What Did The Baylor Sweep Show To You?

[1KCSoonerFan]

To me:

1.) It showed our defense and pitching are our best one-two punch right now. I'll take shutouts all day long.
2.) Our offense is good enough to win most games with our shutout defense and pitching. Again, I'll take it.
3.) Our Gals got grit and moxy to go on the road and sweep a shutout series that included a couple close games. (Close by how I felt them as I listened on the radio.)
4.) Glad Sanders continues to improve! And the team did hit the ball hard many times...just right to a defender it seemed. (I have realized over the previous two years that there is no defense against a home run, and many of those wall bangers were a fraction of an inch off the barrel of the bat from being round-trippers and game breakers.)

I don't know how close we were to real 'trouble' in this series, but there were a couple times when mere luck, probability, or being a human and making a mistake may have turned a sweep into a two-out-of-three series win. Especially the last game.

I think we can handle Kansas at home. Could Wichita State be that 'trap game' that has been discussed before? OSU looks a bit vulnerable with the Texas sweep...but are they?

This year more than ever, it has come into my mind that if the Sooners can win in two-out-of-three categories (pitching, defense, and offense) they will win most of their games. The Baylor Series showed this to me more clearly than ever.

[The Far Journey]

I completely agree with your four points, 1KC. Our offense is still the best in the country but not as dominant as 2021 & 2022. The pitching and defense though are as dominant as the offense was the last two years. I believe this year's offense still has it in them to reach those heights. Blasting double digit wins on a regular basis. We'll see. Right now the midweek games look in doubt due to weather. I know. Patty's next project. Make Love's field an indoor stadium.

[TN Sooner]

Remember baylor swept 2 from Tennessee, the best in the sec, last week. This us a really nice series sweep.

Coming down the stretch, there are really only 2 teams (excluding OU) that haven’t stubbed their toes lately - ucla and fsu. Of course we dominated ucla early and edged fsu mid-season.

Our pitching is simply dominating right now - best in the nation by far. Same for defense. Jennings/Lyons/Brito is best infield in nation and it’s not close.

Offense is scuffling a bit right now. Tiare is absolutely cruising right now - her power is clearly peaking. Cydney finding her bat can be huge. Tough weekend for Jayda - seems to be favoring right shoulder. Rest of the team is a little ragged, but they each woukd be the best hitter on Baylor right now.

We can afford a loss. I’m looking to rest everyone at least 1 game this week. At this point, probable rain-outs in Wichita and Tulsa would be fine with me.

[TropicalSooner]

Kind of a wide open question there K.C.

I'll throw something up in a bit.

[Bixby_Sooner]

This team is versatile they play the way they need to to win, even if it means changing styles in-game.

They have mental and physical toughness, on offense and defense.

They adapt to what is thrown at them and while it's not HR on demand type ball, they can use speed or play small ball to runners on base and move them around

They have an awesome pitching staff and defense.

They feel no pressure and fear no one.

[White River]

In game one I thought the Sooners played with intensity and focus through the first few innings. That seemed to diminish as the game went on. Understandably, with the lead and substitutions it happens. I didn't feel the same intensity for either game Saturday. It just seemed they played to their competition. West pitched well against the Sooners but let's be honest, she's not an elite pitcher. It's a long season and it's hard to stay at your best for long periods of time. There is certainly a look and feel to this team that's different when they come ready to play. They seem to believe they can turn it on and off when they want to and maybe they can. I can see another loss or two in our future before we get to the regionals. The brightest positive from this week is the emergence of Sander's offense!

Any time you sweep a series against a respectable team, you should be happy. I don't worry about this team's ability to put up offense. They have the ability when they bring their A game mindset. I just hope they can hit the on switch and crank it up when they need to.

[oufanforever]

It is difficult to sweep an opponent, even more difficult to do on the road, even more difficult against an ranked conference foe. I am pleased with the results, but there are things the team can work on.

The Good:
1. OU's pitching staff is the best in the nation. May not be all that close by the season's end. Bahl is on fire now. Storako and May were not as sharp in their starts (2 K for Storako and 1 K for May), but they were plenty effective enough to win a game.
2. Cydney Sanders is coming on. Finally we are seeing the potential we say in the fall being realized. It is just in time for the post season run too.
3. Defense wins games. The great double play by Hansen at the plate and the alertness to double off the runner at 2B. May covering 3B on the bunt Brito dived for to tag out the runner. Those are game changing plays OU make regularly.

