|
Hawks unable to seal deal for doubleheader
sweep
Softball team loses late leads in second game
By Dallas Cogle
Maryland Independent Staff Writer
(Article Courtesy of Maryland Independent)
Wednesday, April 26, 2006 -
Through the first 11 innings of Monday’s doubleheader, everything was going
just the way the College of Southern Maryland softball team wanted.
Led by the shutdown pitching of freshman Amanda Johnston (Great Mills) and
freshman shortstop Autumn Boyd’s (Thomas Stone) hot bat and stellar defense,
the Hawks edged out visiting Allegany, 3-2, in Game 1.
Allegany cut the deficit to one in the seventh, and had the tying run on
third with its most dangerous hitter at the plate. But Johnston induced
Allegany cleanup batter Livi Beveridge — who was also the opposing pitcher —
into a groundout to the mound to end the contest for CSM’s eighth straight
win.
Game 2 seemed to be a runaway for CSM, as the offense staked it to a
five-run fourth and 6-0 lead with just three innings remaining.
But Allegany — which is neck and neck with CSM in the Maryland Junior
College Conference standings — came back.
In what became a wild Game 2 finish, Allegany came back twice, scoring seven
runs in the fifth en route to winning the contest in extra innings, plating
five in the eighth to turn an 11-7 deficit into a 12-11 defeat for CSM.
A 7-all affair at the end of the seven regulation innings quickly saw CSM
jump back on top with four runs in the top of the first additional frame.
But CSM (21-14-1, 11-7 Maryland JUCO) could not hang on to what would have
been a pivotal conference sweep of Allegany (11-8, 9-6) with the Region XX
postseason tournament looming in just 10 days.
‘‘A little bit, [I was] getting tired — a lot of pitches. I guess we
should’ve let somebody come in [to relieve me on the mound] to throw them
off a little bit, but we didn’t,” said Johnston, who tossed all 15 innings
of the doubleheader while Allegany used a different pitcher in each game.
‘‘The first game was awesome. The second game — too many errors. We have to
lay off the errors and stay on top of our game, just like we did the first
game. [Allegany] had some nice hits [in the second game], but our errors, on
top of that, got me down. When I’m throwing all my pitches and their hitting
all of them, I depend on my defense.”
Johnston yielded just one earned run on five hits and three walks in her
Game 1 winning performance, fanning three batters.
She was cruising in Game 2 through the opening three frames, yielding just
two hits. CSM’s defense bailed her out in the fourth when Allegany loaded
the bases on three straight singles but was kept from scoring in the inning
thanks in large to a double play, beginning with a catch in right field by
Stephanie Young (La Plata) that ended with Allegany getting thrown out at
the plate on a tag-up from third.
Allegany, however, kept plugging away and exploded in the fifth with seven
runs on six hits, getting some help from lackluster CSM defense in the
process. CSM tied the game at 7 in the sixth on a one-out sacrifice fly by
sophomore first baseman Danielle Sturman (Westlake), made possible on Betty
Jane Tennison’s (Stone) leadoff single and Boyd’s sacrifice bunt.
It appeared CSM had escaped victoriously with four runs in the eighth, using
the international tiebreaker with Tennison, Boyd, Sturman and sophomore
catcher Ashley Cook (Calvert) supplying RBIs.
But Johnston, who had delivered a double off the right-center field fence in
the top of the eighth, didn’t have enough in the tank for the bottom of the
inning. Heather Proud led off the eighth with a long RBI double and then
Beveridge tattooed a shot over the fence for a two-run homer.
Johnston settled down after the homer to retire the next batter, but then
yielded three straight singles. With the score tied at 11, an RBI grounder
to shortstop — still with only one away — plated the game-winning run from
third for Allegany.
‘‘I kind of blame myself in a way [for the Game 2 loss],” said CSM assistant
coach John Creaturo, the interim frontman while head coach Tom Morrison is
hospitalized with respiratory complications. ‘‘When we gave up that
seven-run inning [in the fifth], I should’ve probably changed pitchers and
just given them a different look. I didn’t think it was so much that Amanda
was tiring; it was that they’d seen her in the first game and, in hindsight,
I made a couple of decisions I wish I would’ve made differently. [Allegany]
hit the ball really well. And we just made a couple of mistakes — physical
ones — that we don’t normally make, and we won’t do that again.
‘‘We played very well in the first game, defensively.”
‘‘It’s horrible,” Sturman said about not being able to finish off Allegany
in Game 2 for the doubleheader sweep. ‘‘You get that intense feeling in you,
and you just want to, like, blow up. We had a couple of mental mistakes [in
Game 2] that should’ve never happened. Amanda pitched a great game. She did
very, very well. I think we kind of slacked in the second game, but our bats
came alive, though.”
Sturman and Johnston hit the ball hard in the eighth to seemingly put an
exclamation point on CSM’s Game 2 performance before Allegany came roaring
back. Johnston stroked a double off the fence in right-center field.
In Game 1, Boyd entered on an offensive tear. She went 6 for 9 in CSM’s
lopsided sweep of Rockville on April 19 in the team’s last action before
Monday. That tear continued with an RBI double in the third inning to give
CSM a 1-0 lead, scoring Tennison from first.
Boyd went 2 for 3 in the game with another base hit in the fifth.
She later scored from third on a freak play, as Allegany Game 1 pitcher
Beveridge had the ball slip out of her hand on her windup. The ball rolled
to second base. The error gave CSM a 2-0 advantage, which was upped to 3-1
when Young provided an insurance run in the bottom of the sixth.
Sturman posted an RBI in each of her final three at-bats in Game 2. Tennison
and Boyd had two RBIs apiece in the second of the twin bill. Tennison also
scored twice in the game, but all the offensive production went for naught
in the Allegany comeback victory.
‘‘[Allegany] had a couple hits, but we had errors, too, that we shouldn’t
have made,” Boyd said about the Game 2 collapse. ‘‘They just matched us
every time [offensively]. I think this was the most [heartbreaking loss of
the season], because we were up by six and up by four. This late in the
season and them ahead of us [in the Maryland JUCO standings], it would’ve
been great to shut them down.
‘‘We’re young. We need to learn from our mistakes. We can definitely [make
some noise] at regionals and know we’re capable of playing with anybody.”
‘‘I’m proud of the way we played,” Creaturo said. ‘‘We can go up from this
or down from this. We can learn from it and get a little bit better. We may
end up playing [Allegany] in the playoffs.”
Box score
Game 1
CSM 3, Allegany 2
Allegany 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 – 2 5 2
CSM 0 0 2 0 0 1 x – 3 8 4
WP Johnston, LP Beveridge
Extra-base hits: 2B – Boyd (C)
Game 2
Allegany 12, CSM 11
CSM 0 1 0 5 0 1 0 4 – 11 12 4
Allegany 0 0 0 0 7 0 0 5 – 12 17 3
WP Price, LP Johnston
Extra-base hits: HR – Beveridge (A), 2B – Leigh (C), Johnston (C), Beveridge
(A), Wilson (A), Golden (A), Proud (A)
|
