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No. 23 Softball Stymied by No. 22 Florida State
BATON ROUGE – The No. 23
LSU softball team was unable to connect back-to-back wins to open its
five-game homestand as No. 22 Florida State emerged with an 8-1 victory
Wednesday at Tiger Park.
The Tigers (30-14) and Seminoles
(39-10) met on the softball diamond for the first time since LSU’s 2-1
victory in an elimination game at the 2004 Women’s College World
Series.
LSU scored its lone run of the contest during the
seventh inning. Tammy Wray knocked a one-out single to right field
before giving way to pinch runner Alex Boulet, who provided a spark off
the bench with a steal of second base. She alertly scooted to third
base following the stolen base after the Florida State defense was
caught out of position on the play.
Two batters later,
Ashleigh Kuhn cranked a RBI single to plate Boulet for the final margin
of 8-1. Jacee Blades notched a 2-for-3 performance to claim her third
multi-hit effort of the season, while Ashley Langoni drew her 38th walk
of the season to match former All-American Ashlee Ducote’s single
season record set in 2000.
“I really don’t have an
answer for them,” head coach Beth Torina said. “Honestly, they looked
very unprepared tonight, and that’s my fault. “We haven’t played
back-to-back mid-week games this year. We usually have a day to prepare
for our opponents, and we didn’t have time to prepare for either of
them [McNeese State or Florida State] coming back from Tennessee on
Monday. That’s really the only thing that I can attribute this type of
performance to.”
Florida State dented the scoreboard with a pair
of runs in the first and third innings to build a 4-0 advantage.
Kirstin Austin and Courtney Senas provided the key hits and laced
two-run singles to centerfield and left centerfield, respectively.
The
Seminoles tacked on a Celeste Gomez solo home run with one out during
the fourth inning to push their lead to 5-0 and chase LSU starter
Brittany Mack from the game. Mack was dealt her fourth straight setback
by a Top 25 opponent and fell to 12-8 for the season.
“Tennessee,
Alabama and Florida State – I’ve got to give credit to them,” Mack
said. “They’ve got some good hitters. I could try and place the ball a
little better, but they’ve got some really good hitters. I just had a
bad day today.”
Rachele Fico fired 3.2 frames of two-hit relief
and notched three strikeouts. The three Ks allowed Fico to pass Cody
Trahan (2007-10) for sole possession of sixth place on LSU’s all-time
list.
Florida State added three unearned runs in the seventh
inning aided by a Wray fielding error and a Morgan Russell passed ball
to make it 8-0. Monica Perry went the distance for the Seminoles in the
circle to move to 18-5 on the season. She gave up one run on five hits
and recorded four strikeouts versus two walks.
“I didn’t think
that Brittany was the reason we lost tonight,” Torina said. “I think
that we didn’t play very well as a team. I thought that this was the
worst game that we’ve played the entire season on all sides of the
ball. I thought we played defense very poorly, I thought we pitched
poorly, I thought we swung the bat poorly.”
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