Pingel sets home run record in sweep over State Fair

Pingel sets home run record in sweep over State Fair

Allison Pingel is the new single-season home run record holder at Three Rivers. Pingel, who was tied with Destiney Bolen for the record going into Tuesday, hit a pair of home runs in the nightcap as Three Rivers won 7-4. The Lady Raiders also won the 1st game 4-1 to sweep the day and the season series against the Lady Roadrunners. Pingel broke the record with ten games to spare in the regular season. She also had an RBI double in the nightcap to tie the single-season RBI record of 62, set by Lauren Reinagel in 2012. The top 10 on the home run record list is now exclusively Lady Raiders who played at the school in the past eight years and it is the fourth time in five years where someone broke the record. Jessica Menz hit 11 home runs in 2014, breaking Shaya Kinsey's 2011 record of 10. The following season, Abby Tillotson, now a senior at Southeast Missouri State, hit 12 homers. The next year, Bolen hit 15. Even in a pseudo down year in 2017, Ally Hendricks hit 10 home runs to create a four-way tie for fourth place. The career record list isn't much different. Stephanie Stowe fi nished with 10 home runs in 2005 and the rest of the top 10 has played at Three Rivers since 2011. With 17 home runs, Pingel is already tied for second on the career record list with Demesha Huddleston, who graduated in 2015, and five shy of Bolen's record of 22. Tillotson, in 2015, is the only other Three Rivers freshman to hit 10 home runs in a season, suggesting the question of whether or not Pingel can break the career record in a single year. The Three Rivers cleanup hitter has been on a tear the past month. The opener was her fourth game with two home runs since March 22 and she has 10 home runs over that span of 19 games. At that rate, she would break the career record sometime during the postseason. It will likely take her a little longer to track down the career RBI record. Pingel is also on pace to break the single season slugging percentage record (Jennifer Rains, .726, 1992), and the batting average record (Mallory Siebert, .487, 2011). She needs 33 hits and 12 doubles to break those respective records. Reinagel finished with 109 RBIs in 2012 and with 62, Pingel is tied for 10th all time. Pingel had a solo home run in the second inning of the nightcap to break the record and her two-run homer in the fifth gave the Raiders a 5-4 lead. Randi Scruggs hit a leadoff triple in the seventh for Three Rivers (30-11, 13-3 Region XVI) and Kristyn Carpenter got an RBI double behind her. Gracie King singled to drive in Carpenter and gave pitcher Summer Shockley an extra insurance run. Shockley (19-4) allowed four hits and three walks with nine strikeouts in the complete-game win. All four State Fair runs were unearned and Shockley didn't allow a runner on second base after the fourth inning. Scruggs was 2 for 3 at the plate with two stolen bases. King and Pingel also had two hits each while Ali Law was 3 for 3 with a run and a double. Carleigh Burnett (2-3), in her first start since April 8 and second since March 21, scattered eight hits and two walks with two strikeouts over 5 1/3 innings in the nightcap. Shockley closed out the game and allowed three hits and no walks with four strikeouts. State Fair (14-27, 3-13) stranded 10 runners in the fi rst fi ve innings, including the bases leaded in the fourth. The Roadrunners didn't score until the seventh when Shockley gave up a double and then a two-out, RBI single up the middle. Kabrien Rogers got the Raiders on the scoreboard after she double with one out in the fi fth inning and scored from second on Scruggs' single up the middle. In the sixth, King had a leadoff double to center fi eld and Pingel drove her in with another double to center. Scruggs singled up the middle with two outs in the seventh and Carpenter hit a two-run home run, her seventh home run of the season, to give Three Rivers a 4-0 lead. Scruggs was 3 for 4 in the nightcap with a run and an RBI, giving her five hits in the doubleheader. The Three Rivers leadoff hitter is batting .418 for the season, second to Pingel's .489, and has a .468 on-base percentage and is slugging .532. She has also stolen 37 bases, putting her sophomore season at 10th in the singleseason record list for Three Rivers, but way behind Stefanie Ferguson's 2010 record of 78. Scruggs had 53 stolen bases last year, good for fi fth all-time, and is currently second in career stolen bases behind Ferguson's 142. With fi ve triples this year and four last year, Scruggs needs three more to tie both the single season and career records for triples.