In the end, the Oregon State baseball 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 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 (see below).

Below is a primer for this week’s series, which opens Thursday at 6:05 p.m. at Hi Corbett Field:

(Weekly trivia: The Beavers’ potent offense has produced 458 runs this season, which ranks 12th in the nation and sixth all-time in program history. The Beavers are on pace to break the single-season record for runs scored. Can you name the OSU team that owns the record?)

THE WEEK THAT WAS

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 POLLS

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, which The Oregonian/OregonLive uses for its rankings.

A LOOK ARIZONA

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).

Shortstop Mason White (.317, 17 homers, 60 RBIs), center fielder Brendan Summerhill (.327, 16 doubles, 51 RBIs) and second baseman Garen Caulfield (.317, 18 doubles, 38 RBIs) bring pop and production to the lineup. But it’s the pitching staff, anchored by a dominant trio of starters, that 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) and fewest walks allowed per nine innings (2.41).

The weekend rotation of Jackson Kent, Clark Candiotti and Cam Walty has been both consistent and dominant, combining for 18 quality starts and a record of 17-5. They rank seventh in the nation among weekend rotations in combined ERA (3.31) and all three hurlers rank among the top five in the Pac-12 in ERA.