Southwest moves past South with rally in seventh
By Jonathan Starkey
Staff Reporter

Above, Southwest's pitcher Bianca Idar warms up before taking the field on Tuesday night against South. Below, South's Ramie Pruitt throws one from the outfield in Tuesday's game. Photos by RUSLANA LAMBERT

“It was a tough loss,” said Tim Myers, manager for the Southern team out of Morristown. “They staged a great seventh-inning rally. They’re a great team. I’m proud of them,” Myers said of his own team. “They’ve come a long way.”

Blanca Idar, the winning pitcher, struck out two of her 10 in the ninth and got Brittney Watson, the losing pitcher who scored South’s only run, to fly out to leftfield to end the game. Idar relieved starting pitcher Aman Hinojosa in the third and pitched five innings without giving up a hit.

“I felt good,” Idar said. “My speed wasn’t there (Sunday). It was a lot faster today. We held together and did good. We knew we had to step it up.”

After six innings without giving up a run, Southwest centerfielder Jackie Gonzalez led the seventh with a single into left-centerfield off of South pitcher Leslie Poole and advanced to second on a throwing error.

Poole left the game after the at bat, having only given up four hits and no runs in six full innings. A run was later charged to Poole when Gonzalez scored three batters later on a groundball to the shortstop. The throw home was late. Ashley Perez, who reached on a single, later scored the eventual winning run on a sacrifice fly off the bat of right-fielder Ashley Marquez.

“We played pretty good until the end,” Poole, 15, said after the game. “They’d seen me the whole game,” she said about leaving the game in the seventh. “They needed a different look. I was getting tired, too.”

The win moved Southwest — a team from San Antonio, Texas, that returned nine players and a manager from the team that finished third in Roxana last year — to 2-0. They were scheduled to play the West contenders, a team from Glendale, Ariz., on Thursday. After winning its opener on Sunday and two days off, West was scheduled to meet with the EMEA representative from Den Bosch in the Netherlands at 5:30 p.m. on Ebbets field on Wednesday.

“They want another shot,” Joe Leal, Southwest’s manager, said of his team. Southwest lost by one run in the bottom of the seventh to the eventual champion in the 2006 semifinals. “That’s a big reason why I’m still here. They still have that taste in their mouths.”