FRESNO -- In one of the tightest-contested trio of games of the record-setting 2025 season, West Valley and Fresno played at Valhalla Park in Saratoga with a trip to the state championship on the line. Now, just a year after, the script is different: instead of a seemingly unbeatable Viking squad playing at home, No. 12 West Valley (30-13, 13-7 Coast-South) hits the road to take on the top-ranked team in the state, the Fresno City College Rams (40-3, 23-1 Central Valley) with a spot in the North Final on the line.
It's two teams with a very different 2026 season. While Fresno has seemed to cruise the entire season, winning its first 16 games before an 8-5 loss at the end of February, West Valley had to win three straight games just to escape the Skyline Regional last weekend.
Fresno City is lead by one of the strongest pitching staffs in the state. As a team, the Rams have an ERA of 2.86 with three qualified putchers holding an ERA under 3.00. Hawaii-commit Nathan Leffel, a transfer from Los Medanos College, leads the way with a perfect 12-0 record and a 1.52 ERA while freshman Wyatt Johnson and sophomore Bowen Salyards have had strong seasons behind him.
When the two teams met last season at Valhalla, the Rams took game one of the series, 10-6, before the Vikings climbed out of the double-elimination set with two grueling victories. A lot of that was due to the Viking pitching, which allowed just six runs (while scoring eight) behind ace Nico Wagner in the must-win game and five runs in the win-or-go-home game to end the series. The Vikings, who scored 22 runs in three games last season, will need a similar offensive performance to keep the Rams at bay.
But West Valley is coming off easily its best offensive weekend of the season. With their backs against the wall after a difficult first game against Los Medanos, the Vikings responded with 22 runs against Skyline, another strong pitching staff, and had double-digit runs in each of the next two games. While the final numbers may not have been indicative of how strong the Viking staff looked over the weekend, big performances out of the bullpen from Colin Melrose, Apolo Lapiz and Aaron Baum pushed the Vikings to a series victory.
In its three losses this season, Fresno City has struggled a bit to push runs across, especially in bunches late in games. In the Rams' first loss against the College of the Sequoias, the Rams led 4-2 before Sequoias kept Fresno City scoreless from the third through the seventh, allowing Sequoias to get back into the game. It's a similar script to that of what the Vikings had played against them against Los Medanos in the opener last weekend.
Offensively, the Rams have been led by Drake Davis, a .380 hitter with a team-high 11 home runs and a 1.129 OPS. It's a team that hits a lot of doubles, with eight separate players with ten or more doubles and 107 as a team. In their last series, a double-elimination set against Sierra and Merced, the Rams took all three games, the closest a 7-2 victory in the middle game against Merced.
It is undoubtedly a tough task for the Vikings, who were ranked as the No. 1 team in the state for a majority of the first month of a season until a mid-February skid. If last years' trio of games is any indication, this should be a back-and-forth series with high intensity and pressure in every inning. The best-of-three series starts Thursday at 2:00 PM.