An important week for Oklahoma State’s baseball team has been disrupted by the arrest of senior utility player Gabe Weidenaar.
Weidenaar, 23, was among four OSU students arrested Thursday after federal postal agents noticed suspicious packages addressed to Weidenaar and Ryan Large.
During a preliminary hearing Monday in Payne County District Court, Weidenaar was charged with three felonies and one misdemeanor and is being held in Payne County Jail on $200,000 bond. Weidenaar entered a plea of not guilty.
Tuesday, an Oklahoma State spokesman confirmed that Weidnaar has been dismissed from the Cowboy baseball program.
At 26-17 overall, 11-7 in Big 12 Conference play and tied for third place in the Big 12 Conference standings, Oklahoma State faces rival Oklahoma in the annual Bedlam series this week. At 7 p.m. Friday, the Cowboys and Sooners meet at Tulsa’s ONEOK Field. Saturday and Sunday games are played at Oklahoma City’s Newcastle Field in Bricktown.
OSU enters the Bedlam series with an eight-game win streak.
Weidenaar is charged with unlawful possession of a controlled drug with intent to distribute within 2,000 feet of a school, conspiracy to commit a felony, possession of a controlled drug (marijuana) without a tax stamp affixed and unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia, which included, according to Payne Count District Court documents, “four vacuum sealed baggies containing ... high grade marijuana.”
A Stillwater Police Department spokesman said that marijuana was shipped from California in two packages, each containing four pounds of the drug. Before the boxes were shipped to Stillwater, the spokesman said, postal inspectors expressed a belief that the packages might have contained contraband. Arrests were made after the packages were delivered to two Stillwater addresses.
Tom Lee, the Payne County district attorney, said Stillwater police determined that the street value of the marijuana as having been $75,000.
Weidenaar has a 13-game hitting streak. In Big 12 play, he ranks ninth in the conference with a .357 batting average. For the season, he is third on the team with a .314 average, third with a .449 slugging percentage and tied for third with four home runs. Weidenaar also has four pitching appearances, going 1-1 with a 4.51 earned run average. He was second-team All-Big 12 as a utility player last season, with 54 games as an outfielder, one at first base and 15 relief appearances on the mound.
Weidenaar’s arrest is the second in two weeks for an OSU baseball player. On April 17, senior pitcher Kyle Ottoson was arrested on an aggravated DUI charge. Ottoson, 21, was suspended from the team for a week after police said he crashed his SUV into an unoccupied vehicle at a high rate of speed.
Ottoson was allowed to return the following Tuesday to pitch a non-conference home game against Oklahoma. He threw 8 1/3 innings and allowed just one run in the Cowboys’ 6-1 victory. Ottoson is 4-5 with a 3.51 ERA this season.
Weidenaar, former OSU walk-on football player Jarrod Fields, 22, Austin Marie Yoder, 21, and Ryan Large, 25, all were arrested Thursday. Weidenaar was arrested at his residence after receiving two four-pound packages. Large was arrested at a different residence after receiving a similar delivery.
Large, identified as a co-conspirator with Weidenaar, remains in jail on a $50,000 bond. Yoder posted a $1,000 bond Saturday and was released, while Fields was released Friday on a personal recognizance bond.
Fields, from Ardmore, was a senior on the 2011 football team, though he didn’t see any playing time. He worked out for NFL scouts at OSU’s pro day on March 9.
The packages were mailed from California. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service, a federal law enforcement agency, reportedly notified Tulsa officials of the suspicious packages addressed to Weidenaar and Large.
Stillwater police were notified and served a search warrant for the two residences.
Both Ottoson and Weidenaar are transfer students. Ottoson hails from Greeley, Colo., played two seasons at South Mountain College in Phoenix, then played at Arizona State in 2011. Weidenaar, from Bozeman, Mont., played two years at the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas.
