Graham Hays article excerpt for all those people that think you need 2 pitchers in the NCAA tournament to win it.
3. How many pitchers does it take to win a championship?
Erin Gabriel
Tennessee Athletics
Auburn and Tennessee pitchers such as Erin Gabriel, pictured above, combined for just 29 complete games in 113 starts this season.
That isn't the set-up for a joke of the light bulb variety. It's a question that in some ways may define how this tournament -- and this college softball season -- is remembered.
As of this past weekend, Division I teams had already scored almost four thousand more runs this season than they did in the entirety of the 2014 season, which itself set a record for the most runs per game scored in NCAA history. Offense is everywhere.
Not coincidentally, as teams look for someone, anyone to get some outs, "pitching staff" has become the phrase of the season. It seems increasingly as if the softball ace who starts almost every game and finishes what she starts is going the way of baseball counterpart Old Hoss Radbourn -- the 19th century Hall of Famer, not the Twitter star from the 21st century.
Just five seasons ago, pitchers in the Pac-12 completed 54 percent of all starts. Entering play this past Saturday, the current crop of Pac-12 pitchers had completed 34 percent of games started this season. They aren't alone. Go back to that same 2011 season and Big 12 pitchers completed 57 percent of their games. This season it's 41 percent. Big Ten pitchers completed 58 percent of their games in 2011 and 44 percent this season.
That isn't indicative of one or two programs spreading the innings around. It is at least the framework of a seismic shift (and the percentage of games completed in those power conferences has, in fact, declined at a more or less steady rate over the past five seasons).
There are no better example of the new look than the teams that just played for the SEC tournament title Saturday night (in Baton Rouge, home of LSU's pitching quartet).
Auburn and Tennessee pitchers combined for just 29 complete games in 113 starts this season. In her final season in Knoxville, Monica Abbott alone threw 45 complete games. Even more telling, Megan Rhodes threw eight complete games as the No. 2 pitcher that season, two more than any of Tennessee's current pitchers have at the moment.
Yet when push comes to shove, which is to say when we get to the postseason, it remains difficult for coaches to play anything other than the hot hand. For as much talk as there was about Florida using all three of its pitchers in the game that clinched the championship a season ago, Hannah Rogers still pitched 66 percent of the team's postseason innings, and 78 percent of its postseason innings beyond the regional round.
Similarly, Oklahoma generated considerable buzz when it started No. 2 pitcher Michelle Gascoigne in the clincher in 2013. Yet Keilani Ricketts pitched 81 percent of the team's postseason innings, including all 12 innings the night before Gascoigne's start -- and Gascoigne was one of 10 finalists for national player of the year that season.
In both cases, we saw something different than Taryne Mowatt throwing more than a thousand pitches in a week during Arizona's title run in 2007 or Dallas Escobedo throwing every postseason inning for Arizona State in 2011. But not that different.
The only time in the super regional era that we saw a team win a championship while consistently using a true pitching staff when it mattered was UCLA in 2010. Who remembers that Aleah Macon led the Bruins in innings pitched that postseason or that Donna Kerr was in the circle when the postseason began and ended? Even in that case, the Bruins likely would have handed the ball to Megan Langenfeld more often had she not been bothered by blisters.
Will a staff win the championship this season? Or will a pitcher?
