Week 5 – the final week of the inaugural Athletes Unlimited softball season – is quickly drawing to an end after Sunday’s penultimate day of play.
The season will culminate tomorrow (Monday, Sept. 28) and medals will be awarded during the Closing Ceremony after the final game (8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT, CBS Sports Network) to the top four spots.
The league will also be awarding the Geico Defensive Player of the Year Award, which is voted on by the players and members of The Unlimited Club.
Here are recaps of the games today written by Bruce Miles for Athletes Unlimited and photos courtesy of Jade Hewitt Media.
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Game 27: CHIDESTER TALLIES FIVE RBI, Katiyana Mauga Two Home Runs, AS TEAM WARREN SLUGS ITS WAY PAST TEAM PIANCASTELLI
Old-time baseball legend Yogi Berra used to talk about teams having “deep depth.”
It certainly looks like Team Warren in Athletes Unlimited benefits from “deep depth.”
How deep?
Well, before Sunday’s bruising 15-9 victory over Team Piancastelli, slugger Katiyana Mauga spent several minutes in the pitching circle.
Turns out Warren’s Team Orange got all it needed from Mauga in the batter’s box as she cranked out two of five homers hit by the team on a breezy afternoon at the Parkway Bank Sports Complex.
“Tooly told me I might get a batter,” Mauga said with a smile, referring to her teammate and ace pitcher Danielle O’Toole, who stood in the batter’s box while Mauga practiced pitching. “But I told her no, not at all.”
Teammate Amanda Chidester then cut to the chase.
“She’s our secret weapon,” said Chidester, who got things going in the bottom of the first inning with a two-run homer. Chidester tripled in three runs in a five-run fourth.
Team Warren got homers from Hannah Flippen and Warren in a four-run second inning. Mauga hit her homers, both to left-center, in the third and fourth innings.
“After the first at-bat (a strikeout in the first), I just wanted to make sure I settled down,” she said. “I know I went first-pitch swinging the first at-bat so my next at-bat I was like, ‘OK, I want to see more pitches. I’m going to stick to my plan and execute it.”
The success of this team so far has been in part a tribute to Warren, who has been one of the most effective captains and players in Athletes Unlimited. As a captain, Warren’s teams are 8-0 this season. Her team possesses power, speed and pitching.
Draft plans can go out the window if a team ahead of a captain takes a certain player, but Warren has made her drafts work.
“The majority of the girls that I have on my team were my picks,” she said. “There were a few that were in my secondary plan just because they’re so good. But the majority of them, I was going to take anyway. They’ve been crushing the ball. They’ve been playing defense so well. I’m really enjoying this squad a lot.”
Warren was MVP 2 to Chidester’s MVP 1 Sunday by adding two singles and a walk to her fifth home run of the season. She is 25-for-48 (.521) for the season. She also moved closer to Cat Osterman in the overall points standings with 1,980. Osterman entered Sunday’s second game with 2,094 points.
Warren reiterated she is not concerned with that.
“Not really, to be honest,” she said. “I’m here to play softball and create connections with people that I have never really met. And I think that’s the best part of this whole experience, just getting to know these people on a deeper level. I’m just trying to enjoy these last few days.”
Team Piancastelli hung in there, getting home runs from DJ Sanders, Haylie McCleney and captain Erika Piancastelli. It was Piancastelli’s ninth home run of the season, putting her into the league lead. She took home 20 additional points as MVP 3 of the game.
Because Piancastelli’s team also can hit, there was no letting up on the gas for Team Warren, who scored in every inning but the sixth and seventh.
“We all knew after that draft that they have a ton of great players,” Chidester said. “Just do our best to keep it in the ballpark. How many home runs today, eight? When Hov (Karissa Hovinga) came on (in relief of starter Kelly Barnhill), she did a great job keeping the ball in the ballpark for us. At that point, that’s what we need, to give our defense a chance to make plays. It was great the way we used our pitching staff today and keep scoring runs. It worked out great.”
Here are the Game 27 video highlights:
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Game 28: Team Osterman scores eight runs in the first to cruise to 15-2 win
The way Cat Osterman has pitched this season, she doesn’t need to be staked to an 8-0 lead in the top of the first inning.
But she’ll gladly take it.
Osterman reached double digits in victories Sunday as the team she captains jumped out in front of Team Ocasio 8-0 in the first inning and put it on cruise control the rest of the way for a 15-2 victory at Parkway Bank Sports Complex.
