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NewsvineThe No. 7 Stanford softball team will finish off its home slate this weekend against No. 21 Washington and No. 4 UCLA. Stanford will face Washington at Smith Family Stadium this evening at 6 p.m. and will play UCLA once each on Saturday and Sunday.
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The Cardinal (41-8, 6-6 Pacific-10 Conference) will be playing Washington (25-16-1, 4-7 Pac-10) for the season series, as the two teams split a pair of games in Seattle in the beginning of the month. UCLA (38-5, 10-2 Pac-10), which is a half-game behind Arizona State at the top of the conference standings, beat Stanford in their lone meeting of the year.
Stanford comes into this round of games having taken two of three games from archrival California last weekend, finally pushing the Cardinal back up to .500 in Pac-10 play. Junior pitcher Missy Penna (29-7) earned Pac-10 Pitcher of the Week honors for her performances, which included two straight one-run games to close out the series.
Penna will take the mound again this weekend as she looks for the kind of run support she got on Tuesday, in a non-conference 7-3 win over San Jose State, instead of the zero the team put up in its last game against Cal.
Sophomores Alissa Haber and Rosey Neill are among the Pac-10 leaders in a number of offensive categories. Haber is fourth in the league in batting average with a .395 mark, while Neill is close behind at .380, and Neill is tops in the conference with 17 homeruns, two shy of Stanford’s team record.
Penna is also second in the Pac-10 in strikeouts with 298 Ks.
Washington is a middle-of-the-road offensive team but it is not backed up by pitching and defense the way that Stanford’s offense is. The Huskies are second-to-last in the Pac-10 with a 2.23 team ERA and have allowed 46 unearned runs, more than one per game.
Still, the Huskies do have some formidable players. Jace Williams is third in the Pac-10 in batting average, just ahead of Haber at .397, and she chips in some power to go with her average. Williams has five homeruns and ten doubles on the season.
The UCLA Bruins present a different sort of challenge altogether. UCLA has the best pitching staff in the conference, with a suffocating 0.91 ERA. Only Arizona State’s staff has more strikeouts (465), but UCLA’s pitchers whiffed 403 batters in 52 fewer innings than ASU. Anjelica Selden (19-3) is the staff ace for the Bruins, leading the Pac-10 with a 0.81 ERA. Donna Kerr is right behind her with a 0.90 mark.
UCLA packs plenty of punch on offense too, though. GiOnna DiSalvatore is near the top of the league in batting, with a .381 average. Four other Bruins help round out the Pac-10’s top 20 in batting average.
As the team wraps up its 2008 home schedule, the Sunday game against UCLA will also be Stanford’s Senior Day. Left fielder Tricia Aggabao, right fielder Anna Beardman, designated player Erin Howe, pitcher Becky McCullough and third baseman Michelle Smith will be honored in a pre-game ceremony after four years with the Stanford softball team.