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Gainesville girls come back 27-9 to force winner-take-all title game
The Gainesville District all-star softball team of 9- and 10-year olds certainly had a comfortable lead at one point against the Coles all-stars Tuesday night at George Tyler Elementary School in Haymarket.
After all, the girls from western Prince William County won 27-9, a score more commonly associated with football than softball or baseball. The win in the District 10 playoffs forced the series into a do-or-die game three, which was scheduled to be played after press time on Wednesday.
But defining what a comfortable lead is in Little League pretty much comes down to guess work as there are a plethora of factors at play in almost any given game.
Coles carried a 3-0 lead into the top of the third. They beat Gainesville 11-8 Monday and were in position to claim a berth to the state tournament with a win Tuesday, so a three-run lead would have seemed like a nice cushion under normal circumstances.
But in Little League, defensive errors can be as common as base hits. Hitters having problems with the bat can reach base if the opposing pitchers keep throwing the ball in the dirt or over the catcher’s head.
Gainesville took advantage of virtually every opportunity from there on, scoring eight runs in the third inning, 10 in the fourth and nine in the fifth. The girls collected 19 walks in those three innings while striking out only twice.
Starting pitcher Emi Ingalls limited Coles to one run in the third inning, earning an inning-ending strike out in the process.
“She doesn’t get down,” commented Gainesville assistant coach Kim Ingalls, Emi’s mother, adding that her daughter hit the field despite having kidney infection.
The younger Ingalls also helped her own cause by scoring three times.
In fact, 11 out of 12 Gainesville players scored Tuesday. Second baseman Natalie Dost lead the team with four runs while Alexis Swingle, Brianna Burch, Shea Swingle and Emily Regis joined Ingalls with three runs each. Katie Cologne and Donna Darling crossed the plate twice and Brianna Gilmore, Erica Garrigan and Marli Irizzary earned runs too.
Shortstop Shea Swingle did more than just help out Ingalls in the field with some nifty catches, however. She gave Gainesville its first lead of the game in the top of third with an RBI single off the Coles pitcher’s foot that brought in catcher Brianna Burch.
“She had a really rough game hitting [Monday] and she just came back,” said the assistant coach of Swingle as she credited the shortstop for “resilience” in the field.
When Swingle stepped into the right-handed batter’s box again in the fourth, she roped a shot down the leftfield line for what looked like a two-run triple.
Yet she overran third base and, with the ball behind her, had no choice but run home.
The throw to the plate sent the Coles catcher off line, allowing Swingle to earn an inside-the-park home run that gave her team a 14-4 lead.
Anyone hoping for an early exit via the 10-run-lead “slaughter” rule had to wait as Coles battled back from an 18-4 deficit to put up five runs in the bottom of the fourth inning.
That just gave Shea Swingle another chance to driving in more runs, which she did by grounding a 1-0 offering off the second baseman for two RBIs.
Closing pitcher Donna Darling put on perhaps the best single-inning performance of the day with a 1-2-3 fifth inning to end the game on just nine pitches.
“(She) mowed them down, three up and three down,” said Gainesville manager Mike Ashcraft. “And that’s exactly what we wanted her to do.”
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