BENTON – The Rangerettes had a serious case of the Mondays, as they fell back to 6-6 on the season, and 0-1 in the SIRR, as they lost their first conference game of the season against the Herrin Lady Tigers 7-0 at Benton Park on Monday afternoon.
Before spring break, the Rangerettes were on an impressive tear, winning three straight against quality opposition and going a full week's worth of games in which they averaged over 10 hits per game. Against the Lady Tigers, Benton's bats fell sadly silent however, as they came out of the game with only two base hits, one courtesy of Aubrey Hunter, and the other from Lauren Zinzilieta. Herrin wound up with 11 hits in the game against Benton pitcher Taylor Mosley.
Herrin went ahead 2-0 in the top of the first after the Rangerettes, playing their first game since last Wednesday's loss to Vienna, committed two fielding errors. In their half of the first inning the Rangerettes had a couple different base runners after Ally Gischer reached on an error, and then Aubrey Hunter and Cristen Shaw both took their turns on first after grounding into fielder's choice balls.
Herrin scored again in the third after Rebecca Moffett reached on a single. Moffett scored three runs in the game, and had previously tripled in the first. She reached base two more times on walks. Hunter gave Benton a chance in the fourth, getting a single and then stealing second to get into scoring position, but the Rangerettes were unable to capitalize on the opportunity.
The Lady Tigers put the finishing touches on the Rangerettes in the seventh when they scored three runs off three hits. Coach Sarah Stowers laid some of the blame to Monday's slump on the five day layoff, but was still proud of her girls for taking mostly good cuts in the game, and only striking out once against Herrin's starting pitcher Calli Sutcliffe.
After the game Stowers gave a lot of credit to Herrin's cleanup hitters. "Whenever they have their 3-4-5 hitters up, they're pretty dangerous. Moffett is pretty dangerous. We tried to be smart on our pitch calls, but any time they'd get base runners on, we could see it start to slip, and our confidence went down too," added Stowers.
"We didn't strike out a lot, we just didn't get a lot of base hits. Normally our hitting has been pretty decent, and our fielding wasn't too bad. Kudos to them, because they do have a couple big hitters, and they showed up today. I would say we have some rust to work off from spring break, but we'll just have to keep moving and hopefully things will start to swing back our way," Stowers concluded.
The Rangerettes will regroup today as they play their second conference game of the season in an away game against West Frankfort.
