The Los Angeles Queens had a gameplan for the opener of their best-of-three semifinal against the New York Heights on Thursday night in Springfield, Ill., and it worked beautifully.
All season long, Ayami Sato, the 36-year-old women’s baseball legend, has been the Queens’ nominal ace. Sato started the first game in WPBL history for Los Angeles and led the team in games started (six), innings (23) and strikeouts (17) and led the league in strikeout-to-walk ratio by a considerable distance with a 5.67 mark. Sato seemed like the obvious choice to start Game 1 of LA’s first playoff series. But Sato also led the Queens’ pitchers in starts against the Heights with three.
Twenty-year-old Michelle Roche, the Queens’ ostensible number-two starter (she did best Sato, slightly, in ERA and WHIP on the season in nearly as many starts and innings and lead the team with three wins), had not faced the Heights all year. For manager Eric Young, who returned to his team after missing the final game of the regular season due to a family emergency, his choice to start Game 1 was obvious.
In preparation for Game 1, primary catcher Maggie Foxx and the entire Queens pitching staff held a meeting to figure out how to pitch to a New York lineup that exploded for 32 runs in its final two games in the regular season. As Roche told ESPN’s Genna Rose after Thursday night’s game, “We went through all of the data, all of the games and figured out the weaknesses of their batting but also the strengths of our pitching and just went with our strengths.”
Young had one other card to play. In all five of her starts this season, Roche pitched to Foxx, but in the season finale, a tune-up game in which Roche threw two hitless innings of relief, she pitched to the team’s other catcher, Jamie Mackay. Young liked how the two worked together in that game and started Mackay behind the plate on Thursday night.
Ironically, Mackay had missed the pitching staff’s strategy meeting due to illness, but Roche filled her in earlier on Thursday, and the two put that gameplan into action Thursday night with startling success. Over five innings, Roche held the mighty Heights lineup to just one run on four hits, that run coming with two outs in her final inning of work and representing just the second Heights runner to get past second base to that point in the game.
Meanwhile, the Queens jumped out to an early lead on Heights starter Emi Saiki. Saiki made one of her two previous starts this season against LA, surrendering six runs in five innings on Aug. 29. With two out in the top of the first Thursday night, Queens captain Ashton Lansdell jumped on a 1-0 fastball that Saiki left up over the plate and sent it 353 feet over the wall in right center field for the first home run in WPBL postseason history. Lansdell had homered off Saiki on Aug. 29, as well.
Roche worked through some admitted nerves in the first, putting runners on via a hit-by-pitch and a walk, the latter her only walk of the night, then getting a force out at third and a pop-up to second to escape the jam. She then held that 1-0 lead through the third, escaping a similar jam in bottom of the third inning by similar means.
The Queens gave her a little breathing room in the top of the fourth after a trio of singles from the bottom of the order loaded the bases with one out. Saiki got center fielder Mo’ne Davis to pop out for the second out of the inning, but LA second baseman Samaria Benítez, who went 2-for-4 on the night with a walk and four runs batted in, battled Saiki for nine pitches before delivering a clutch, opposite-field single to push the score to 3-0 Queens.
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After Roche worked a 1-2-3 fourth, the Queens added another run in the top of the fifth on one-out doubles by Lansdell and Mackay. Still, at 4-0, the lead was far from safe, and the Heights answered that fifth-inning run with one of their own when, with two outs and the lineup turning over for the second time, right fielder Natsuki Yonetani singled and advanced on a wild pitch, and captain Denae Benites singled Yonetani home to make it 4-1.
At 4-1 through five innings, this game felt nearly as tense as the seesaw postseason opener between the Firebells and Hunters on Wednesday night, particularly given the explosive potential of the Heights lineup. However the tenor of the game changed in the final two innings.
In the top of the sixth, the Queens added a pair of insurance runs against lefty reliever London Studer, who had replaced Saiki the previous inning and stranded Mackay at second base. With a five-run lead and thoughts of possibly needing Roche again later in the series, Young pulled his young starter at 65 pitches and gave the ball to his left fielder, Isabella Villarreal. However, Villarreal struggled to throw strikes and quickly loaded the bases with no outs, so Young capitulated and brought in his shut-down closer, Meggie Meidlinger.
Meidlinger needed just seven pitches to erase all three runners. First, she stabbed a sharp comebacker from Alyssa Zettlemoyer, making her first start at third base for New York in two weeks, and turned it into a double play by doubling second baseman Madison Willan off first base. Meidlinger then got ninth-place hitter Claire Eccles to fly out to center to strand the remaining runners.
In the top of the seventh, Studer ran into her own control issues, with two walks, a hit batter, and a wild pitch surrounding a well-placed single by Meidlinger (in just her second at-bat of the season) to plate one run and load the bases. Now down 7-1, Heights manager Rocky Henley called Keira Izumi in from left field only for Izumi to be just as wild, walking three of the first four baters she faced and allowing all three inherited runners to score run the tally to 10-1.
