Cal Poly stuns Saint Mary’s to win LA Regional

Cal Poly closed out the Los Angeles Regional at UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium with a 5-2 comeback win over Saint Mary’s, capturing its first NCAA regional title in five tries and advancing to the Super Regionals for the first time in program history. Ryan Tay

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — The scoreboard didn’t change the way Cal Poly wanted early on. Saint Mary’s jumped out to a 2-0 lead, and the Mustangs had only three baserunners through the first four innings.

Then everything tightened, inning by inning, until the game finally broke open in the fifth and sixth.

Cal Poly recorded its 23rd come-from-behind victory of the season with a 5-2 triumph over Saint Mary’s on Sunday night inside UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium. winning the Los Angeles Regional championship final. The Mustangs did it the hard way—one late rally at a time—pushing the program to its first NCAA regional title in five tries and a berth in next weekend’s Super Regionals. also a first in program history.

Coach Larry Lee watched the weekend shift from moment to moment, and he made it clear the win wasn’t built on one single hero.

“Great weekend. Hard-fought games. Four really, really good teams,” Lee said. “Our players responded, and it was different guys each game, so it was a total team effort. Josh, Ryan and Gavin supplied a lot of the theatrics to get us over the top and win this regional.”

It started with how the Mustangs answered adversity. After falling behind 2-0. Cal Poly cut into the deficit with a run in the fifth inning when Nate Castellon delivered an RBI single to left field. The Mustangs then erupted for four runs in the sixth—an inning anchored by Ryan Tayman’s power and Gavin Spiridonoff’s timing.

Tayman’s 18th home run of the year—his tie for the school record for home runs in a single season—came with one out in the sixth. sending a 1-1 pitch over the left-field fence to tie the game at 2-2 and extend his hitting streak to 13 games. After Monty Waltz hit 18 homers in 1985, Cal Poly had its own marker of history in the middle of the regional.

Moments later, Spiridonoff widened the gap. After a pitching change, Cam Hoiland and Castellon drew walks, and with two outs Spiridonoff hit a 2-0 pitch over the wall in left field for a three-run shot—his fourth home run of the year—putting Cal Poly ahead 5-2.

On the mound, Josh Volmerding delivered the steadiness Lee and the coaching staff hoped for—and then pushed beyond it. In his first win of the season, Volmerding earned a quality start with six innings, scattering five hits. He allowed two runs. issued one walk. and struck out a season-high seven before turning things over to Corden Pettey and Nick Bonn.

Volmerding went one more inning than Lee and pitching coach Seth Moir were hoping for. Lee and Moir had been aiming for at best five innings from the junior southpaw Sunday against Saint Mary’s. They got six. The 6-4. 210-pound third-year Mustang threw 81 pitches. allowed single runs in the second and third innings. and retired the Gaels in order in both the fourth and sixth.

He danced around trouble early, working a leadoff single in the first inning and a one-out triple in the fifth, then let the innings settle.

“The process has been slow,” Volmerding said of his time off. “Just ramping up those pitches every week, getting back in the swing of things, and tonight it all just clicked. It happened to be at the right time.”

Volmerding threw 45 sliders with 11 swing and misses and landed 75 percent of his strikes. He described the slider as something he was still adjusting into this year.

“That slider’s new this year, and with my knee earlier this year, it was hard to throw,” Volmerding said. “Now that I’m back fully healthy, it’s comfortable to throw, one of my favorite pitches. It started out pretty good. We got some swing and miss on it, so we just stuck with it the whole game.”

His road back to full strength has been built in steps. Volmerding missed six weeks of the 2026 season with a lower body injury. He returned to the mound May 2 by pitching one inning in relief at UC Irvine. progressed to 2 1/3 innings in starts at Cal State Fullerton—three frames versus Long Beach State at home—and four innings in the Big West tournament against UC San Diego in Irvine.

After Volmerding, Pettey and Bonn closed the door. Pettey retired the side in order in the seventh before allowing a walk and a single opening the eighth. Bonn was summoned from the bullpen and retired all five batters he faced for his fifth save in his last five trips to the mound.

Bonn worked through an eighth-inning jam with a fly ball to right field and a 5-4-3 double play, then finished the ninth with two strikeouts—sandwiched around a grounder to shortstop—to close out the game and spark a wild celebration and dogpile near the mound.

The win secured Cal Poly a Super Regional that will begin next weekend, but the details are still out of reach for now. Cal Poly won’t know who it will play or when and where the Super Regional will be held until Monday.

The Mustangs will play the winner of the Morgantown Regional, decided Monday when host West Virginia plays Kentucky in the “extra” game of the double-elimination event. Super Regionals are best-of-three series played Friday through Sunday or Saturday through Monday.

West Virginia. an 11-9 loser to Kentucky on Saturday. scored five times in the ninth inning to turn a 9-6 deficit into an 11-9 win over the Wildcats on Sunday night. forcing another contest Monday at 3 p.m. Top-seeded West Virginia would host the Super Regional with a victory. If Kentucky wins, the NCAA will decide who hosts the Super Regional. Both Cal Poly and Kentucky were seeded third in their regional tournament.

