All-America Pitchers
Trio of baseball players ranks among the nation’s elite

By Kip Carlson

From left: Buck, Gunderson and Nickerson

It’s not supposed to happen here.

The wet springs. The small population of the state of Oregon. The general lack of national recognition for baseball in the Pacific Northwest.

Those are all reasons that Oregon State isn’t expected to be able to come up with three baseball players who earn preseason All-America honors. But there they were — Dallas Buck, Kevin Gunderson and Jonah Nickerson — ranked among the nation’s elite as the 2006 season began with the Beavers trying to defend their 2005 Pacific-10 championship and return to the College World Series.

It could be the first time that a Northwest school has had a trio of preseason All-Americans, much less all three of them coming from in-state high schools. At least it’s the first time that Bill Harper, ’51, can recollect it in more than 50 years as a professional scout, Oregon State player and coach, and high school coach.

“No way,” said Harper, who played for the Beavers from 1948 to 1950, coached at OSU in the 1960s and has spent the past 30-plus years seeking talent in the region for the Philadelphia Phillies. “I’m not saying there haven’t been some prospects around, but not three of them.”

It’s not unprecedented for Oregon to produce crops of outstanding players who wind up at OSU. In 2003, Oregon State had arguably the best outfield in the Pac-10 in Jacoby Ellsbury, Aaron Mathews and Seth Pietsch, who hailed from the rural precincts of, respectively, Madras, John Day and Wilderville.

But while those three earned all-conference honors and went on to play pro baseball — including Ellsbury being a first-round draft pick by the Boston Red Sox last summer — the current trio of junior pitchers has gone a step beyond that.

And for it to happen, a lot had to go right for OSU.

There was Buck, a four-sport standout at Newberg High who was projected to go high enough in the draft that he might get a monetary offer he couldn’t refuse and sign with a major league team. Gunderson, from Central Catholic High in Portland, had his choices come down to OSU and perennial national power Stanford. And Nickerson, from Oregon City High, felt that if he were drafted coming out of high school that he’d go ahead and sign.

Kevin Gunderson

Yet they all ended up at Oregon State in the fall of 2003.

“So obviously someone was looking out over the program and looking out over those guys to get all three of us to the same school,” Gunderson said this spring.

Gunderson is the closer, the little lefty the Beavers go to at the end of the game to finish off an opponent’s final few hitters; by the middle of his sophomore year, he’d already set the school record for saves. Buck and Nickerson are both right-handed starters with the ability to mow down opponents deep into a game, and both are likely to be in OSU’s all-time top 10s in career wins and strikeouts by the end of this season.

Buck, who had a 12-1 record for the Beavers in 2005, was a first-team All-America selection by several publications last season and was a first-team preseason pick in 2006. Nickerson and Gunderson both earned places last summer on Team USA, the United States’ national amateur team that played an international schedule, and they were preseason second-team picks this spring. Nickerson had earned an All-America second team nod last spring.

In a way, it’s pretty much like they’d planned it all along.

Buck, Gunderson and Nickerson met during their high school careers when they played together during summers on an all-star team.

“We all made a pact — ‘Let’s do something special at Oregon State,’” Gunderson recalled. “A lot of guys tend to leave for the better weather and it kind of costs the program, but we wanted to come to Oregon State and really do something special.”

OSU head coach Pat Casey was familiar with Buck; Casey had attended Newberg High with Buck’s mother, Tina. Casey was able to see Gunderson and Nickerson develop as their high school careers progressed, and the idea of having all three at OSU at the same time intrigued him, to say the least.

“It’s hard to know, because you never know how they’re going to do and how the draft is going to come out,” Casey said. “I thought Dallas might go pretty high in the draft — and he would have if he had chosen to (let major league teams know he’d sign a pro contract rather than attend school). And I thought somebody might take Jonah, so we were concerned about that. I thought Gundy might think about wanting to get out of state with his uncle (former major league pitcher Eric Gunderson) being a professional guy, but I felt pretty good about the other guys wanting to represent the state. Then once we started talking to Gundy on a pretty good basis, I thought he was really comfortable with us and what we were doing here, and I thought he was really going to be a big help to us.”

Dallas Buck

“Once they all showed up at Oregon State their freshman year, we were extremely pleased that they were all here and we thought they were going to be real good.”