The Heights made noise against the typically dominant Meidlinger in the bottom of the seventh, with the top of the order plating a pair of runs with the help of a fielding error by Queens shortstop Ayuri Shimano, but it was too little too late for this game, as Meidlinger induced another double play and fly out to center to complete the Queens’ 10-3 win.
An argument could be made that, with Roche dominating the way she did and Meidlinger ready to go two innings, Henley’s choice of relievers was ultimately irrelevant (chalk the Heights’ two runs against Meidlinger in the seventh up to a bit of a hangover after the pitcher-only had to run the bases in the top of the inning). There’s also an argument that Henley let this game get away by staying with Studer too long and bringing in Izumi, who has had control issues all season and entered the game with eight walks and five wild pitches against no strikeouts and a 4.500 WHIP in four innings of work.
Henley admitted after the game that center fielder and left-handed knuckleballer Claire Eccles, who turned in the most dominant relief appearance of the season in her last pitching appearance, was part of her initial pitching plan. Perhaps with incumbent closer Jaida Lee still on the inactive list due to an ankle injury, Henley was overly cautious in deploying Eccles. Perhaps she made the right move in saving Eccles for Game 2. We’ll find out soon enough.
Either way, the Heights were clearly outmaneuvered by the Queens in this game, the Villarreal interregnum proving to be the only flaw in LA’s gameplan. New York now faces elimination on Saturday in Game 2 of this series, which will start at 7 p.m. ET.
Henley told reporters after Thursday’s game that, “as of right now” she intends to start Rakyung Kim in that game. If so, it will be Kim’s fourth start against the Queens this season. Young will likely choose between Sato and Shimano for the Game 2 start. Shimano threw three hitless innings against the Heights in her only appearance against them on Aug. 29.
Tonight, the Boston Hunters will either snap their six-game losing streak against the San Francisco Firebells or their participation in this landmark inaugural season will come to a end. That game will start at 6 p.m. ET.
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Injury Updates
Heights closer Jaida Lee, who rolled her right ankle during practice prior to the final week of the regular season, was on the inactive list for this game and still in her walking boot during the game. ESPN sideline reporter Genna Rose reported that Lee was seen without the boot and walking with a slight limp prior to the game and that Lee hoped to be available next week. After the game, manager Rocky Henley was a bit more optimistic saying that Lee is “day-to-day. I’m hopeful. … We’ll see what happens [Friday], how she wakes up and feels.”
Notes
The start of this game was delayed by more than an hour by rain, and there were two lengthy delays midgame, one in the bottom of the third so the grounds crew could attend to the dirt around second base (about seven minutes), and another in the next inning when Queens right fielder Amira Hondras had the contact lens in her right eye slip out of place (about five minutes). After the game, the Heights denied that the rain delay sapped the intensity that they showed in their final two regular season games, though I have my doubts. As for Roche, she said she knew about the potential delay before coming to the ballpark and passed the time playing games, including hacky sack, with her teammates. She also told reporters she got 11 hours of sleep the night before, adding “I might do that a bit more.”
For their part, the Heights spent the delay celebrating captain Denae Benites’s 25th birthday, Keira Izumi told reporters after the game.
Speaking of Benites, I’ve been critical of the Heights’ catcher’s pitch blocking this season, but Benites (who went 2-for-3 at the plate with an RBI, a run scored, and a hit-by-pitch in this game) had an outstanding game behind the plate for New York on Thursday night and was a huge reason why the game remained so close for so long. By my count, Benites blocked seven of eight pitches in the dirt with runners on base and reacted quickly to catch another four pitches that were way off target, at least one of which required her to leap out of her crouch. She also threw out two runners to help mitigate Queens rallies. In the fourth, with two outs and runners on first and second, Benites back-picked Amira Hondras, catching her off second base to end the inning. Then, in the sixth, she threw out Samaria Benítez attempting to steal second for the second out of that inning.
Finally, I’ve noticed Heights left fielder London Studer lick her bat during an at-bat on multiple occasions this season. She did it again in the bottom of the seventh inning in this game and promptly connected for an RBI single on the next pitch. Studer wasn’t in the postgame press conference (she seemed pretty upset about her pitching performance in the top of the seventh), but I had to ask her teammates about it. Izumi said, “that’s something we’ve been asking for a long time. … She says its a mindset thing.”
Explaining Studer’s thinking, Izumi said, “When you go to the batter’s box, you have to think that you’re the best … hitter in the entire world. For her, that’s her moment to really collect and be like, ‘If the pitcher throws me a strike, I’m going to hit that thing 450 [feet] to the moon.’ And she also just likes to be one with the bat.” I haven’t kept track of Studer’s post-lick success rate, but it worked Thursday night.
