About last night
Great night of section softball at two sites
Thursday was a remarkable night of softball no matter if you were at the Marshall Softball Complex or at Caswell Park in North Mankato.
I’ll get the end results out there right away, so they don’t get lost.
At the Section 3AA tournament in Marshall, Morris Area/Chokio-Alberta defeated Jackson County Central 2-1 in eight innings in the championship round to force the ‘if necessary’ game as it was the first loss in the tournament for the Huskies.
The second game went 14 innings with JCC scoring five runs in the 14th to win 7-2 and scan its ticket to the state Class 2A tournament that starts Tuesday at Caswell Park.
In Section 2A, Martin County West handed United South Central its first loss not only of the tournament, but of the season, by a 6-5 score to force a second game there. The Rebels won the second game 6-0 to scan their ticket to the Class 1A state tournament.
Section 3AA
I was in Marshall, and it would someone who is a better writer than me to capture what happened over the course of 22 innings and more than six hours, but I’ll try to pass along a few items here. There will be more later.
Jackson County Central and Morris Area/Chokio-Alberta had an amazing stretch of softball over three days as the teams played 30 innings of nail-biting softball from Tuesday afternoon through late Thursday night.
For the first 29 innings (which of course, is more than four regulation games), each team only scored six runs. The Huskies almost equaled their total from the first 28 innings in that one at bat as they scored five times.
The first game apparently got underway a little ahead of the 5:00 scheduled start time because I tweeted out the result of the of the first inning at 5:00:
Coach Morgan Christopher posted that the second game ended at 11:05 and the time stamp on my post is 11:06, so that tracks:
Here are a few numbers that I have (your mileage may vary):
JCC’s Mady Wachal threw 139 pitches in the first game Thursday, 85 for strikes.
Hadley Wachal of JCC threw 235 pitches in the second game (154 for strikes).
Haley Kill is the lone pitcher MACA used. In the first game she threw 89 pitches (63 for strikes). In the second game she threw 199 pitches (143 for strikes) to bring her total for Thursday to 288 pitches (206 for strikes).
In the suspended game vs. JCC, Kill threw 118 pitches. The Tigers had to play an extra game after the loss to the Huskies and Kill threw an efficient 87 pitches in a 1-0 win over Dassel-Cokato. That brought her total pitches from Tuesday-Thursday to 493.
What about the catchers? JCC’s Bailey Finck and MACA’s Samantha Konz caught the entire night. That’s a lot of crouching and getting up and down for six-plus hours in one day, let alone adding the previous two days.
Don’t forget about how many throws a catcher makes over the course of a game. There are throws back to the pitcher (the Wachal sisters threw 374 pitches), warmup pitches before and between games and between innings, and also plays on the bases so the number of throws Finck made is north of 500. And Bailey doesn’t lob the ball back to the pitcher, even with nobody on base. It seems like a lot of her throws go back to the pitcher as hard as they came in.
And we have to mention the umpires, especially after writing about the long day Tom Schuller and Corey Christopher had last Saturday in Edgerton. The umps in Marshall Thursday were on their feet for all 662 pitches. And incidentally, Schu and Corey were in Marshall as spectators Thursday.
Again, JCC will play in the state Class 2A tournament on Tuesday at Caswell Park. All four quarterfinal games are at 3 p.m. Pairings will be announced Saturday morning.
Here are the teams in the Class 2A field. One spot has yet to be filled.
1AA: Randolph
2AA: Lake Crystal Wellcome Memorial
3AA: Jackson County Central
4AA: St. Agnes
5AA: Spectrum
6AA: St. Cloud Cathedral
7AA: Esko
8AA: Roseau or Hawley They play Friday. Both have one loss.
Section 2A
Okay, how about this for an unusual occurrence?
MCW’s Sydney Clow pitched six innings of no-hit relief, walking one and striking out three.
Clow entered the game in relief after USC’s first five batters all reached base in the first inning.
Clow kept the state’s top-ranked Class 1A team off the scoreboard and gave the Mavericks a chance to get back in the game.
And MCW did more than get back in the game as the Mavericks came back to win it. The Mavericks scored one run in the first, two in the third and two more in the fourth to tie it 5-5.
That’s the way the score remained until the top of the sixth when Hannah Rosenberg doubled to lead off the inning, moved to third on a groundout by Lillie Schultz and scored on Emily Anderson’s groundout.
After a rain delay, the second game got underway, and the Mavericks again had trouble early in the game as USC scored three first-inning runs.
The Mavericks again hung in there after a tough start, keeping the Rebels off the board for three innings, but USC scored three more in the fifth to take control.
Here are the Class 1A state tournament qualifiers. Pairings will be announced on Saturday.
1A: Bethlehem Academy
2A: United South Central
3A: Wabasso
4A: Braham
5A: Blackduck
6A: Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley or Swanville (Friday)
7A: Moose Lake/Willow River
8A: Badger/Greenbush-Middle River