TUMWATER — Option 1 is the only option the Tumwater softball team has in the circle this season, and Friday afternoon, Option 1 didn’t know if she had it in her.
Over 100 pitches into her fifth straight day of work, on the hottest day of the year, with the tying run at the plate in the form of Aberdeen’s clean-up hitter, Ella Young needed a boost. So head coach Ashley Lupinski came out and gave her one in the form of a hard truth: the T-Birds didn’t really have any other way to go.
“She was tired, and it was like well, we really don’t have time for that,” Lupinski said. “I said, ‘Yeah, I get it, bud, but we don’t have the time.’ And then it was just, ‘Where do you want to throw her?’”
Ferguson threw first-team all-leaguer Lilly Camp up in the zone, and got three straight strikes to end the frame. Then in the seventh, she went 1-2-3, capping things off with her 15th strikeout on her 155th pitch of the day, sealing Tumwater’s 5-3 (officially non-league) win.
After rain pushed back nearly a week of games for the Thunderbirds, they found themselves playing five in a row, starting Monday. Ferguson threw every single pitch — 588, to be exact — and racked up 67 strikeouts in 33 innings.
“That’s gritty right there,” Lupinski said.
And Ferguson’s right arm led the T-Birds to five straight wins — even though Friday’s didn’t count toward the league standings — keeping pace with W.F. West and Aberdeen at the top of the 2A EvCo standings.
“We really just needed to gas it and leave absolutely everything we have on the field,” Ferguson said. “We’re a tough team, and we’ve played through so much adversity already this year, and we are so mentally strong, and we have so much physical ability, the sky’s the limit for this team.”
Ferguson only allowed two hits and walked three, but the T-Birds behind her committed eight errors, helping Aberdeen tie the game at 2-2 in the top of the third.
After Tumwater struck for two in the bottom of the first, Camps kept the T-Birds quiet for three frames. For the second straight day, though, Tumwater got things going in the fifth, and did it with small ball.
Erika Schock put a bunt down and reached on an error, and Ferguson put a second bunt down to move her up a base. Megan Barrett jammed a ball on her hands about 30 feet but put it right into the perfect spot to reach on an infield single, and Jaime Haas drove a ball down the line that got through a glove to plate Schock.
“We’ve had the one-two punch of Erika Schock and Ella coming up with the bunts, and then we get our big hitters up,” Lupinski said. “That’s exactly what we’re trying to do. They executed really well.”
After a loud out, Zoe Fields broke things open with a hard single to right, scoring two more.
Two more errors helped Aberdeen get a run back in the top of the sixth, but Ferguson — after her heart-to-heart on the mound with Lupinski — got the T-Birds out of it.
Fields finished the day 2 for 3, and Kylie Waltermeyer was 1 for 2 with a triple and a walk. The first five batters in the Tumwater order all got into the hit column.
Tumwater will get a well-deserved weekend off before getting back to the grind against the very same Aberdeen team on the road — this time with league stakes — on Monday.