Of course, there was still the matter of keeping Buck around once he’d arrived in Corvallis. A standout in not only baseball but also football, basketball and track in high school, Buck wanted to continue his athletic careers in both football and baseball; OSU had proven the best opportunity to combine the sports. Buck let it be known that he’d probably be headed for college to play both, so major league teams decided not to risk a draft pick in the first few rounds on a player who probably wouldn’t sign a contract. Instead of being picked in the top two or three rounds, Buck was taken in the 19th round by the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Still, the rules that govern the major league draft say that any high school player headed for a four-year college can be signed up until he sets foot in his first college class; at that point, he’s off-limits to the pros until after the third year of his college career. With OSU starting school in late September, that gave the Pirates more time to try turning Buck into a late-round steal. On the final weekend before classes started, with Buck already having been part of Oregon State’s football team for over a month, the Pirates made one more try at signing him.

So just what sort of offer did Buck decline to remain a Beaver?

“I turned down a pretty good penny,” he grinned. “If it would have been earlier in the summer, I probably would have thought about it a little harder … football was looking good by then. I felt good about where I was and what I was going to do.”

So the four-sport athlete with the devastating slider, the low-key guy with the big breaking ball and the diminutive closer with deceptive velocity on his pitches were locked into OSU’s pitching staff for the next three seasons. And Oregon State began building toward that 2005 Pacific-10 championship and trip to the College World Series.

“We knew we had that potential,” Nickerson said. “We didn’t know exactly how long it would take, if it was going to be our freshman year or what, but coming in we knew we were going to have a good chance of doing what we wanted to do.”

Jonah Nickerson

The trio got a taste of college competition in 2004, when OSU finished 31-22 overall and tied for sixth in the Pac-10. Then came the magical season of 2005, with Oregon State going 46-12 and all three earning all-conference first team honors.

“Coming into college, you never think you could do that by yourself or with a couple other guys,” Buck said. “But once we got here and once it started to happen, it wasn’t a surprise, necessarily. But you’re not going to predict that.”

No one did, as OSU was picked for sixth in the conference last season and received no mention in any of the preseason national rankings. This time around, the Beavers were picked by conference coaches to win the Pac-10 and were ranked as high as second nationally in the preseason.

“Looking around, we’re the hottest ticket in town coming into this spring,” Gunderson said; indeed, OSU cut off season ticket sales at 1,200 and added extra bleachers to Goss Stadium at Coleman Field. “Everybody wants a ticket to come watch us play, and that’s a tribute to the hard work we put in last year and even the year before. We worked hard and we didn’t reach a regional our freshman year, but last year we reached great heights. Just to be able to be here and to wear an Oregon State uniform and represent your state and where you’re from, your hometown, it’s really something special.”

By now, Gunderson and Nickerson have joined Buck in attracting heavy interest from major league scouts, and it’s likely they’ll all have an opportunity to play professionally.

“I don’t think there’s any question about it,” Harper said. “They have developed into excellent pitching prospects, and hopefully they will have a chance to go to professional baseball and make it a career.”

First, they still have some things they’d like to accomplish at Oregon State. After all, they didn’t come home from Omaha with a victory last season.

“If we stay consistent the whole year and continue to get better, I think we can get back to where we were,” Nickerson said. “Plus, with the experience we had there last year, I think we can go further this year.”

If the three are drafted and sign pro contracts at the end of this season, the All-American boys will have helped boost an Oregon State baseball program with a long, proud tradition to a new level of success.

“That’s what gets a program started,” Buck said. “That’s what brings a program from where this one was to where it is now. Hopefully they can keep it up at the level where we are now.”

The heights to which Buck, Gunderson, Nickerson and the rest of the Beavers have risen in 2005 and 2006 should help attract the sort of players who can keep them there.

“I think it has,” Casey said. “I think our success and our visibility at the College World Series have helped our recruiting. We just had a good run of visiting with guys and our recruiting class coming in is real good. We’re talking to kids we think will be the next group of those guys if we can land them.”

And it’s shown that the top players in the Pacific Northwest don’t need to head for warmer climes to have their day in the sun.

“Absolutely,” Casey said. “We just hope the kids in the state of Oregon recognize the success we’ve had and say, ‘Hey, we can stay home and have that kind of success and play with that kind of visibility.’”

In years to come, Buck, Gunderson and Nickerson want to look to their alma mater and see baseball teams enjoying the same kind of success they had.

“We did something special last year, but we want to do it year-in and year-out,” Gunderson said. “When we’re gone, moving on with our pro careers and the next batch of players is coming in, it doesn’t matter who’s here — we want to put Oregon State on the map year-in and year-out and be up there with those Texases and Floridas and USCs and the teams that make it year-in and year-out.” OSU