KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — There’s a train track just past the outfield wall at Lee Stadium, and through the weekend, trains have come rolling through at a booming volume.
Graffiti litters most of the train cars, much of it using vocabulary unfit for print.
Early on Sunday, one train passed through with the word “DONE” spray-painted in blue across the side.
By late afternoon, the train was motionless, silent.
At 2:31 p.m., Tamara Statman’s bat connected with the ball, sending it into the outfield, so Nancy Bowling rounded third base at the behest of Mike Candrea.
If the train had moved, right then and there, making the loud, booming noise it had all weekend, Bowling wouldn’t have heard it, anyway.
All she could hear was a voice screaming in her head.
Bowling said it told her, “Run. Faster.”
Done.
Bowling scored, and Arizona walked off with a 4-3 win in eight innings to advance to next weekend’s best-of-three Super Regionals series at No. 4 Auburn.
“Nancy was rounding third, and I was laying on the floor (thinking), ‘Go faster!’” said pitcher Danielle O’Toole. “It was great.”
Added Bowling, “I was just trying to get to home plate.”
That Arizona is advancing to the Super Regional round came down to the late-game heroics of two unlikely players in Statman and Bowling.
Statman is just a freshman, better known for throwing more than 1,000 strikeouts as a pitcher at Horizon in Scottsdale.
Her RBI on Sunday won the game.
“Going through my head was pretty much just, ‘Hit the ball, hit the ball where it’s pitched to me,’” Statman said. “I just had to relax and do what the game gave to me.”
Added Candrea, “That’s why she’s in our lineup.”
Bowling has never been the talkative type, but her story speaks for itself — she spent most of the 2015 season on the sidelines dealing with personal issues, just a spectator during last year’s postseason. Before this year, she’d exclusively been a pitcher for the Wildcats, anyway. Now the redshirt junior is the first baseman, batting fifth in the order, and on Sunday, she scored the game-winning run.
In Knoxville, she hit 4 of 8 in three games with one RBI, two walks and two runs scored. In all three games — two wins against Tennessee, one against Ohio State — she was the first Wildcat to record a hit.
“Nancy, what a story for her,” Candrea said. “The last few weeks of the season, she’s really been our spark.”
The real story of Sunday’s game — and the whole weekend, really — was O’Toole, Arizona’s ace pitcher. The San Diego State transfer was stellar in her first two starts of the regional, pitching two complete-game shutouts. After a quick first inning on Sunday she had retired 24 straight Tennessee batters.
The Volunteers’ Megan Geer broke that spell in the second inning with a leadoff single, and then the real damage was done in the fourth.
Aubrey Leach led off with a single, then stole second base. Meghan Gregg moved her to third on another single. After a strikeout, Lexi Overstreet hit an O’Toole change-up over the fence in right field for a three-run homer.
After walking the next batter, Candrea pulled O’Toole for freshman Taylor McQuillin, who made her postseason debut.
“(Overstreet) was waiting for it. Gotta give her kudos, right?” O’Toole said. “I wasn’t surprised. I kinda had a feeling … I kept drilling her in one spot, and then it was just, ‘If she’s going to hit, she’s going to hit it.’ And she did.”
Said Overstreet, “I just went in there looking for what I wanted to hit and it was an off-speed, and I was ready for it.”
This wouldn’t be the last of O’Toole, though.
McQuillin started out by walking two straight batters, but then settled down and pitched three innings of shutout ball.
After opening the seventh inning by allowing two straight singles, Candrea went back to his ace, a somewhat surprising decision considering O’Toole had started three straight games and the possibility loomed of a fourth game coming should Arizona have lost.
But Candrea wasn’t thinking like that.
“I wasn’t playing for the second game; I was playing for the first game. And I really felt like anytime you’re in this situation and it gets to that second game, I think the momentum goes the other way,” Candrea said. “It was a gut feeling that that was the time, and that was the place.”
So O’Toole went in and didn’t allow another baserunner.
Arizona fought back from that early 3-1 deficit — the first run coming on a Mo Mercado RBI single in the third — by scoring two runs in the fifth on an Ashleigh Hughes groundout and Mercado sacrifice fly.
“I was told to be ready,” said O’Toole, who pitched 5ª innings, allowing four hits and three earned runs and striking out five. “I was thinking, ‘I gotta give this team a chance. There’s nothing they can do if I don’t.’”
Now the Wildcats are off to Auburn, Alabama.
“It really was a good weekend for us,” Candrea said. “Now we get to go down deeper to the South and see what we can do.”
