Five errors might be one lesson for softball

Sometimes, the best lessons are the toughest to take.

And the lesson Michigan's softball team learned yesterday at the hands of the Spartans was a particularly tough one.

Michigan lost its first game since March 7 when it fell to Michigan State, 7-4, on Tuesday. After trailing 4-0, the Wolverines produced a three-run inning, and when Melissa Gentile launched a lemon rocket almost to Jenison Fieldhouse, looming in the distance beyond the left-field fence, the game was tied.

Typical Michigan softball. The No. 2 team in the country seemed as though it couldn't be denied. It looked as if it were only a matter of time until they scratched out that extra run.

FILE PHOTO Sara Griffin didn't commit any errors against Michigan State this weekend, but her teammates did while she was on the mound.

But the Spartans stood their ground, and when they came to the plate in the top of the sixth, they took back their lead right from under the Wolverines' noses.

Yes, the top of the inning. Doubleheaders in softball switch the home teams for the nightcap. Not that it mattered any for the Wolverines. Their five-error performance transcended such triflings like the nominal home or away designation.

Regardless, it was the Michigan State fight song that blared when the on-the-road-in-name-only Spartans went ahead as Tiffany Yeager scored on a Carrie Carpenter single to right.

Instead of the Wolverines breaking green-and-white hearts by slowly advancing runners around the bases, it was the Spartans who found a way to scratch out a run.

Then another.

And another.

Each run brought the entire team out of the dugout to celebrate behind home plate.

And when Michigan State pitcher Stephanie Noffsinger struck out Michigan's Stacey Judd to end the game, the Spartan leapt into the air and her teammates ran out to surround her.

All the Wolverines could do was stand silently and watch.

Or was it?

Michigan centerfielder Tammy Mika, who had done so well in the first game with three hits and two runs batted in, contributed only an error in the second game.

And, in that first game, she came within a softball's width of scoring a run as well. In the fifth inning, Carrie Carpenter, Mika's counterpart in center, threw her out at the plate by the slimmest of margins. Mika made a nifty move to try and reach around Michigan State catcher Margaret Hollis. But Carpenter's throw was dead-eye accurate and the score stayed tied until the fifth inning.

But what might have been in the first game never came to be in the second.

In fact, it just got worse.

After the second game, Mika stared at her cleats as she traced circles in the dirt with them. She chewed on her lower lip and it was a long time before she spoke.

"We're gonna learn from it," she said.

Some people stumble through life, missing all the subtle little signs, the lesson in nearly everything. Especially things that hurt. Some people shrug it off. And learn from it.

Good teams do, too.

Some teams will let an insides-churner like Tuesday's get to them.

They'll take their mistake to heart, and forget that the mistakes were aberrations. They'll let the mistakes define them.

And some will try to take what they can from their failure, take a lesson, and use it to motivate themselves.

Maybe this is just what hey needed. A loss to sharpen their focus, which, shortstop Rebecca Tune noted, might have worn a little dull during their 17-game win streak.

"It's not like we were just cruising, but ...," Tune said.

Tune explained how she and her teammates are "so used to making the play," that when they don't its a bit of a shock.

But when they do, she said, the miscue is quickly forgotten.

Well, usually.

Nothing was usual about Tuesday's five-error conflagration.

In Michigan State's three-run fifth, Tune and first baseman Traci Conrad booted grounders. The gaffe was Conrad's first of the season. Tune followed with another in the sixth and then it was Melisa Taylor's turn, as she inexplicably lifted her glove over Jacqueline Hall's routine, two-out grounder.

Pam Kosanke rounded out the erring by sailing a throw to first base well over Conrad's head.

But cruising time was over, and learning time had just begun.

And today's game will be the first time they'll be tested, to see what they've learned. But it's not as if they're never allowed to make an error again.

This test is open book.

There is no curve.

04-16-98