OSU coach Pat Casey argues with an umpire in the ninth inning of the Beavers' game against Washington State on May 11, 2007.

The remnants of Pat Casey’s legacy at Oregon State are scattered everywhere at Goss Stadium.

Three championship trophies are on display in the Omaha Room.

There is a No. 5 uniform featuring the name “Casey” painted on the right-field wall, which rests kitty-corner to “CASEY CORNER” down the right-field line.

The words, “HOME OF THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONS,” are proudly presented in big, bright letters above the bullpen in left field. And in the clubhouse, a gigantic floor-to-ceiling photo of Casey is painted on a wall inside the coaches’ office, looming as an oversized inspiration to everyone who occupies his old desk.

But the true measure of his influence is not something you can see or touch, but rather something you feel or experience. It was cultivated in the legions of people and players he inspired, the countless baseball fans he shaped, and the myriad teenagers he nurtured into men. Casey inspired and influenced thousands of players during his decades in the dugout, as he guided Oregon State to three national championships and won 900 baseball games.

And every one of them seems to have a story about the man who, though fierce competitiveness, love and a little bit of lunacy, spawned confidence, shaped winners and molded generations.

After Casey was recently enshrined into the College Baseball Hall of Fame, here’s a snapshot of the man and his career, courtesy of the stories of those players:

‘Horrifying in the moment’It was widely known among Oregon State pitchers that Casey didn’t make mound visits during a game. He preferred to let his pitching coach guide and nurture the staff.

“You knew if you got a mound visit,” Matt Boyd said, “it was not going to be good. If he came to the mound, it wasn’t going to be about pitching, it was going to be something completely different. He would come out and say something like, ‘You look like you’re competing in fear. You don’t look like a champion.’ He would call you out, challenge you. It was always comical in hindsight. But it was horrifying in the moment.”

And for Boyd, no visit was more horrifying than the one he received in the third inning of a start at Arizona during his senior season in 2013.

It was the first week of Pac-12 play and the Wildcats had won the College World Series the year before, so it was an important game for the Beavers. Boyd remembers having an uneventful first inning, before running into trouble in the second. He walked the leadoff hitter, worked behind the count on multiple batters and ended up allowing a run. An inning later, Boyd continued to go through the motions, pitching without purpose and confidence.

“I wasn’t attacking,” he said. “I was on my heels, if you will.”

So after Boyd retired the final batter of the third, he strolled off the mound and headed toward the dugout … but ran into an enraged Casey at the foul line.

“He was coming at me, just unloading on me behind his clipboard,” Boyd said. “He was like, ‘You’re not on the attack. You’re not pitching like a Friday night starter. You’re pitching scared.’ He straight said that to me and it pissed me off. It lit a fire in me.

“He goes: ‘I should pull you out of the game.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘Then do it!’ And we kind of started walking back to the dugout, down the steps, and we went back and forth at each other. We raised our voices, really let each other have it. But we didn’t look at each other, didn’t yell directly at each other, just shouted as we walked, kind of out loud to no one. We were heated. I’m still stinging about it right now talking about it.”

Boyd stayed in the game, but everything had changed. He went on to toss five shutout innings after the altercation, guiding the Beavers to an important victory.

“At the end of the game, he came up to me and gave me a big hug,” said Boyd, who has pitched nine seasons in the major leagues and is currently rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. “That’s how it was with him. He knew you could be better and he was going to do everything he could to get the best out of you. Why go out there and give anything less than your best? That was his thinking and that’s what carries me right now as I go through TJ rehab. It’s carrying me to believe I can pitch 10 more years in the bigs.”

Don’t overthink itThe Beavers were groggy, sore and still cleaning sleep out of their eyes when they wrapped up a 7 a.m. weight-lifting session and gathered for a round of hitting.

It was a random Tuesday in the fall in the mid-2010s.

Kyle Nobach hopped into the hitting cage first and Casey barked out instructions, telling Nobach to lay down three bunts and then work on a hit-and-run swing. But Nobach was confused and had a question. Lots of them.

“Kyle just starts asking question after question after question after question,” Michael Gretler said. “He just keeps going. So Coach Casey just stopped him and he looks at him and says: ‘Kyle, this is what I want you to do. Go ahead and cut your head off and put it in a jar and just look at it.’ It was so absurd that Kyle immediately stops asking questions and kind of looks around, like, ‘What does he mean? That doesn’t even make any sense.’

