Super Cats: UK Clicking at the Right Time
Reaching super regionals is familiar for Kentucky softball. After all, the Wildcats have done it five times in the last six years.
What’s new is the way this group did it. Never before have the Cats so thoroughly dominated en route to college softball’s penultimate stage.
The Cats completed their three-game sweep through the Lexington Regional on Sunday, not allowing a postponed game on Friday, two delays on Saturday or Notre Dame stand in their way. No. 16 UK (34-19) downed the Fighting Irish on Sunday, 8-0, to render a potential winner-take-all game on Monday unnecessary. The Cats had already clearly established themselves at the best team at the Lexington Regional.
“I’m really proud of this team,” Rachel Lawson said. “I’ve said all year: The thing about I love about this particular team – every team I’ve had has worked incredibly hard and I’ve always had people who have worked on their own and tremendously. What this team does is I have more of them.”
Over the course of the weekend, UK set school records for runs scored (28), runs allowed (one) and run differential (plus-27) in a regional. The Cats didn’t trail once and had at least a two-run lead by the third inning in all three games en route to becoming just the third team the super-regional era to record three straight run-rule victories in a regional.
UK’s pitchers – Erin Rethlake and Grace Baalman – tossed a pair of shutouts and would have had a third if not for the fourth inning against UIC when the first two batters reached on errors and one eventually scored on a wild pitch. All told, Rethlake and Baalman allowed just four hits and a pair of walks and needed just 198 pitches to throw three complete games.
“I felt great about Erin,” said Lawson, who didn’t decide until late on Sunday morning to start Rethlake. “I woke up this morning, watched a little video and I knew she had this. I felt really good about her and I feel good about her moving forward.”
The job of the pitchers was made easier by a prolific offense, which manufactured runs and slugged with equal effectiveness. UK batted 23 for 66 (.348) with 18 walks, 10 extra-base hits and two walk-off home runs on the weekend, the last one by Abbey Cheek.
“The way we’re hitting the ball right now is something that it puts a different confidence in a pitcher’s head when it’s not, ‘OK, I can’t make one bad pitch,’ ” Rethlake said. “It’s, just go out there and throw yours and our offense is doing what they need to do right now.”
That’s a change from a few weeks ago, at which point UK was coming off a series loss at Georgia in which the Cats managed just five total runs.
“About three weeks ago, I could tell we weren’t going where we needed to go offensively,” Lawson said. “So we made a complete offensive switch in our approach, and really it was just simplifying things. The cool thing was, in order to make that kind of change at this point in the season, the team has to first trust the coach know what she’s doing and then they have to be willing to go in and work and do it.”
Now, UK has a lineup of batters not trying to do too much. When the Cats get pitches to hit, they don’t miss them. When they don’t, they aren’t expanding the zone.
“One thing we do focus on is passing the bat down,” Cheek said. “It can’t be just one person in the lineup doing it. If we have multiple people stepping up and doing what we’re supposed to be doing, I think we’re getting going to get far. We’re going to be really good against Oregon if we keep on passing the bat down.”
Indeed, UK’s next challenge will be to take down top overall seed Oregon on the Ducks’ home field, where the Cats saw their season end a year ago. Oregon tossed three straight shutouts at its own regional this weekend to lower its nation-leading earned-run average to 1.06.
That pitching will make the Ducks the favorites next weekend, but the Cats don’t exactly mind that.
“Personally, I think we always play well as the underdog,” Rethlake said. “It’s fun to be the underdog. Nobody expects us to come out and (win). It’s not about Oregon. It’s about us. The way we just played this weekend, it never was about Notre Dame or Michigan or UIC. It was about us. I think that’s the same mentality that we (take to) Oregon.”
