As expected, Texas and Texas A&M softball delivers big hits, drama and fireworks | Bohls
The first game of the Austin Super Regional had it all.
Everything from a questionable pitching gamble to first-inning fireworks by the road team to a triple play that wasn’t a triple play to a between-innings dust-up leading to multiple coach ejections to a pinch-hit grand slam to as tense an outcome in the final inning as you could get.
Kind of what you’d expect from a heated Aggies-Longhorns matchup.
In fact, the opener in this best-of-three series had a little too much for Texas.
Oh, yeah, it’s on.
In fact, the schools might want to consider making this a regular thing. Oh, right. It will be soon enough. Thank God. Bring it on.
Asked to describe the highly emotional showdown between these two blood rivals, Texas coach Mike White said, “This is just the start, baby.”
He prays it’s not the end.
Of his season, that is.
But Texas A&M’s 6-5 win Friday before a packed house at McCombs Field, including only about a hundred Aggie supporters sitting in the stands behind their team’s dugout, put Texas on the brink of elimination in what has been a superlative season.
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Saving their worst for last
No way is this burnt orange season supposed to end in Austin. And it might not.
Texas is more than capable of winning consecutive games. After all, it hasn’t lost two straight to the same opponent all year and had just one two-game losing streak all year, to No. 8 Oklahoma State to end one series and to No. 1 Oklahoma to start the next one.
The Longhorns now have to answer the Aggies’ confidence and not only win Saturday’s 4 p.m. nationally televised game on ESPN but force a third game Sunday and win that one, too, to gain a berth in next week’s Women’s College World Series.
“Hopefully, the pressure’s on A&M not to lose,” White said. “That’s how I look at it.”
White’s bunch played one of its worst games of the season with a severe lack of clutch hitting and a poor pitching performance. Of course, there haven’t been many bad ones from arguably one of the premier Texas softball teams of all time.
“We know we can do it,” said Texas slugger Reese Atwood, whose solo homer in the seventh drew the Horns closer. “You saw us fighting at the end. I wouldn’t say the pressure is on us. I just think our energy should have been there from the first inning. You can’t just show up in the sixth inning and expect to win the ballgame.”
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But this is the same confident Texas team that beat three-time defending national champion Oklahoma two out of three at McCombs Field and won the regular-season title in its Big 12 farewell.
And anything short of the school’s first softball national championship will be viewed as a disappointment because Texas has the nation’s leading offense with a .383 collective batting average and a host of excellent pitchers. Unfortunately, White bypassed 18-game winner and strikeout artist Teagan Kavan and chose veteran sophomore Citlaly Gutierrez for mound duty instead.
Texas A&M coach: 'Maybe others were shocked. I wasn't'
Gutierrez had whipped the Aggies on this same field in last year’s Austin Regional, but she struggled with her command from the outset. She threw a first-pitch ball to the first seven Aggies and started with 2-0 counts to the first three. That included A&M’s Trinity Cannon, who mashed a meatball over the left field wall for a three-run homer — the first of her two bombs for five RBIs — and a nerves-settling 3-0 lead early.
So did the upset by the drastically underseeded Aggies, somehow ranked just 16th by the NCAA selection committee, stun Trisha Ford?
“Maybe others were shocked,” the second-year Aggies coach said. “I wasn’t.”
Why should she be?
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Not unexpectedly, tempers flared in this rivalry series
Her club, just like the 50-8 Longhorns, has had a special season with a 44-13 record that included a third-place finish in the stacked SEC. It’s got a potent lineup, a superb defense and an extraordinary pitcher in ace Emiley Kennedy, who contained powerful Texas for five shutout innings before Victoria Hunter’s pinch-hit grand slam over the right center-field wall in the sixth.
The Longhorns also got a long ball from Atwood, in the seventh. But it was a two-out solo shot, and Kennedy then struck out Katie Stewart to close out the stunner.
“I think the SEC prepares us,” Ford said. “I felt really good we found our groove again. We were swinging at the correct pitches and putting our A swings out there. We usually play well when we’re the underdog and we’ve got a chip on our shoulder.”
That chip will probably remain since the Aggies have a legitimate beef with the committee that penalized them unnecessarily for a schedule that didn’t allow them to play SEC heavy hitters Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas or Missouri. An 0-7 record against Florida and LSU didn’t help.
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It’s hard to imagine Texas not coming out with a greater sense of urgency Saturday.
The altercation late in the game when Longhorns assistant Steve Singleton got into a shouting match with A&M’s very worked-up Russ Heffley over some near collisions with UT first baseman Stewart that resulted in both of their ejections riled up the crowd. It also fired up the Longhorns, who quickly rallied in their next at-bat for four runs off the bat of Hunter, who had hit a homer against Baylor in the Big 12 Tournament and has immense power.
Crew chief Paul Edds explained that some “inappropriate comments were exchanged, and both coaches were given a behavioral ejection.” Which comes as a shock since what exactly constitutes inappropriate in this rivalry?
White said the disagreement was “mostly a misunderstanding,” but there’s no confusion about the magnitude of Saturday’s game. Maybe Texas will channel those emotions into a championship-worthy performance and keep its magical season alive.
And maybe the pressure is on A&M, although that’s probably wishful thinking on the Longhorns’ part.
“I don’t know what they’re thinking inside their locker room,” White said, “but I've been on both sides. Sometimes you can feel like it's yours to lose instead of yours to win.”
Longhorns-Aggies online
Texas' effort to beat Texas A&M on Saturday evening and force a third game Sunday ended too late for this edition. Go to hookem.com to find out how it turned out.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas and Texas A&M softball series opens with high drama, fireworks
