball polls after their dominant weekend sweep and enter the final week of the regular season as a consensus top eight team. Oregon State moved to No. 6 in the D1Baseball Top 25.

The 14th-ranked Wildcats, picked by Pac-12 coaches in the preseason to finish ninth, have been the biggest surprise in the conference this season — and one of the biggest surprises in all of college baseball.

After stumbling to a slow start — Arizona dropped several early-season nonconference games against nationally ranked opponents and opened Pac-12 play with a disappointing 2-6 record — the Wildcats (32-18, 19-8) have been dominant. They’ve won five of their last six Pac-12 series, which includes four sweeps and a clutch victory at Utah last weekend in a series featuring the top two teams in the conference (the Utes fell into a tie for third after losing twice).

Arizona’s pitching staff, anchored by a dominant trio of starters, has lifted the Wildcats to the precipice of a Pac-12 title. The pitching staff boasts a team ERA of 4.14, which ranks 11th in the nation, and the Wildcats enter the final week of the regular season leading the nation in strikeout-to-walk ratio (3.69).

On paper, the series will be a classic matchup between one of the best lineups in the nation (Oregon State) and one of the stingiest staffs in the nation (Arizona).

— The Oregonian