Oklahoma softball: If not the best, this Sooner group is again challenging the record book
By Chip Rouse
Baylor had everything going for it. The 19th-ranked Bears had already beaten the top-ranked Oklahoma softball Sooners once this season, and now they were hosting the best team in college softball for three games on the same field where Baylor handed OU its only loss of the season back in February.
Oklahoma, however, came into the series with Baylor with much different intentions. “We take pride in not letting anybody beat us twice,” said Sooner head coach Patty Gasso after her team had won both ends of a Saturday doubleheader over the Bears and completed a three-game sweep of upset-minded Baylor.
Mission accomplished. The Sooners made sure of it by not allowing Baylor a single run over 21 innings. It’s a blinding flash of the obvious that if you don’t score you can’t win, and the Bears found that out three times over from an Oklahoma pitching staff that has been in lockdown mode this entire season.
With Texas winning all three games in its home series with Oklahoma State this weekend, the Sooners have opened up a four-game advantage in the Big 12 standings and are clearly in the driver’s seat to capture what would be an 11th consecutive regular-season conference title and 15th in the 27-year history of the Big 12. No other school has won more than four conference championships.
Sooner pitching, which leads the nation this season in earned run average (0.90), won-lost percentage (42-1, .977), shutouts (25) and ranks fifth in strikeout-to-walk ratio (4.91), has allowed just two runs in Oklahoma’s last nine games. The Sooners have swept the last two series against Big 12 opponents (Texas Tech and Baylor) and not allowed a run.
But it’s not just pitching that has been responsible for the Sooners’ success this season. OU leads Division I softball in multiple batting categories and also ranks No. 1 nationally in fielding percentage with just 11 errors in 43 games.
Oklahoma has eight games remaining in the regular season and will likely play a minimum of eight or nine more in the Big 12 tournament and NCAA postseason. That would get the Sooners as many as 60 wins, which would be below their all-time best of 66 wins in 2000. Their all-time best winning percentage, though, was .952 set by last season’s 59-3 team. The Sooners are currently at .977 this season.
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As dangerous as this year’s Oklahoma lineup has been offensively this season, again leading the country and the Big 12 in most major statistical categories, the Sooners are not likely to challenge their all-time best, which belong mostly to the 2021 and 2022 national championship OU teams.
The Sooners certainly have had good pitching in their recent championship years, otherwise they never would have been the last team standing, but it has been Texas that has dominated the Big 12 record book and UCLA and SEC teams that sit atop the record books insofar as excellence in the pitching circle.
Oklahoma pitchers have thrown 25 shutouts through games this past weekend. The all-time OU record is 33 in a single season, which is tied for the third most all-time in Big 12 history. Texas has the Big 12 record in the shutout category with 35 in 2005. The NCAA record is 51 by the Tennessee pitching staff in 2005.
The current OU staff ERA is 0.85, which would be the lowest in Sooner softball history, with a previous best of 1.05, set last season. The Big 12 record is 0.60 by Texas in 2005. UCLA holds the NCAA record, twice posting a remarkable 0.18 ERA, in 1984 and ’85, a record that may never be broken.
The Sooners make very few mistakes in the field. This has been a hallmark of Patty Gasso’s Sooner teams in recent seasons. Oklahoma holds three of the top-four Big 12 fielding percentage seasons, and if the Sooners continue at their current pace (.985 fielding percentage through 43 games) they could conceivably top the previous best fielding percentage (.986, also owned by an Oklahoma team, in 2018, with 22 errors). Tennessee is the record holder nationally with a .988 fielding percentage, including 21 errors, in 2007.
Records are made to be broken, as they say, and the Sooners have been doing that on the hitting side in recent years. The 2023 Sooners might not set any new season records, but the numbers they do end up with are certain to be right there among the very best in both the conference and very best in both the conference and NCAA record books.