The dominant play slowed, but didn’t stop for the No. 13 Missouri softball team Wednesday as it extended its win streak to 14 with a 3-0 shutout of Southern Illinois.
Missouri got on the board in the first inning, when senior Marla Schweisberger launched a two-run homer over the centerfield fence, scoring senior Rhea Taylor. They added another run in the third when Megan Christopher drew a bases-loaded walk, bringing in a run to put the Tigers up 3-0.
Missouri pitching took over from there. Sophomore Chelsea Thomas (7-3) lowered her season ERA to 0.38 with four innings of two-hit ball. Junior Kristin Nottelmann pitched the final three innings to earn the save and complete the shutout, the 10th time in the last 12 games Tiger pitching has not allowed a run. Thomas said she felt good about the outing for both.
“We both need to see batters mid-week, and this is a good little refresher for the weekend,” Thomas said. “We’ve got our home tournament, so we both want to throw well. Getting to see batters that we don’t face every day like our team is good for both of us. So I’m glad we get to split, because we both need that.”
After the game, coach Ehren Earleywine said that having such a potent pitching staff makes things easier from a hitting perspective.
“I’ve played on teams where you don’t have good pitching, and you feel like you’ve gotta go score seven runs,” Earleywine said. “I think it relaxes the offense a little bit, it’s a nice luxury to have. Having said that, we might’ve been a little too relaxed today.”
The pitching performance overshadowed the rather difficult day for the Tigers at the plate. Missouri left 10 runners on base and twice failed to cash in with the bases loaded. Earleywine said after the game that he expects his team to beat mid-tier teams to “score seven-plus” runs, and Taylor said the team understands the expectation.
“It’s kind of indirectly said,” Taylor said. “He doesn’t necessarily say it to us, but we know. We have that mentality too. This year we can win big, we’ve got the talent to.”
Thomas told reporters after the game that the Tigers were “ready for the competition” of the Big 12, an assessment that Earleywine agreed with but also warned against.
“The problem with that is as a player if you get too caught up thinking about a month later, in between now and then you can throw your swing or pitching mechanics off,” Earleywine said. “This game will humble you if you’re not in the here and the now. And I hope they don’t have to learn that lesson the hard way because things can go awry really quick.”
Missouri is now ranked 13th in the nation, but still sits behind teams with similar records like Stanford and California despite having a longer winning streak. Even so, Earleywine said his team doesn’t let the rankings worry them.
“The ranking people are idiots,” Earleywine said. “Most of them couldn’t coach a T-Ball team, yet they’re ranking the top 25 teams in the country. We never talk about it. They know I think they’re idiots, so we never talk about it.”
As Missouri prepares to play five games against mid-tier teams over the weekend, Earleywine said he’s hoping for different kinds of wins than the one Wednesday.
“Yeah, the game was over in an hour twenty five minutes, and I get to get out of here and go home,” Earleywine said. “But at the same time, we should dominate teams like that, we really should. We’ve got to do better.”