The Bad:
1. Adjust to the environment faster. Wind was blowing in during the early game on Saturday, yet our hitters constantly tried to hit one out. Resulting in pop ups and fly outs that do not move the runners on base. Patty even talked about it during the in-game interview, yet the adjustment was not made.
2. Executes the small ball plays. Patty called for a sac bunt but Brito couldn't lay it down, Patty tried to hit-and-run and it resulted in an ugly infield pop-up by Coleman that double offed Boone to kill the inning.
3. OU started game 3 by hitting the ball hard against Orme, but when she adjusted OU couldn't adjust as well. It is also the 3rd time OU faced her, has to do better there.

The Ugly:
Nothing.

[inconnu]

Right On, White River. We are tempting fate, and seem to be only semi-motivated, unless we play traditional powers. I don't think there are very many teams who we fully respect right now.

[BixSooner]

No disagreement here for the previous comments.
In regards to hitting, this team is elite, physically and mentally. The mentally part of this extends to the pitching staff of the other team. No one wants to face that lineup. However, hitting is an up and down thing. That’s baseball/softball. OU also has an elite coaching staff. Patti will get any mental breakdowns corrected (not really in this camp that there’s an issue) by post season.

[TropicalSooner]

To me:

1.) It showed our defense and pitching are our best one-two punch right now. I'll take shutouts all day long.
2.) Our offense is good enough to win most games with our shutout defense and pitching. Again, I'll take it.
3.) Our Gals got grit and moxy to go on the road and sweep a shutout series that included a couple close games. (Close by how I felt them as I listened on the radio.)
4.) Glad Sanders continues to improve! And the team did hit the ball hard many times...just right to a defender it seemed. (I have realized over the previous two years that there is no defense against a home run, and many of those wall bangers were a fraction of an inch off the barrel of the bat from being round-trippers and game breakers.)

I don't know how close we were to real 'trouble' in this series, but there were a couple times when mere luck, probability, or being a human and making a mistake may have turned a sweep into a two-out-of-three series win. Especially the last game.

I think we can handle Kansas at home. Could Wichita State be that 'trap game' that has been discussed before? OSU looks a bit vulnerable with the Texas* sweep...but are they?

This year more than ever, it has come into my mind that if the Sooners can win in two-out-of-three categories (pitching, defense, and offense) they will win most of their games. The Baylor Series showed this to me more clearly than ever.

Nicely done KC. Your 4 points are absolutely spot on. And the Baylor series did show all of those quite clearly.

To me, it also showed a couple of other things.....and I'll acknowledge that I am probably a solitary man on an island here:

Pitching;
Yes! Please give me shutouts!! Everytime!!
But it didn't seem the pitching was as dominating as it has been in the past. Bahl is doing Bahl thngs--no question there. 10 K's in game one. She's back.
Storako-- pitched a little over 6 innings and had 2 SO's. Against Tech, she had only 4 SO's in a full 7 innings, and against Louisville, she had 2 in a little over 3 innings.
May--had only 1 SO in the full 7 innings against Baylor. Back against Tech, she had 8 SO's in a little over 5 innings-great-, and against Miami, she had 5 in a little over 4 innings. Baylor's not a great hitting team. The team BA is only .296. Just puzzled that they figured her out?
Please don't misunderstand, I am not complaining about the shut-outs. And, I guess the silver lining in the Baylor series is that with the two games with a low SO component, all the grounders and fly outs are keeping our defense sharp. I just don't want to see the drop in K's becoming any kind of a trend. We can't have that going into the rest of the season and post-season.

Offense:
First: Yep--have to agree with TN Sooner here--it just feels like we're trying to force it, maybe? It's not the total LOB number that gets me anymore but RISP-LOB does. We miss good opportunities to put games away early by not bringing our runners on third and second home. At least we were getting the bat on the ball--we only had 2 strike outs in game 1 Saturday and none in game two. But it was really disappointing to try to power the ball into the wind and wind up with fly outs and pop ups.

