Collins: After a couple slams, Marywood 'deserved the happiness'

May 6—The dichotomy of feelings is not lost on Sam Baltrusaitis.

On one hand, the Marywood star knew as soon as her aluminum bat belted that softball in the seventh inning Saturday afternoon what was coming next. Everybody at Neumann University's Bruder Field did. No mystery could possibly survive.

That ball was gone. Baltrusaitis had hit a go-ahead grand slam in the last inning to provide the difference in a dramatic Pacers win in the second game of a doubleheader against nemesis Neumann. And in its own bubble, it was all really simple to understand, the type of moment that would be the highlight of just about anybody's athletic career.

And yet, days later, Baltrusaitis still struggles to find the words to put it into her own kind of perspective.

"In all honesty," the freshman said, her voice still hoarse and cracking from a weekend's worth of yelling and screaming and cheering on teammates, "I'm still in shock. I'm still in shock from the first one."

Wait ... The first one?

This is a good time to mention that hitting game-winning grand slams in the last inning of Marywood's games this season has sort of been Baltrusaitis' thing.

She has done it twice now. To get technical about it, she hit them on back-to-back gamedays, and one might argue that Baltrusaitis' blast against Neumann that secured a 10-7 win on Saturday isn't even the more impressive of the two.

With Marywood trailing by three runs April 15, the former all-state slugger at Lackawanna Trail drilled a walk-off grand slam at Pacers Field to stun Gwynedd Mercy, 10-9. It was a shot down the left field line, with darkness settling in so quickly, getting the seventh inning completed seemed touch-and-go for a bit. Coaching third base that day, Pacers head coach John Butash begged the ball just to stay fair as it hummed past him.

When it happened again Saturday, he simply raised his hands and pumped his fists skyward. Partly in celebration, mostly in disbelief.

"I've been coaching 40 years, at all different levels, and nothing ever in my career has been anything close to this," Butash said.

Even factoring in the drama of those two wins, the statistical improbability of it all, the fact they were big reasons why a team predicted to finish fifth in the Atlantic East Conference in the preseason but wound up finishing third ahead of the playoffs that start Friday, Butash insists the enormity of those moments goes a bit beyond the standings.

There might not have been a player that needed those blasts more than Baltrusaitis, he said. And there certainly wasn't a team that needed those happy moments more than Marywood.

Just a day after Baltrusaitis' walk-off grand slam against Gwynedd Mercy, Marywood had to shut its program down two weeks because of a positive COVID-19 test. A program having to take a COVID pause isn't exactly front-page news anymore, but that news shook the Pacers.

No other softball program in the Atlantic East had a COVID shutdown in 2021, but for Marywood, that was the second. The first sapped what amounted to three weeks off the Pacers' schedule between a season-opening nonconference doubleheader sweep of Cazenovia on St. Patrick's Day and the couple days of practice before they got back on the field April 9 to start the conference slate.

The second cost them 15 more days, ending just before that doubleheader with Neumann last Saturday.

Seems trivial in comparison to what they lost in 2020, but Marywood essentially lost five weeks of softball this season.

"It would be easy in both of those games to say, 'Well, the game was just good to play, because we haven't gotten much of a chance to play,'" Butash said. "But to come back and do that? Twice? For Sam to have the focus, and the ability, to slow things down, to not get over-amped, and to hit a bomb?

"I told the team after that, we deserved the happiness."

Speaking of deserved happiness, the past two years haven't exactly been a trot around the bases for Baltrusaitis, either.

A three-time all-state player at Lackawanna Trail, she missed her senior season in high school after undergoing surgery to repair a torn labrum in her shoulder, then had just two hits in three starts, still working past the injury during the abbreviated 2020 season for the Pacers.

"That was very tough for me, sitting out my senior season," Baltrusaitis said. "But, I took that as a big learning experience to cheer my teammates on. I think that's why I'm the person I am, because I sat out that season. Now I know, to the full extent, how important it is to be a teammate, how much you need to push the other girls.

"I could easily have sat on the bench and moped the entire time because I wasn't playing. But that's not what it's about. It's not about me."

Which is why, when she finally does find the words to talk about the grand slam moments authored with her at the plate, that if Annie Heyen, Rae Hatala, Cait Becher and Jackie Burke didn't all rip sharp singles in that game April 15, she'd never have gotten to the plate with a chance to hit a grand slam. Same with Hailey Rapisardi, Mara Hamm, Brooke McCay, Sierra Mulgrew and Emily Rose bringing her to the plate in that same situation with seventh inning singles again against Neumann. And it would have been all for naught in the second game had Pacers pitcher Gianna Marsico not slammed the door on Neumann in the bottom of the seventh.

This is a lesson brought to light by a rather illogical feat, for sure. It's a story about moments that define a season, that bond a group. But maybe they're not exactly the moments, Sam Baltrusaitis will tell you, that seem obvious from the outside.

Because while the time she hit game-winning, seventh-inning grand slams on back-to-back to back gamedays will always be a story she'll tell, she'll remember something else even more.

She'll remember a team that had ridden an emotional roller-coaster all season jammed into a bus to ride home after that comeback against Neumann. Celebrating loudly. Downing every slice of pizza they could grab. Talking softball for hours. Looking forward to the promise of better days that somehow seemed much closer to reality.

After all, what doesn't seem possible when you've experienced the impossible?

DONNIE COLLINS is a sports columnist for The Times-Tribune. Contact him at dcollins@timesshamrock.com and follow him on Twitter @DonnieCollinsTT