The good news continues, Arizona Wildcats baseball fans!

With just a little over a week before the Aug. 15 deadline for signing a pro contract Steve Selsky and the five UA recruits are still amateurs.

The bad news is this is the week when the players have the most leverage and the dollar amounts go up. Can Andy Lopez last another nine days without losing anybody?

Selsky is currently taking part in the Cape Cod League playoffs. He was a Player of the Week in July but did not make the All-Star team.

UA pitcher Kyle Simon, however, will be joining the Cape Cod All-Stars at Fenway Park as he is third in the league in ERA. Cat fans should be very happy Simon is still a year away from draft eligibility.

Here are the six drafted-but-as-yet-unsigned players who could play for Arizona in 2011:

There have been no changes to the amateur status of Steve Selsky and five drafted UA recruits, and that is great news for Andy Lopez and the BatCats.

Selsky (along with Wildcat teammate Kyle Simon) is currently playing for the Orleans Firebirds in the Cape Cod League. He is hitting .282 with a .393 OBP and .408 SLG.

Here are the six players Arizona fans hope do not sign pro contracts before the Aug. 15 deadline:

The Cats had to hang up their high-fives for the year.
Photo by David Kadlubowski/The Arizona Republic

The Arizona Wildcats baseball team saw its season end with two losses in three games at the Fort Worth Regional in the 2010 NCAA tournament.

The weekend got off to a good – albeit uncomfortable – start. The Wildcats built a 10-4 lead against Baylor in Friday’s game before the Bears stormed back with five runs in the bottom of the 9th to put a real scare into the guys from Tucson.

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Oregon State beat the Arizona Wildcats, 5-0, Saturday afternoon to put another nail in the UA’s postseason coffin.

Beaver pitchers recorded 16 strikeouts as the Cats were shut out for the third time this year, wasting starter Kyle Simon’s big-game performance. The sophomore pitcher gave up just one earned run in 6.1 innings but his teammates were only able to muster five hits, all singles.

The Wildcat offense is in a really bad place right now.

But it gets even worse for Arizona. Cal has risen from the dead to win two straight at Oregon. Couple that with the events in Corvallis and the up-to-the-minute Pac-10 standings look like this:

The Bears have gone from falling off the bubble to being one victory away from a winning conference record which is going to be really hard to ignore. And Cal series always end in sweeps.

It will be very interesting if Cal beats Oregon and Arizona beats OSU on Sunday. That would give the Ducks, Beavers and Wildcats identical Pac-10 records with similar RPI numbers. How do you tell them apart? Do you just take all three?

At this point the UA would gladly suffer through that uncertainty. Lose one last time and it’s an easy call to leave out the 11-16 team that’s sitting in 8th or 9th place.

But is it already too late? Realistically, is the tournament selection committee going to wait until 6:30 Eastern to decide if Arizona is in the field?

I say yes.

A top-25 RPI and 12 wins against the RPI top 50 should get you in. But you can’t take a team that has lost six out of seven and 14 of 19 to end the season. You’re not going to extend a bid to a team that finishes five games under .500 in league play. You can crunch the numbers all you want but at the end of the day your job is to select the teams most deserving of the opportunity to play for a national championship.

To be deserving you have to win.

The playoffs start on Sunday for the Wildcats. And for one day, it’s single-elimination.

Baseball isn’t played with a clock but if it was, time would be running out for the Arizona Wildcats.

The Oregon State Beavers beat Arizona by a score of 6-3 Friday night to put the UA’s postseason chances at further risk. Wildcat ace Kurt Heyer was roughed up for six earned runs in 6.1 innings including two home runs off the bat of OSU’s Adalberto Santos.

The Wildcats will now attempt to do something they haven’t done all year: win a series after losing the first game. If the Cats can’t turn around their season-long trend the season could come to an abrupt end.

I still believe Arizona needs just one win in this series to earn a tournament bid but the pressure is building with each additional loss.

The good news is the second game has been the Wildcats’ best effort in each of the past three series. The UA has backed up Kyle Simon with over 12 runs a game and won all three starts. It would be a really good idea to do the same this Saturday. No one wants to have the entire season come down to one game.

Saturday’s contest starts at 2 p.m. It can be seen on Fox Sports Northwest and heard on 1290 AM radio in Tucson.

Tick…tick…tick….