One of the few highlights for the UCLA softball team in a
weekend in which it lost three of four games was the pitching and
hitting of Lisa Dodd. While her pitching had already begun
returning to her old form, on Sunday, her hitting finally did too.
Dodd, whose batting average had dropped to as low as .143, got two
hits on Sunday against Stanford, one of them a double that started
a Bruin rally. “It’s encouraging, but it’s still
frustrating,” Dodd said. “Why can’t I hit like
that every day? I know I’m a good hitter, I just have to
figure it out.” On top of the two hits, the sophomore pitched
her third straight quality start, shutting out Stanford’s
high-powered offense in the first game of Sunday’s
doubleheader. Up until mid-April, Dodd had been struggling both in
the circle and at the plate, struggling to match the numbers she
put up a year ago. Then, she allowed only one run in a start
against Arizona and has pitched two consecutive quality starts
since. And her two hits on Sunday may be a sign of returning to
last year’s form, where she was a key hitter for the Bruins
at the end of the season and especially in the postseason, where
she hit .412 at the Women’s College World Series.
“She’s a May Bruin,” UCLA coach Sue Enquist said.
“This is when she starts to heat up. She’s putting it
all together.” Dodd’s shutout against Stanford came in
the same series in which the Cardinal hit Bruin ace Anjelica Selden
hard. “I felt good out there,” Dodd said. “I was
hitting my spots. I kept the hitters off balance and was hitting
the corners.”
OFFENSIVE WOES REDUCED: The Bruins (25-15, 6-9 Pac-10) showed
signs of coming out of the offensive slump they had been in for
most of the season, but still weren’t happy with the way they
hit as a team. They scored 16 runs in the three-game series against
Stanford, but many on the team say they could have scored more.
“We started to make adjustments at the plate, and we hit
better,” catcher Emily Zaplatosch said. “We need to
continue to do that. Overall, we improved a bit but it’s
still not where it needs to be.” When the Bruins fell behind
7-0 early in Saturday’s game, they rallied to score five
runs, but squandered many other opportunities to score runs after
that, including stranding Andrea Duran on third after she hit a
leadoff triple. And in Sunday’s second game, UCLA jumped out
to a 3-0 lead in the third inning, but mustered only two hits the
rest of the game, while Stanford scored five runs late in the game
to win. “We stopped fighting for our lives at the plate after
they saw the scoreboard and saw we were up by three,” Enquist
said.
SHORT HOPS: Enquist made several changes to her batting order,
with Duran, now leadoff, and Caitlin Benyi, now batting third, both
trading places. Also, Enquist moved Dodd down to the eighth spot in
the lineup, with Kristen Dedmon and Krista Colburn each moving up a
spot to sixth and seventh, respectively. … The team has fallen to
No. 12 in the latest ESPN/USA Softball Top 25 Poll, which was
released Tuesday. … Friday’s game at Arizona will be
televised on ESPNU at 7 p.m.