“It was so funny. I’ll never forget it. He was basically telling Nobach that he was overthinking things. When you’re recruited at Oregon State, you have the talent to play. The biggest thing is you have to figure out the confidence part, you have to develop the right mindset. Coach Casey was always working on our confidence and mindset, no matter what we were doing. In that moment, he was basically saying, if you just cut your head off and let your ability guide you, you’ll be a better player.”

Championship inspirationInanimate objects were often the target of Casey’s ferocity. If it wasn’t bats or snacks or coolers, it was baseballs.

In fact, it was a bucket of baseballs — and one memorable Casey eruption — that proved to be the inspiration behind a national championship.

It’s not widely remembered all these years later, but the Beavers were hardly a shoo-in to make the postseason in 2007, the year they won Casey’s second title. Heading into the final weekend of the regular season, a three-game series at UCLA, they had lost seven of nine games and were precariously positioned on the tournament bubble.

“It went down the to the wire,” Joey Wong said. “We knew we had to win the series to get into a regional.”

Early in the first game of the series, there was a borderline call. Wong said he can’t recall if it was an iffy call at the plate or in the field, but he will never forget the byproduct.

“Case just loses it,” Wong said, smiling. “And he gets thrown out of the game. He goes down to the bullpen, grabs a bucket of balls and throws them onto the field. It really kind of set the tone for the series and kind of fired us up. It was like, ‘Here we go.’”

The Beavers went on to win 10-7 and take two of three games in the series, earning an at-large bid to the playoffs. It started a magical run in which OSU won 11 of 12 postseason games to win the College World Series.

It’s likely that none of it would have happened without Casey’s eruption in UCLA.

“We win the game,” Wong said. “And afterward, we look around and no one knows where Case is at. The rumor is that he just left the field in his uniform, walked back to the hotel, and took it to the house. Uber wasn’t around back then, so maybe he got a taxi or maybe he just walked. I’ve heard he’s walked it a few times. So it wouldn’t surprise me.”

And even when Casey did stick around after a game to travel with his team, he didn’t always acknowledge his connection.

In 2016, when the Beavers suffered a late-season sweep at Arizona, the team was lingering in the terminal at the airport, preparing for a painful flight home.

“We just got our asses kicked,” Nobach said. “It was bad. And so we’re rolling home in the airport and all the guys are in matching suits. But Case, he’s in his normal clothes. Someone comes walking up and asks Case, ‘What team is this? Who are these guys?’ And Case goes, ‘I don’t know. I’m not with them.’ It just makes me laugh so hard thinking back. That’s how competitive he is.”

Softer, sentimental sideBut while his eruptions and blistering tirades were unforgettable, Casey also had a softer, sentimental side.

Nobach will never forget the image of Casey hugging 9-year-old superfan Drew Boedigheimer — and handing him an OSU jersey — after the team lost a game in Omaha. Dylan Davis and Jake Rodriguez will always remember the guidance and love Casey offered after their fathers died. And, all these years later, numerous players say it meant the world to them when Casey would show up at their weddings and walk over after the ceremony to give them a big hug.

Casey delivered his share of memorable speeches over 24 years, but no one will forget the one he gave before his final game, a legendary 5-0 victory over Arkansas in the College World Series that cemented the program’s third championship and delivered Casey his 900th career win.

“We kind of had an idea it was going to be his last game,” Rodriguez said. “And we had all these great players. Nick Madrigal. Adley Rutschman. Trevor Larnach. Steven Kwan. And I’ll always remember him standing in front of the group, reiterating that it was going to be the last time we played together, win or lose.

“He was always the kind of guy who got out front. He was motivating, pushing. But he also was the guy who took a step back and shared with us the reality of the situation. He said that group was never going to play together again, never be in the same locker room together again. And we should cherish the moment. He kind of took a deep breath for all of us. I wasn’t even playing — I was on the coaching staff then — but you could feel the weight of the moment disappear.”

Gretler said it was one of the best speeches he’s ever heard.

“The whole idea was that everything was coming full circle,” Gretler said. “And that was what Beaver baseball was about. He said we had an opportunity to do something super special and that no matter what happened, it would be the last time this group of guys was going to be together on this team. So he told us to enjoy the moment, to go out and be confident in what we do. If we did that, we could walk away knowing that we were leaving the jersey in a better place. It was the culture he created.”

