CENTRAL GARAGE – When the stakes are high and the tension thick in the air, great pitchers do what great pitchers are supposed to do.
Which is?
“Keep fighting to the end,” said Taylor Johnson, King William‘s senior left-hander par excellence in the aftermath of the Cavaliers’ 1-0 cliffhanger of a victory over Randolph-Henry on Thursday evening in the Class 2A championship softball game.
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“Throw strikes. Work the corners. Get outs. Any way you can.”
Against the Statesmen (19-4), the James Madison-bound Johnson did just that with aplomb, finesse and intentionality.
Using a variety of pitches to keep the visitors from Charlotte Courthouse off balance, she faced just 23 batters, struck out 13, walked one, allowed two hits, and, focusing squarely on the task at hand, pitched her way out of a fifth-inning jam with runners on first and second to quell Randolph-Henry’s only serious threat.
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“I knew I couldn’t get stressed out thinking about the runners,” she said of that one close call. “I had to go after the batter and do what I’d been doing all game and get the next out.”
Johnson’s counterpart and Starz Gold Bigham travel teammate Danner Allen, a senior lefty and Liberty University commit, was similarly effective.
Also adroitly mixing a range of pitches, she faced 24 and struck out 13 as well including eight straight in the first three innings. She allowed three hits and worked out of two tense, potentially game-changing situations after Johnson led off the Cavaliers’ fourth with a double to deep left centerfield and Annabelle Townsend opened the sixth with a triple down the right-field line.
The dilemma she and the Statesmen couldn’t solve, though, came in the bottom of the seventh.
Hollyn Krukowski, the Cavs’ sophom*ore second baseman, led off with a blooper to short center which she stretched into a double.
“I’m coming around first base after the hit,” Krukowski said. “My (first base) coach is waving me to go (to second). Then, halfway down the baseline, it was like, ‘Oh, get back. Get back.’ At that point, I was already gone. I’m not fast enough to get back to the base, so I kept going.”
Krukowski slid under the throw to second, rose to her feet, dusted herself off and took a deep breath.
Allen retired the next batter, and with Skylar Meriwether at bat, King William coach Elizabeth Welshonce ordered a high-risk, high-reward delayed steal.
“It’s something we’ve never called before all year,” Welshonce said. “We’d actually been practicing delayed steals the past two weeks, just getting the girls comfortable with doing it.
“It was a huge risk, but that deep in the game, we wanted to go ahead and take that risk. Like we called a bunt-and-run (to no avail) earlier, we wanted to take a chance and see what would happen.”
What happened was that it proved to be the difference-maker.
Krukowski beat the throw to third, then scrambled to her feet and raced home on an error to seal the victory.
“I’ve never (executed a) delayed steal in my life,” she said with a smile. “You can probably tell if you watch it. I just went for it. She (the third baseman) was ready to catch the ball. She had me if she’d caught it, but she didn’t. I couldn’t see anything around me. I was looking straight at the ground.
“I hear Coach go, ‘Get up! Get up!’ “Apparently, she didn’t send me, but I went.
“I (slid into home) and was safe.”
The down-to-the-wire, razor-thin victory was something of an outlier for the Cavaliers but not surprising considering the heightened level of postseason competition.
“We haven’t had a lot of games like this,” said Welshonce, whose team is 18-2 and on Tuesday will host the loser of Friday’s Riverheads-Central (Woodstock) game in the Class 2 quarterfinals while Randolph-Henry plays the winner of that matchup on the road.
“Our season has been pretty successful, but we’ve won by a significant number of runs, so games like this can be such a mental task.
“We remind the girls constantly that it’s every pitch, every inning. We wash every inning. We start over every inning. We talk about our strategy. We adjust every inning. We reset everything.
“We’ve really gotten in the habit of doing that because we knew we’d see a pitcher like Danner. She’s tough, really tough.
“We do a lot of inter-squad competitions at practice. The girls love it. If you develop that (competitive) skill set at practice to keep the mental toughness up at all times, it trickles into games.”
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Class 2A softball
championship (Thursday)
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