Oregon State baseball's Jacob Krieg (22) watches a fly ball against Washington at Hillsboro Ballpark on March 25, 2025. Krieg's revamped swing has helped keep the Beavers lineup turning over in the postseason. CMG photo: John Lariviere

Oregon State baseball first baseman Jacob Krieg has been lost in the shuffle of the Beavers’ charge through the losers bracket of the Corvallis Regional and subsequent Super Regional win.

Oregon State’s unprecedented 5-0 mark in elimination games this postseason has seen red-hot third baseman Trent Caraway, outfield staple Gavin Turley and the up-the-middle defensive wizardry of second baseman AJ Singer and Aiva Arquette bask in the spotlight of it all. That’s not even mentioning the lights-out pitching the Beavers have counted on to lead the charge.

And Krieg is a hard guy to miss.

Quantifying “raw power”

The 6-foot-5, 240-pound first baseman has the size to pass for a big leaguer, a NFL tight end or even NBA small forward with plausibility to spare. Krieg’s hoop dreams or thoughts of running the seams and catching touchdowns may be out of reach at this point, but his future as a professional baseball player is alive and well, checking into Baseball America’s top 500 MLB Draft prospects as the No. 346 player in the class. BA’s evaluation of Krieg would put him in the range of a 12th-round selection in the 20-round draft, should the junior elect to go pro.

Kreig’s knack for the long ball (23 career home runs in 100 starts as a Beaver) stems from his elite ability to punish baseballs.

The junior owns Oregon State’s program record for recorded exit velocity, hitting a home run out of Goss Stadium at 118 mph during the 2024 season. According to a study by Baseball America’s Carlos Collazo, Krieg is one of just 15 “power hitters” at the Division I level to post a 90th-percentile exit velocity north of 110 mph (The 90th-percentile range is standard use in the scouting community for evaluating raw power. Why not the 99th-percentile? It can have large outliers or flukey measures, 90th supplies a larger sample size and gives an accurate reflection of the player’s legitimate power).

Of the 15, Krieg ranks fourth, owning an absurd 110.7 mph mark. Metal bats vs. wood bats aside, those are big-league metrics. Kreig’s problem, however, is a 69.4% contact rate, with Collazo’s 122-player study producing a 78.1% average. His 21.8% chase rate (how often he swings at pitches out of the strike zone) is the third-lowest amongst the power hitters. The data suggests Kreig’s swing-and-miss bugaboo isn’t so much a pitch-recognition issue as it is a timing one.

The solution? Overhaul the swing.

New swing, who dis?

Beavers head coach Mitch Canham first pointed out the change to Krieg’s swing following an elimination game home run against USC on June 2, bashing a three-run tank in the ninth inning to seal a 9-0 win over the Trojans. Prior to the at-bat, Krieg was in the midst of an 8-for-53 streak with 28 strikeouts dating back to April 21 against Gonzaga.

Prior to Krieg’s tank, the Beavers took an offensive timeout.

“(Hitting coach Ryan Gipson said to Krieg) ‘I want you to sit on a breaking ball and I want you to hit it as hard as you can,’ and he did just that” Canham said. “(Krieg) is going through a bit of a swing change lately, trying to widen out and keep it simple. He’s so big and strong that he doesn’t have to do a whole lot. And he’s still growing into his skill set, he’s going to be electric — he already is, but even more so.”

The changes are very obvious when looking at both, with his adjustments coming from the hips down. While the bat and his hands remain in the same place, Krieg looks a little lower in his set now and has gotten rid of his leg kick, opting for a strideless approach a la St. Louis Cardinals masher Albert Pujols. Simplifying Krieg’s stride can correct a number of things, with the main pieces being the reduced motion helping simplify his timing as well as keeping his head still to maintain an even path of vision as a pitch approaches.

A man of few words with cameras and recorders in his face, Krieg gave his insight into the adjustment following his game-tying single in the ninth inning against Florida State on June 6 in the Corvallis Super Regional.

“Its definitely new for me,” Krieg said. “I’ve never done a no-stride swing. But (I’ve) been working on it everyday with Coach Gipson and it feels pretty good right now.”

Turley gave some of his own insight into his teammate’s adjustment, going to show how humbly Krieg talked about it and how important he’s been to the Beavers’ postseason push.

“Krieg sent us to Omaha with that one swing on Friday,” Turley said. “It’s tough (to do). Because once you’re in that batters box, you can’t be thinking about your swing. If a change is working, you really don’t know for a couple at-bats — 10, 20 at-bats — if what you’re feeling (is working). So it’s really, really tough thing to go through and the fact that he’s coming out on top right now is huge for us.”

Paying off

The effects of the change appear across the rest of his slash line pretty dramatically as Krieg reaches the 20 at-bat threshold Turley described.

Small sample sizes and postseason-adjacent adrenaline rushes are a given. But in eight postseason games thus far, Krieg has gone 8-for-20 at the plate (including three-straight multi-hit games) with a double, the aforementioned home run and seven RBI. The junior lifted his season-long batting average from .234 to .251 with the string of performances.

Five of Krieg’s 31 walks this season have come in those eight games, producing a .520 OBP in the postseason compared to a .338 mark in the regular season. His exit velocities remain intact, too, with his home run against the Trojans leaving Goss Stadium at 104 mph. Krieg’s strikeout rate, postseason or not, is still north of 30% and the barrage of singles off his bat have dramatically lowered his slugging percentage, the latter of which is something bound to translate the more time he works through the adjustments.

But his home in the bottom-half of Oregon State’s batting order, newfound on-base ability and the constantly looming threat that he can put a ball into a parking lot (not to mention solid defense at first base) make Jacob Krieg as dangerous as anyone the Beavers can send to the plate.

On Deck

Louisville will be the next team to face Krieg and the Beavers, with the Cardinals set to face off with Oregon State in both’s first matchup of the 2025 College World Series.

First pitch between No. 8 Oregon State and Louisville is slated for 4 p.m. on Friday, June 13 at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha. The game will be broadcast on ESPN.