Saturday felt like a boxing match at Smith Family Stadium in Durham, N.C. The Oklahoma City Spark defeated the Carolina Blaze 12-4 in an eight-inning game. The Blaze showed continued will to fight and finish the season strong, no matter the end of season result. However, things fell apart in the eighth, and Oklahoma City rattled off eight runs to seal the deal.
The Blaze finished with a mixed bag of results. The good was the ability to punch back and put up 12 hits against the Spark’s arms. Alyssa Brito had a fantastic game, going 4-for-4 with three RBIs and a home run. Brito began the scoring in the first inning with an RBI single, and later demolished a two-run home run in the bottom of the fifth to give the Blaze a 4-3 lead.
Ana Gold also put a great performance forward. Gold went 3-for-4 and in the bottom of the fourth, she hit a solo home run to bring the Blaze within one. Whenever Oklahoma City punched, the Blaze punched back in some way. The problem with OKC’s punches is they were loud and came in bunches. Eleven of their 12 runs came in the fourth and eighth innings alone.
After three solid innings pitched, Karlyn Pickens had a rough go of it. The Spark figured it out and the top of the fourth brought back-to-back-to-back home runs from Maya Brady, Sydney Romero and Delanie Wisz.
“The first three innings were a slow start,” Flores said. “Maya got us going in the fourth, and it kind of went from there.”
Pickens however finished the inning strong, including back-to-back strikeouts before turning the ball over to Keilani Ricketts to begin the fifth. If there was any comfort for the Blaze, it was that the damage came one swing at a time.
“The home runs that we gave up were solo home runs,” Dill said. “They weren’t a ton of damage at one time with one swing.”
Ricketts did what she usually does. She kept things steady and avoided trouble for the first couple of innings. Her movement and deception makes it tough on some to adjust to coming off of facing Pickens, who comes at you hard. Brady, who homered off both arms, spoke to the quality of pitching.
“I think they’re a pretty deep staff,” Brady said. “And obviously everyone knows, it’s no secret that Karlyn is an absolute flamethrower, and they brought Keilani in, who’s just a competitor and super veteran in this league. I don’t think there’s one pitcher in this league that is a cakewalk.”
That steadiness held until the top of the seventh, when Brady smashed her second homer of the game to tie things up. The blast was also her 10th of the year, an AUSL season record. Ricketts finished the inning, and then turned it back over to Pickens for the eighth inning. Pickens loves the tough situation, but this has been a page we’ve seen a few times this season, especially during this nine-game losing streak.
“We absolutely put her in tough situations late in games,” Dill said. “And the cool thing about Karlyn is she wants to be in those situations. There was a chance to take her out after she got hit, and she was fine. She wanted to go right back in, so I left her in that moment.”
The eighth inning is when the Spark found their way to eight runs, as the Blaze imploded. That inning was a culmination of a couple of badly timed mishaps, such as an error, and a hit by pitch. Then, the Spark just made contact after contact for base hits that resulted in runs. Pickens also took a comebacker to the upper area from Romero, but remained in the game to see two more hitters before Emma Lemley took the ball to finish.
“You just have a couple unlucky things in that last inning,” Dill said. “Some balls getting hit where we weren’t positioned. A foot to the left, a foot to the right, just some stuff that was unlucky there, and then it just stacked up over time pretty quickly.”
By the time the frame was over, a 4-4 game had turned into a 12-4 final, with six of those eighth-inning runs coming after two were out. Flores pointed to one bat in particular as the moment she knew it was over.
“I think honestly the final knockout, when I knew we were gonna win the ball game, was when Haley Lee got that hit in the eighth inning,” Flores said. Any time you’re coming up to do what she did was huge for us tonight.”
The result extends a difficult stretch, but Dill is not ready to file the experience away as a loss in full. For seven innings, the Blaze showed some resemblance of the version of themselves they have been chasing.
“It depends on your outlook and your perspective on it,” Dill said. “If we look at this game, the outcome didn’t go our way, but for seven innings, we had some really good things stacking together, which we haven’t had in the last couple of games.”
The Blaze knows the outcome of the season, but they are professionals who still show up to do their job. With a nine-game losing streak, it would be easy to show up and just go through the motions, but not the Blaze.
“They’re a very hardworking group,” Dill said. “If things go right, if things go wrong, they still show up the next day ready to work. So in those moments when they still fight and they still have that passion and that energy behind it, I don’t think it’s much of a surprise to those of us who have been here from the beginning.”
For now, the Blaze will take the good with the bad and try again tomorrow.
“In our mind, it’s not a failure at this point,” Dill said. “We’re still putting a fight out there. We’re still stacking good things one after the other.”
