Stanford baseball to kick off season on Valentine’s Day
In its first season in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) after exiting the Pac-12, the Stanford Cardinal baseball team will face a mix of old rivals and new adversaries. Their first few weeks will see them battle familiar foes on the West Coast, whereas the spring months will be dominated by conference play in unfamiliar territory.
All told, Stanford will play 29 home games in 2025 against 11 teams during the regular season. The most anticipated series of the year may be against Stanford’s chief rival, UC Berkeley, who also switched to the ACC as the Pac-12 collapsed. That best-of-three series will be played at Stanford from March 21 to March 23, just as academic final exams are set to conclude.
The Cardinal’s first series of 2025 will begin away from home on Feb. 14 against Cal State Fullerton, where Stanford holds a record of 26 wins and 22 losses since 2006. The first home series at Klein Field starts the following weekend, on Feb. 21, against the University of Washington. On March 7, the Cardinal flies off to North Carolina to play its first official ACC match against UNC Chapel Hill.
To proceed to the NCAA playoff tournament in June, Stanford will need to have a high enough winning record to be one of 64 teams that advances from a pool of around 300. The last time the Cardinal qualified for the tournament was in 2023, when they became one of only eight teams to play in the College World Series in Omaha, Neb. After losing nine players to the Major League Baseball draft that year, Stanford failed to make the playoffs in 2024 with an overall winning record of only 400. This year, with the help of key additions like freshman Rintaro Sasaki from Japan, the Cardinal will attempt to launch a comeback.
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