The Women's College World Series gets started on Thursday, and here's what you need to know about every team vying for a softball championship.
Alabama escapes a bases-loaded jam to beat Tennessee in the Knoxville Super Regional and earn a trip to the Women's College World Series.
Among World Series teams, only Duke has allowed a lower on-base percentage than Texas' 0.267, and only Oklahoma and Duke have allowed lower scoring averages. The righty trio of Teagan Kavan, Mac Morgan and Citlaly Gutierrez is stylistically diverse but almost interchangeable in terms of results -- all three have started 15 to 21 games, and all allow an OPS between .527 and .592 with an ERA between 1.79 and 2.20.
Maybe this will make the 2024 World Series a fair fight. OU won five WCWS games by a combined 23-3 last season, after all. The Gators are a bit on the mortal side in the pitching department: They allow 2.9 runs per game , and they've given up 40 home runs . Freshman Keagan Rothrock has started 40 of 64 games this season, and while she's got power and plenty of strikeout capability -- and she shut out both UCLA and Alabama -- if you make contact, you're probably going to hit the ball pretty hard.
If you're going to punish Kilfoyl and the OSU pitchers, you better be really good at hitting pitches low and outside.Kilfoyl, a second-year Alabama transfer, is 26-3 for the season; she and secondary pitchers Ivy Rosenberry and Kyra Ayrock are all righties, and they all throw 63-68% of their strikes on the outside half of the plate; they can nibble a bit too much at times , but you just don't ever get anything good to hit.
This hasn't really been just a postseason thing with Palacios, either. For the season, she's got a .491 on-base percentage and nearly as many home runs as strikeouts . If you throw her a strike, she's probably going to crush it.Oklahoma's recent success has almost made us forget about how important it can be to peak at the right time -- the Sooners, after all, spent most of 2022 and 2023 in peak form and never deviated.
In the end, however, that was particularly unfortunate for Mizzou. Duke advanced to its first WCWS -- the third"first" of the season -- with an extra-inning win in the deciding game.
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