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The Penn State baseball team will play either Oregon or Nebraska in the semifinals of the Big Ten Tournament Saturday at 6 p.m.
Oregon plays Nebraska Saturday morning at 10. If Penn State wins, it will play Sunday at 3 p.m. against the winner of Saturday's UCLA-Iowa game in the finals.
All games will air live on the Big Ten Network.
The Nittany Lions, led by coach Mike Gambino, are 33-22 this season after winning Pool D with victories over Washington and USC. Penn State came in as the No. 9 seed and defeated two teams seeded higher than them (Huskies No. 5 and Trojans No. 4). The 33 Penn State wins are the second-most in program history. The 2000 team won 45 games.
Penn State has now reached back-to-back semifinals (2024) for the first time since 2000-2001.
In the 5-3 win over Washington on Thursday, pitcher Ryan DeSanto worked 5 two-thirds scoreless innings, plus got a big two-run sacrifice fly from Bryce Molinaro that scored both Joe Jaconski and Paxton Kling from second who kept running after the flyout was caught against the center field wall.
In Friday's 2-1 win over USC, a home run from Nate Voss in the top of the ninth inning was the game-winning shot. Five Penn State pitchers shut down the Trojans' offense.
Any opponent will have to control Kling, Molinaro, Ryan Weingartner, Jesse Jaconski and Jack Porter, who lead the team in home runs with 13, 13, 11, 11 and 10, respectively. Kling is a first-team Big Ten All-Star while Porter was a second-team member.
Last season, Penn State beat Michigan, 7-6, in the semifinals and then lost a heart-breaker to Nebraska, 2-1, in the championship game. The Lions finished 29-24. That was all in Gambino's first year.
This season, the Nittany Lions reached 30 wins for the first time since 2011 and won road series at Northwestern, Minnesota and Rutgers, the first time that has been done since the 2012 season. Penn State won eight Big Ten road games, the most since 2007.
Through 55 games, Penn State, which has slugged 79 home runs this season, has picked up big non-league victories against Missouri, West Virginia and Xavier, all ranked higher than Penn State at the time of those wins.