Cal Poly’s path through the regional wasn’t just about the final score. Lee noted how pitching and defense limited Saint Mary’s biggest strength—an offense that entered the tournament with the third-best batting average in the country at .334.

“We really, really good teams,” Lee said, turning back to what mattered on the field. “Our pitching and defense did a tremendous job against their offense,” he added. “Their offense is really, really good. Every at-bat is tough, they put the ball in play and they have the ability to hit for power. What Coach (Seth) Moir did with his pitchers was an A-plus effort.”.

Lee said the Mustangs have learned how to play through emotions without letting it run the game.

“Our players play hard. They play the game the right way. They’re very resilient. They have learned to take the emotion out of it unless the emotion is on our side and to deal in reality. ” Lee said. “However the game gets to a certain score in a particular part of the game. they just go on and continue to compete and play the full game. They do a lot of things that really good teams do. They have those qualities in them.”.

Saint Mary’s had already battled its way to the championship final by beating UCLA earlier Sunday. 6-5. in the first game. The Gaels scored one in the ninth inning on Ian Armstrong’s RBI single to right field to tie the game at 5-5. then won it in the 10th on Makoa Sniffen’s RBI single to left. It was Saint Mary’s second win over the overall national top seed in three days.

Back in the final, Cal Poly’s offense didn’t start fast, but it didn’t stop pressing. Across the two meetings in the regional, Cal Poly limited Saint Mary’s to three runs, 14 hits, and a .219 average, including a 14-1 Mustang romp Saturday.

Even in the final, the Mustangs found their rhythm once the game opened up. Murray singled to left field, moved to second on a groundout, and came home on Castellon’s two-out single, also to left, to cut Saint Mary’s 2-0 lead in half.

Saint Mary’s pitching and fielding had moments, but Cal Poly added runs when it mattered.

Defensively, the day belonged to the kind of plays that flip momentum without announcing it. Castellon supplied two of the team’s top defensive plays Sunday. In the seventh. the sophomore shortstop went into a feet-first slide behind second base to snag a grounder off the bat of Jared Mettam. He bobbled the ball briefly, recovered, spun around, and threw to first base for the first out of the inning.

Then in the ninth, with one out, Ian Josephson sent another grounder to Castellon behind second base. Castellon slid again and made a 360-degree turn before the accurate throw to first base for the penultimate out.

Alejandro Garza added his own two outs. He speared a hot grounder off Nick Allred and threw to first base for the second out of the seventh frame. and he also singled twice to break the school record for most career hits. lifting his total to 253 in three seasons. Jimmy Allen had 252 hits in four years (2011-14).

At the plate, Cal Poly finished with 9 hits and Saint Mary’s had 6. Garza and Murray each had two hits. Center fielder Tanner Griffith led Saint Mary’s with a 3-for-3 performance featuring a single, double, and triple. Right fielder Diego Castellanos extended his hitting streak to 39 games with a single leading off the eighth inning.

Cal Poly also showed it came into this weekend swinging. The Mustangs hit .310 in the regional for the 12th time in its last 13 games. Murray led the way at 7-for-12 (.583) with five RBIs, while Tayman went 6-for-12 (.500) with two home runs and three RBIs. Left fielder Dante Vachini went 5-for-11, and Castellon went 5-for-16.

The Mustang pitching staff compiled a stingy 1.33 ERA with Naess, Volmerding, and Carson Turnquist earning victories, and Bonn notching a pair of saves.

Tayman was named most outstanding player of the four-team tournament and landed on the all-tournament team at the catcher position. Other Mustangs on the all-tournament team included Castellon at shortstop, Vachini in left field, Murray in center field, and Turnquist and Naess on the mound.

For Lee, the regional title carried extra weight beyond the trophy. Cal Poly competed in a Division I regional for the second straight year and fifth time in program history. Lee. now 8-8 in regional play after going 3-0 in the Los Angeles Regional. said the moment felt emotional in a very personal way.

“Yeah, it’s pretty emotional for me,” Lee said. “I had my wife and daughter in the stands. My son was watching back in Minneapolis, and it’s cool.”

“It’s just a lot of hard work over the years, representing San Luis Obispo County, representing Cal Poly,” Lee added. “It’s a pretty great moment, so there’s a lot of emotion that goes into it for me.”

Lee’s son, Brooks—an infielder with the Twins—also had a reminder of how baseball runs through the family. Brooks set the tone earlier Sunday by driving in three runs with two home runs at Pittsburgh.

With the Los Angeles Regional locked in, Cal Poly’s focus now shifts to what comes next. The Mustangs won’t know their next opponent until Monday—when the Morgantown Regional’s “extra” game decides whether West Virginia or Kentucky stands in their way.

For a program making history, the waiting might be the hardest part.

Cal Poly is the first Big West team to advance to a Super Regional since Cal State Fullerton in 2018. The Titans claimed the Stanford Regional title before falling to Washington in three games at Goodwin Field.

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Cal Poly Saint Mary’s Los Angeles Regional NCAA tournament Super Regionals Josh Volmerding Ryan Tayman Gavin Spiridonoff Jackie Robinson Stadium Larry Lee