Katie Osiecki, North Bar’s pitcher, was away for a good deal of the summer, but she returned for the East Hampton Town women’s slow-pitch softball league’s playoffs, and, with her accurate high-arc deliveries, made her presence known.
North Bar (formerly East End Land Planning), the defending champion, won the playoff trophy again, downing the P.B.A. in a semifinal series before bulldozing Groundworks in a doubleheader played at the Terry King ball field in Amagansett on Aug. 15.
Groundworks, which had edged Montauk Dental in the other semifinal, winning two in a row, but by one-run margins, never got going in the final. Kaci Koehne’s grand slam home run in the bottom of the fourth inning was all North Bar needed to win the first game 10-3. And to make matters worse for the Landscapers, North Bar executed a triple play that took Groundworks out of the top of the sixth.
Koehne, North Bar’s lead-off hitter, began the bottom half with a triple, after which Kathy Amicucci drove her in with the team’s 10th run.
Groundworks dug itself into a hole from the get-go in game two. Koehne and Amicucci doubled in leading off, Amicucci’s plating Koehne. Mylan Eckardt then reached first base safely on an infield error as a run scored, and after Osiecki flied out to center field North Bar’s third run came home as the result of another infield error. Three straight singles ensued, upping the lead to 5-0, and a two-out bases-loaded single made it 6-0 before a strikeout finally ended the uprising.
Groundworks scored two runs in the bottom of the first, and, after North Bar had extended its lead to 10-2 in the second, thanks to three doubles – two of them by Koehne and Amicucci – and two more Groundworks errors, briefly made a game of it with four runs in the bottom of the second, a bases-loaded r.b.i. single by Katie Kuneth and a two-run double by Ally Friedman doing most of the damage.
North Bar, which took a 10-6 lead into the third inning, wasn’t done, however. By the time it was over, the defending champs, with Amicucci, Eckardt, and Osiecki getting r.b.i.s, had put five more runs across, all of them having been plated with two outs.
Again with two outs, North Bar upped its lead to 18-6 in the top of the fourth, another double by Koehne accounting for the 17th and 18th runs, the latter enabling the champs to win by the mercy rule after Osiecki shut down Groundworks in its fourth and fifth at-bats.