Second: Our small ball game needs work. We have trouble executing bunts and steals. We miss them altogether or wind up doubling off runners on base.

What is nice about our offense is that we have power all the way up and down the lineup. Coleman, Jennings, Hansen, can put one out of the park any time. So can Erickson, Lyons, or Lee. And if they all get in a slump, we've still got Brito, Nugent, and now Sanders coming on strong. It's been said that good pitching beats good hitting--or something like that---and feel free to correct me--but it's like the Okie Lite/ Tejas game this weekend, Kilfoyl pitched 7.2 innings of 4 hit shutout ball, and then for the first time all night, the horns loaded the bases and drove in the walkoff run with a single. The cowgirls just couldn't help their pitcher out. With anything. Moral is, no matter how good your pitching is, ya still gotta score a run to win the game. Fortunately we did that in both games Saturday, but still, my nails are gone now. If we can get back to early season bringing runs in early and often, then the pitching staff can relax a bit more.

Defense:
Awesome. Keep it up.

All three games should have been "comfortable" wins. Maybe game one was--but it didn't seem to be what it could have been. Games two and three were very uncomfortable and against a Baylor team that got tagged for 26 runs by taco tech the week before. And we got only 13 the whole weekend? Baylor's pitching isn't elite. But we made them look better than they are.

[MontOUfan]

One of my takeaways from the series is that Baylor is a better softball team than a lot of people give them credit for. Before the weekend, they were batting .305 as a team. Not great, but the same as Florida State, and better than Kentucky, Washington, Stanford, Virginia Tech, Auburn, and Alabama. Their staff ERA is 2.31 which is 1.5 runs better than last year and again better than some traditionally very good programs. This season they had only given up 20 homers compared to the Sooners 16. I think I have let their poor/mediocre seasons since 2018 color my perspective somewhat. I did think that in the second game on Saturday the Sooners actually hit the ball pretty hard, but a number of liners and hard ground balls were right at fielders.

[inconnu]

I expect to see Jocelyn Alo show up somewhere soon as a hitting coach. She might want to play for the OKC Spark this summer, but after that, I believe she could land a hitting/offensive coach job if she was interested in doing that. Top notch hitting skills are apparently not all that common in college softball, and she likely knows as much about how to do that as anybody.

[portalball]

If OU pitching has a off day against a really good team they will get beat, this year team does not have the fire power to over come it.
I don't know why but for some reason I think UCLA is the better team. Not saying OU has no chance but the odds are not as great as in the past

[White River]

If OU pitching has a off day against a really good team they will get beat, this year team does not have the fire power to over come it.
I don't know why but for some reason I think UCLA is the better team. Not saying OU has no chance but the odds are not as great as in the past

I have way more confidence in this team now than I had in the middle of March. Yes, they have to step their offensive game up for the stretch run and UCLA or FSU could get hot and beat them if they don't, but I believe they have more than enough in all 3 phases to win it all. They are more likely to get beat by a Wichita State or Kansas where they show up flat, than by another top 10 team. There is also a chance a mid-major with a good pitcher could take a game from them in the regionals, but I don't think anyone can beat them more than once. They have to finish strong and I'm betting they will. Last years team looked uninspired in the Big 12 Championship game against OSU but came ready to play when it really mattered to them.

Bet the Sooners for the three-peat! They'll be ready when the time comes............ but so will some others!

[AustinTXSooner]

If OU pitching has a off day against a really good team they will get beat, this year team does not have the fire power to over come it.
I don't know why but for some reason I think UCLA is the better team. Not saying OU has no chance but the odds are not as great as in the past

Well, you didn't think we were ready for UCLA right before we beat them 14-0. So let's look at UCLA. They have four losses:

• 0-14 (5) Oklahoma

• 0-8 (5) California

• 3-4 Washington

• 0-3 Oregon

I see three shutouts, two run rule losses, and a run rule loss to an unranked team. I'm struggling to understand why this makes them a better team than us. Did you read their board when we beat them? They don't think that they're better than us.

They have a good pitching staff. Not quite as good as ours. They have 4 really good hitters, but then it falls off after that. Maya Brady looks like she's making a serious run at player of the year. We have 4 unearned runs, they have 17. That tells me that their defense isn't as good as ours either.