Lefty Osterman pitched a complete game and ran her Athletes Unlimited record to 10-1 as she gave up three hits while walking three and striking out nine.
She also solidified her place atop the overall leaderboard with 2,318 points heading into Monday night’s showdown with Team Warren, whose captain, Jessie Warren, sits second with 1,980 points. That game will begin at 8 p.m. ET (7 CT) and will follow the game between Team Piancastelli and Team Warren at 4 ET (3 CT). Both games will be televised by CBS Sports Network.
Victoria Hayward of Team Osterman ranks third with 1,750 points, and Team Blue captain Erika Piancastelli is fourth with 1,740.
Sunday’s eight-run first inning for Team Osterman featured several interesting quirks:
- Twelve players went to the plate.
- Every batter in the inning scored individual stat points except No. 9 hitter Morgan Zerkle, but she contributed with an RBI groundout.
- Leadoff batter Hayward singled twice and stole a base for 30 stat points.
- No. 2 hitter Aubrey Leach doubled home Hayward in her first at-bat for 20 points and had a sacrifice bunt in her second plate appearance in the first for 10 more points.
- Jordan Roberts, who won MVP 1 honors Saturday, hit a single to deep left-center field that scored three runs.
- Six of the runs were scored against captain Aleshia Ocasio, who did not retire a batter before giving way to reliever Jessica Burroughs.
- This was the second time this season a team captained by Osterman put across eight runs in the top of the first. The previous time, Osterman was not the pitcher.
She said she did not give her team marching orders to put up an 8-spot but added it was nice to pitch with that kind of lead early.
“It was great to get a cushion that early,” she said. “That allows you to relax a little bit and know that one pitch isn’t going to change the game. No, actually those orders didn’t come from me. The team has been talking about, ‘Let’s figure out how to win every inning and put runs on the board and not kind of fall into a lull because we do have a big lead.’ I think we did a great job of that tonight to continue to put runs up almost every inning. Our offense was unbelievable.”
This game also was a nice showcase for the hitters at the bottom of the batting order for Team Osterman. No. 8 hitter Anissa Urtez singled twice, doubled, had an RBI and scored three runs.
Zerkle added to her RBI groundout with a pair of singles, a double, a stolen base and two more RBI. She has quietly crept up the leaderboard to fifth with 1,570 points. Zerkle isn’t a power hitter, but she helps her team with her exceptional speed and ability to get on base and steal.
The Athletes Unlimited scoring system rewards those qualities and that skill set as well.
“I think it’s awesome because each player is different, and I’m still able to get points by getting a single or a double here or there and get some stolen bases in there, and I have a chance to stay at the top,” said Zerkle, who won MVP 3 honors for the game and picked up an additional 20 points on top of her 50 stat points and 120 win and innings points.
This was a breakout game for Urtez, who came into Sunday batting .240.
“We were all being very consistent,” she said of the first inning. “They gave me a lot of confidence because I’ve been struggling at the plate a little, but you know that just being able to have my back and having that confidence really helped me today.”
MVP 1 honors and 60 extra points went to Team Ocasio’s Nicole Pendley, who hit a two-run homer in the fourth.
There will be a couple of interesting things to watch Monday. Osterman has a seemingly comfortable lead in the points standings, but she doesn’t seem to to be giving that a lot of her attention.
“I came in here just trying to get my feet under me and going into however next number of months into the Olympics,” she said. “The leaderboard wasn’t my focus. Obviously I was able to find my groove and put together some great performances. I think more the last couple of days now that everyone’s trying figure it out and see how close everyone can get, if Jessie (Warren) can catch me and leap me and all that kind of thing, it’s been a little bit of thought.
“But since Day 1 I’m just here to play.”
That raises the question of whether Osterman will start Monday night. She drafted fellow lefty Haylie Wagner with the first overall pick for this weekend, and Wagner is well rested.
“Obviously I’ll give it some thought, but throwing seven innings today, Haylie will probably get the nod,” Osterman said. “I would like that if (she) can, she finishes out the game. I’ll be ready if we need to. If we need to do like we did (Saturday) and go back and forth, we will. But she carried the load (Saturday). Today the plan was for me to carry the load.
“We’ll play it by ear tomorrow, but I think it’s fitting that Haylie Wagner finishes it out if she can with being one of the first three to actually get this thing off the ground.”
Here are the Game 28 video highlights:
