Dramatic seventh-inning rally means Oklahoma City for Michigan, uncertainty for Missouri

ByGRAHAM HAYS
May 30, 2016, 11:26 AM

— -- ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- It was a rally that left the woman with more wins than any other coach in the sport wiping away tears and dancing, neither an act commonly associated with Carol Hutchins. It was a win she told her Michigan players ranked among the best in the history of one of the most stable, admired programs in college softball and delivered its 12th trip to the Women's College World Series.

Time will tell if it was also the rally that ended Ehren Earleywine's employment at Missouri.

Down three runs entering the top of the seventh inning and three outs from having to play a winner-take-all finale on a day when its pitching ace had already been brought to her knees and dispatched to an ice bath with a sore back, No. 2 Michigan scored four runs before it ran out of outs against No. 15 Missouri. Then it held on by its fingernails to finish a 5-4 win.

"That's one of the very greatest victories ever in the history of Michigan softball," Hutchins said.

This wasn't a referendum on two programs. It was just a softball game between two very good teams. It turned on hits and runs, plays made and not played. It even turned on sunglasses left in the dugout. Both teams accumulated nine hits. Both teams left six runners on base.

Michigan just scored one more run. Such is softball.

But darned if it didn't feel like some sort of parable all the same. Sports does that sometimes.

A game with high stakes nonetheless meandered through the early innings, even the drama of the home run that put Michigan ahead 1-0 undermined by Lindsay Montemarano stumbling as she rounded first base and tumbling to the ground before completing her circuit.

But inning after inning, Missouri starter Paige Lowary grew into the game. And with each easy inning -- Lowary at one point retiring the top six batters in Michigan's lineup in order on only 14 pitches -- the lead looked more tenuous for the higher seed. That was all the more true after Michigan starter Megan Betsa needed treatment from the team's trainer for what she said was the recurrence of back issues.

Betsa stayed on the field, but Missouri's Taylor Gadbois tied the score with an RBI double soon thereafter. And an inning later, with Betsa now out of the game and in an ice bath in the team's clubhouse, Missouri's Rylee Pierce hit a three-run home run to give the Tigers a 4-1 lead.

All Missouri needed to carry its momentum to a decisive third game were three more outs. The first of those looked certain when Montemarano did what so many Michigan hitters did on the day and popped up a Lowary pitch. But on an afternoon that saw sunny skies give way to intermittent clouds passing overhead, Missouri senior shortstop Sami Fagan, playing without sunglasses, lost the ball in the sun.

The ball hit her and fell to the ground, Montemarano safe at first.

"That's a lesson learned the hard way," Earleywine said. "Bring your glasses out before the inning."

Sierra Romero's sacrifice fly after two more singles cut the deficit to two runs, but Michigan also had two outs by then. That's when Kelly Christner and Kelsey Susalla, the latter a cleanup hitter mired in an extended slump, delivered back-to-back RBI hits to tie the score. A wild pitch eventually allowed Christner to come home with the go-ahead run.

Gadbois made it to third in the bottom of the inning, Missouri's running game finally on display after she stole second and third, but the game ended with her there.

It was the fight to make the rally happen that Hutchins suggested moved her to tears. Michigan wins a lot and wins in a way that most hold up as a standard of how college athletics should function and how a coach can be, for lack of a more accurate phrase, a hardass. But it's more about becoming a better person, with athletic success in some ways merely the byproduct.

"Our culture is our strength, I believe that," Hutchins said. "Our culture is more important to me than being able to hit the ball or pitch the ball -- although you need a little bit of that. But culture is what makes everybody accountable. Culture holds the standards high and players rise to the standards. And culture is the only reason I will ever punish a kid, if they try to damage our culture. We have worked really hard over the years and all these young women are just models, models of our culture."

It is the culture that is under fire at Missouri, unfairly if you listen to the fans who made their support of Earleywine evident in both voice and attire here as everywhere else the past few weeks. And unfairly if you listen to any player who speaks publicly. But under fire all the same.

"The past month has probably been the most rewarding month of my life," Pierce said. "Our team and our leaders made huge risks and did things that could really change our program. And the future of our program, being a freshman it really mattered to me. I just love my team. I'm so grateful to have a senior class like those three because they wanted to not only do good this year, but they wanted to leave the underclassmen with the best. And that's Coach E."