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Cowgirl Softball: Recapping What We Learned on a 1-4 Weekend

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Oklahoma State’s softball team ditched the bipolar Stillwater weather and headed west to Palm Springs, California, late last week. Each of OSU’s first three weekends have followed an interesting trend.

In their first two road trips, they lost the first game and followed it with a four-game winning streak. This past weekend, they won their first game and followed it with a four-game losing streak. There’s probably not much substance to that trend, but it’s at least intriguing.

Here’s everything you missed this weekend in the OSU softball world as the Cowgirls went 1-4 in California at the Mary Nutter Collegiate Classic.

Wisconsin: 3-2 (W)
Oregon State: 4-2 (L)
Oregon: 4-1 (L)
Mississippi State: 9-4 (L)
UC Davis: 3-1 (L)

Bayless is out for the season

Rylee Bayless, one of the most productive players on the team, is out for the season after tearing her ACL. Sydney Pennington has played the majority of the games in left field since the injury. Whitney Whitehorn has slid into Pennington’s role as designated player. The loss of Bayless hurts, but the Cowgirls have a bevy of weapons at the plate.

Runs weren’t scored easily

This isn’t to say the Cowgirls score runs without effort. Rather, they had a tough time bringing runners across home plate at all this weekend. They failed to score five runs in all of their games and were held to two or fewer runs three times. Pennington went 2-for-16 on the weekend, and Vanessa Shippy was 3-for-15.

Lynch hits her stride

Junior Taylor Lynch was in a bit of a slump to begin her season, but she seems to be back to her usual self. She was hitting .185 eight games into the year. Now she has a seven-game hitting streak and has upped her average to .320. She went 7-for-15 on the weekend and didn’t strike out once.

Cowgirls get a handful of strong pitching performances

The Cowgirl pitching staff held opponents to less than five runs in all games but one. Logan Simunek still has a 0.00 ERA through 14 1/3 innings, and Samantha Clakely had her best game of the season against Wisconsin. She pitched a complete game, allowing five hits and only one earned run. She also struck out four.

Here’s a video of coach Kenny Gajewski summarizing the weekend.

If you don’t have headphones or don’t want to watch the video, here are a few quotes.

“Obviously, this was a rough weekend for us,” Gajewski said. “All the way around, we didnt do enough. Most disappointed in our offense. I thought we pitched good enough to win more games than what we did. Thought our defense was OK, not great at all. But we pitched enough to come out of here better than 1-4, that’s the most disappointing thing. On the other end, I’m disappointed in the way we hit. We didn’t make adjustments.”

“I’m sure it feels like the sky is falling at this point, but we’re 15 games in. We’re 9-6. We played a top-10 schedule. We got a lot of good things that can come out of this. I think we’ll be OK.”

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