Sometimes, Casey’s messages came in the form of short quips or quotes he displayed around the clubhouse.

He would say things like: It’s amazing what a person can do when you convince them that they can do more than they thought was possible. And don’t be fearful of the fight. And life starts when fear ends. And never be satisfied with being good — always work toward greatness.

In the OSU locker room at Goss, hanging above the door the players ran through to reach the field, a sign read: “Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are stiffened.”

And in the Omaha room, there was this: “One man’s will can become a team’s will if enough individuals are willing.”

Players can still recite from memory the sayings today. The biggest — and most common message: “If you want to be like a champion, act like a champion.” Casey would tell his players to walk like a champion, go to school like a champion, do homework like a champion. “If you live life like a champion,” he would say, “You’ll be a champion.”

“It was even brush your teeth like a champion,” Gretler said, laughing.

PLAYFUL SIDE

Of course, Casey had a playful side, too. And it often surfaced at the most unexpected time.

“One day, it was raining so hard, we had to go to the Truax Center to work out,” Darwin Barney said. “And we’re sitting down, stretching as a group, and Pat walks through the door. He sees us and beelines right at us. Just goes into this dead sprint toward us. We’re like, ‘What’s going on?’ And just as he nears us, he slides, pops up, and just has the biggest smile on his face. And he starts yelling: ‘I freakin’ love it! You guys are ballplayers! You’re ballplayers! I love it!’ That’s how he felt. And you could see it. You could feel it.”

Even in the biggest moments, the right guys could prod Casey in just the right way.

Before a game in Omaha, when the Beavers were in the middle of winning back-to-back championships, Casey lingered in the dugout and peered out onto the field, sporting a stoic, intense look. Barney and Mitch Canham were standing behind him and Barney turned to his teammate with a stunning question: “Hey, should we flick him in the ear?”

Canham looked at him like he was crazy. “Uhhhhhh. What?”

“He’s sitting there, super intense, and Darwin and I are just smiling,” Canham said. “And we lean forward and just tickle his ear. We felt so good and we were in control and happy. And so we went for it.”

Casey turned around in disbelief. And then he smirked.

“He was like, ‘Oh, you’re poking the big bear,” Canham said. “But he saw us sitting there, smiling, like, ‘You know we’ve got this, right? We’re good.’ Darwin and I were so comfortable and we were so confident in what we were doing and the guys that we had around us, that we felt OK.”

Almost everything Casey did, players say, was to embolden them with confidence.

When Barney was a freshman, he was good enough to bat third in the lineup. But by week two or three, he was struggling.

So he went into Casey’s office and told him that it would be OK if the coach moved him down in the order. He would understand.

“And he’s like, ‘Look, I’ll move you out of there today because you came and talked to me about it. But you’re going to hit,’” Barney said. “And it was just so absolute. There was no explanation. There was no big talk about how I needed to do this or that. It was just straight, ‘You’re going to hit.’ That just instilled so much confidence in me. I learned a lot from that mentality. And I think I went 4 for 5 that day and I was back in the three hole the next game. He was in the business of confidence.”

THE LOOK

For Central Point’s Ryan Gipson, he’ll always remember the look.

It was 2005, before the Beavers reached the College World Series for the first time under Casey, before they won the back-to-back championships, before Oregon State was a college baseball powerhouse.

The Beavers were scheduled to play a three-game series against Stanford at Sunken Diamond, when a smattering of rain fell. Cardinal coach Mark Marquess pounced on the chance to postpone the opener, even though, Gipson says, the weather wasn’t all that bad.

“He thought they’d have a little bit better chance to win,” Gipson said. “He thought playing a doubleheader on Saturday instead would give them a competitive advantage.”

It did not. The Beavers swept both Saturday games, snatching a crucial series win over the traditional power. Afterward, the Beavers gathered for a celebratory huddle across the field from Marquess, and the program never looked back, reaching Omaha three consecutive seasons.

“I’ll never forget the look on his face — the look on all of our faces — after we won that second game,” Gipson said. “That moment, those wins, it just confirmed the message that we were the real deal. That’s really, in my mind, when things started to really, really, really take off for the program. It was confirmation that, yep, this is who we are. It was confidence. It was belief. And we fortunately had a group of guys that all had self-belief. We believed in each other, we believed in the program, we believed in Coach Casey.”