Barney, Beavers bask in Series spotlight

Southridge grad Darwin Barney and OSU revel in their second Series trip

By Miles Vance

The Beaverton Valley Times, Jun 22, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

ARMED AND READY — Southridge High graduate Darwin Barney, now the starting shortstop on the Oregon State baseball team, and the Beavers battled their way into the semifinals of the College Baseball World Series in Omaha, Neb.

Chris Machian / For the Times

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OMAHA, Neb. – For a while anyway, Omaha’s Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium probably felt like Death Valley for Darwin Barney and the rest of the Oregon State University baseball team.

Barney, a Southridge High School graduate who’s now the starting shortstop for the Pac-10 champion Beavers (46-15), and his OSU teammates suffered through an 0-2 appearance in the 2005 College Baseball World Series, then opened the 2006 Series with an 11-1 loss to the University of Miami.

But now, just five days after that opening-round loss to the Hurricanes, things are feeling much different – and much better – for Barney and the Beavers.

After struggling through that painful defeat against Miami on Saturday, Barney and OSU came back with their school’s first-ever CWS win on Monday, beating 12th-ranked Georgia 5-3 in the loser’s bracket of the eight-team, double-elimination tournament.

“That really took a chip off our shoulders and gave us confidence” going into the next game, Barney said. “It was a huge (weight) off our shoulders.”

Then, to make things even better, the Beavers got even with Miami in a second straight loser-out game, beating the Hurricanes 8-1 on Tuesday

night behind the lights-out pitching performance of Lake Oswego graduate Mike Stutes.

“I’m very proud of our ball club,” OSU coach Pat Casey said on the NCAA website. “We said we were better than we played on opening day and we had to prove it.”

“After we got that first win, we were very confident,” Barney said.

Through it all, the good and the not so good, Barney has remained confident in himself and in his OSU team.

“After the first win we got, I knew we’d have a lot of confidence,” he said. “We knew that first game (against Miami) was a fluke. We knew we were better than that.”

Barney, in his second starting season at shortstop for the two-time Pac-10 champion Beavers, has made a career out of being better than everyone else.

In addition to his honors at OSU – where he won Pac-10 Freshman of the Year honors in 2005 and first-team All Pac-10 in both 2005 and 2006 – Barney proved himself pretty special as a high schooler at Southridge, too.

There, he helped the Skyhawks win their first Metro League title and keyed Southridge’s run to the 2002 Class 4A state title (posting an 8-6 decision in eight innings over Newberg and current OSU teammate Dallas Buck).

He also was named to the Class 4A All-State first team following his senior season.

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