Poplar Bluff falls 3-2 to Parkway South in C5 softball quarterfinal
Pitch after pitch after pitch, Poplar Bluff hitters kept fouling off anything over the plate Thursday.
Parkway South pitcher Ashley Ware struck out seven of the first eight hitters she faced, but each time the Mules were getting their timing down.
After falling behind, Poplar Bluff was able to pull even with two hits while a third started another rally late. But that’s all the offense the Mules could muster in a 3-2 loss in the MSHSAA Class 5 quarterfinal.
“We started to come alive with those bats, we were just a little bit late with it,” Mules coach Joel McDuffey said.
Parkway South (23-8) scored twice with two outs in the bottom of the fifth as freshman leadoff hitter Lauren Bacon had the two biggest hits to put her team in the final four for the first time since 2008.
Poplar Bluff finished 18-13, earning the program’s fifth state playoff appearance.
It was the final game for seniors Emilee Cheek, Morgan Courtney, Serena Davis, Layla Sullivan, Breann Thresher, Lauren Webb and Ella Zgaynor.
“I can’t express how happy I am and how proud of the girls I am,” McDuffey said. “They fought their butts off the entire game. They didn’t let anything kill our momentum, kill our spirit, they kept fighting.
“That’s all I can ask for.”
Bobby Strenfel Field was packed with nearly 400 fans, including a student section that stood the entire game while the football team watched from a hill beyond the left-field fence.
“It was amazing,” Courtney said of the atmosphere. “Normally we don’t have anyone in our stands, just our parents. Having people from school that are in our class there to support us, it just felt amazing … an unexplainable feeling honestly.”
Both teams were not favored to be here with the Mules winning the District 1 title as the No. 3 seed while Parkway South was seeded fourth in District 2.
“They’re an amazing team,” McDuffey said. “They’ve got a great pitcher and she was on her stuff today.”
Ware, coming off a 15-strikeout performance in the final, was again dominate early. The junior, who finished with 11 strikeouts, only threw 25 pitches for balls and nearly half were in one inning.
She struck out the side in the first, fanned two more in both the second and third with the other outs coming on grounders back to her and the third baseman.
“She’s good with varying up with what she’s doing, she’s keeping us off-balance,” McDuffey said.
Thresher struck out seven, two shy of her season high, while allowing three runs on four hits, two walks and a hit batter.
The senior had the same stat line as Ware through four innings, allowing one run and two hits while striking out seven. She also wiggled out of jams after the leadoff hitter reached base in three innings.
“She always does an amazing job,” said Courtney, the team’s catcher. “She manages to pull herself out of bad innings if she has them. She’s consistent with everything she does.
“She just manages to pull through every time.”
Said McDuffey, “She pitched a stellar game, it was awesome to watch. She was out there the whole time, confident, her pitches were working for her and she was putting them where she wanted.
“She’s not a big strikeout pitcher but she was doing her work today.”
South, which won the coin toss to be the home team, scored in the bottom of the first when Bacon turned on a 2-2 pitch and hit it over the center-field fence. It was her third homer of the season.
Thresher and the Mules defense retired nine of the next 10 hitters until they were finally able to get to Ware.
Courtney said that while they had nothing to show for it through three innings, the Mules felt like they were getting close.
“(We were) fouling off pitches one by one until we get the right one and it’s going to go somewhere when we do,” she said.
In all, Poplar Bluff hitters fouled off 38 pitches, 22 with two strikes to extend at-bats.
“Fouling off pitches is what we’re looking to do until we get the one that we can drive,” McDuffey said. “We did what we were wanting to do. We stayed aggressive, we kept our head in the game and it just didn’t fall our way.”
It did in the fourth when Thresher fouled off the first two pitches and then singled up the middle. Madelyn Hefner’s bunt sent Sullivan, the courtesy runner, to second before Cheek’s RBI double tied it.
Consecutive ground outs to the left side ended the inning with Cheek stranded at third.
“It was huge,” McDuffey said. “We get that inning going and that really gets the girls fired up.”
The Patriots scored in the fifth after a one-out walk and a sacrifice bunt moved the runner to second. With two outs and a 1-2 count, Bacon sent a fly ball to the left-field gap. It appeared she might have hit another home run but Cheek, the center fielder, got her glove on the ball leaping in front of the fence and only one run scored.
Bacon scored when the Mules couldn’t hang on to a fly ball after the inning started with Webb making a diving catch running in from right field.
As they’ve done often this season, the Mules answered right back in the sixth when Kennedy Zgaynor led off with a double to the right-field gap.
After a pair of strikeouts, Cheek fouled off four two-strike pitches to earn a walk. Adrianne Casey hit grounder to the second baseman, who didn’t have time to tag Cheek as she headed to second and then had to rush a throw that ended past the first baseman. That put the Mules within a run with runners at second and third.
The Patriots escaped with the lead on a fly out that the center fielder tracked down running in.
The Mules were retired in order in the seventh.
“We just couldn’t pick up that last hit,” McDuffey said. “Trying to will it the whole way, standing there going ‘we’re going to hit it into the gap’ but it just didn’t turn out that way and sometimes that’s how it goes.”
The Mules were making their first playoff appearance since 2005 and the program last won a playoff game in 1993 when Poplar Bluff placed fourth at state.
Poplar Bluff opened this season against the defending state champs, Rock Bridge, losing 11-0 then split two games with Incarnate Word before beating Kelly and Farmington, all three of which won district titles. The Mules beat Notre Dame three times, the first an 11-inning thriller at home and the last in the district final, hitting three of their five home runs on the season, including a pair of grand slams.
As the No. 3 seed in the district, the Mules beat Mehlville 3-1 with a sixth-inning rally, knocked out second-seeded Oakville 11-7 in a game that was suspended by weather for two days and then fourth-seeded Notre Dame 6-5 in the final Monday.
The Mules were 9-2 coming into the quarterfinal when holding teams to three runs or less but fell to 3-6 in one-run games on the season.
“In a quarterfinal game, a game this big, that’s what you want it to be. That’s softball,” McDuffey said. “You just look for that clutch moment and if we could have gotten one more than it would have been a different game.”
The Patriots were the No. 4 seed in the District 2 tournament, beating Northwest 11-1 before top-seeded Eureka 6-5 in the semifinal. In the final, the Patriots beat second-seeded Marquette, which had won 10-1 on Sept. 30, in the final 4-0.
Parkway South won three state championships in softball, the last in 1995, while the 2008 team placed second.