The No. 15 Oregon Ducks softball team will make its Pacific-10 Conference home debut tonight at 6 p.m. when it welcomes No. 3 Arizona State to Howe Field for the first of a three-game series.
Oregon (29-6, 1-2 Pac-10) enters the series after a tough weekend against the Washington Huskies in which the Ducks saw their 12-game winning streak come to an end with a pair of narrow losses. The Sun Devils (35-3, 2-1 Pac-10) shared a similar outcome last weekend in Berkeley, when their eight-game winning streak was ended in a 3-2 loss on Sunday.
In addition to that eight-game stint, Arizona State also rode a 23-game winning streak that lasted from Feb. 13 to March 17 before falling to Michigan, 1-0.
This weekend’s matchup pits the Pac-10’s best hitting team in Arizona State (team batting average at .380) against the Pac-10’s top pitching staff (team ERA of 1.66) led by Oregon sophomore Jessica Moore. But the Sun Devils are arguably the most well-rounded team in the conference, if not the nation, with the second-best team ERA (1.71) and the top fielding percentage (.980) in the Pac-10.
Individually, junior infielder Katelyn Boyd will be among the most impressive players to watch as she returns off a first team All-American season as a sophomore in 2010.
Boyd, a 5-foot-5 Phoenix product, has played in all 38 games for the Sun Devils, while batting .467 at the plate. She leads the Pac-10 in runs scored (53), RBI (41), home runs (11) and walks (30), and also has 11 doubles to her credit.
True freshman Alix Johnson has provided Arizona State with a spark at the plate in her first collegiate season, batting .417 with 37 runs, 30 RBI, five doubles and three home runs thus far.
On Oregon’s side senior Monique Fuiava has done most of the heavy lifting offensively for the Ducks, as she’s tallied a .440 average with 32 RBI and six home runs in 30 games played.
With two of the top three pitchers in the conference in Moore and Arizona State’s Dallas Escobedo stepping into the circle tonight, getting on the board early will be key for both squads. Moore (14-3) has posted a 1.21 ERA in 2011, while Escobedo, a true freshman from Glendale, Ariz., has gone 17-2 with a 1.32 ERA and conference-best 163 strikeouts.
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