So Begins the Legend of Jordy Bahl
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This is when everything is still new. When you’ve only heard each of the anecdotes a couple of times. The one about Oklahoma coach Patty Gasso surveying a relaxed recruiting cookout and noticing Jordy Bahl oblivious to the proceedings, locked instead in an epic game of one-on-one basketball with her brother. Or perhaps the one about when Bahl willed her travel team from Nebraska (yes, right between New Mexico and Idaho in population) through the losers bracket to win a PGF Nationals.
It is the feeling of anticipation when the plane touches down on the first day of vacation. Or the first chapters of a book that keep you turning pages deep into the night. It’s a giddy rush of possibility.
We nearly spoiled it. In an age when simply waiting for things to happen is anathema, when even Super Bowl ads are leaked in advance, we couldn’t help ourselves. We built her up. Even Bahl’s coaches and teammates got in on the action. They couldn’t resist.
“You guys, United States of America, get ready because she is legit,” reigning USA Softball Player of the Year Jocelyn Alo said on the eve of the season. “She’s one of the best pitchers I’ve ever seen, I would say. And I’ve seen quite a few pitchers in my day.”
That is admirable confidence and candor. It also didn’t leave Bahl much wiggle room.
And yet reality exceeded expectations.
After a brief but mesmerizing debut on the season’s opening day, a dress rehearsal, Bahl stepped into the circle against UCLA on Feb. 12. Except ‘step’ doesn’t capture it. She strode onto the field in front of a Southern California crowd and struck out All-American Briana Perez. She struck out 13 more batters before it was over, finishing as she began when Perez swung through a pitch for the final out.
Bahl had the swagger. She had the pitches. She had that ineffable something that, over time, separates the merely excellent from the eternally remembered.
Even as the freshman continues to excel, striking out 34 batters and walking four in 20.1 innings against opponents who have yet to manage either an extra-base hit or an earned run, nothing is certain. We can’t know after two weeks if she will be one of the best ever or merely very good. We don’t need to know. The thrill isn’t born of certainty, but from the hint of limitless possibility. From time to time, someone comes along who seems not just made for the moment but perfectly at ease with it. Someone who will make you remember the first time you saw her play.
“I knew people would learn about her early,” said Nebraska Gold director Larry Swift, one of her club coaches. “What she did to UCLA even caught me a little bit, the high level of strikeouts. But I firmly believe she may be that next generation player that you compare to Cat and Monica.”
Not Your Typical Freshman
Most experienced Bahl’s debut as glimpse of the future. Kenzie Fowler experienced it as a memory. Fowler is one of a select few who know what the world looks like through Bahl’s eyes. It was a little more than a decade ago that Fowler was the two-time Gatorade National High School Player of the Year, still the only two-time winner of the award that Bahl won last year. Only three years removed from its most recent title at the time, Arizona built a marketing campaign around her before she ever threw a pitch. And a day after throwing a one-hitter in her debut, she struck out 18 batters in top-15 clash against Northwestern. She pitched Arizona to the championship round of the World Series that season.
Watching highlights of Bahl’s performance against UCLA and listening to the word-of-mouth buzz circulating through the softball world, Fowler felt the deja vu wash over her.
“I feel like there’s a certain fearlessness that you have as a freshman, that you can be in those situations differently than any other time in your career,” Fowler said. “You could absolutely see that in her eyes going up against UCLA. Any other pitcher, it’s UCLA, it’s a big-time crowd, big tournament and it may seem a little daunting. But I remember my mindset as a freshman, and it’s almost ignorance is bliss, in a way. You just have this attack mentality and you’re so zoned in that nothing else matters.
“It’s such a magical place to be, and that’s why I was having flashbacks thinking about it.”
Tangible and Intangible Tools
There is, of course, more to Bahl than magic and charisma. She arrives in college with a remarkably advanced arsenal of pitches and command of all of them. As D1Softball’s Tara Henry noted from a few feet away against UCLA, Bahl excelled that night despite not even throwing much of the hard, heavy drop ball that was among her calling cards as a prospect.
Maybe the pitch wasn’t sharp in warmups, maybe Oklahoma pitching coach Jen Rocha just wanted to work on development in a high-profile but ultimately low-stakes February setting. It didn’t matter. Bahl’s velocity, which Patty Gasso said touched the low 70s throughout the fall, her east-west breaking movement and her offspeed pitches were more than enough.
Pitching technicians will have endless fun reverse engineering her excellence.
“Any time you’re throwing that hard and you have a good mix of speed, you’re going to have athletes off balance,” Gasso said before the season. “She gets a lot of strikeouts just because she has a good mix of pitches. If they’re not strikeouts, she gets a lot of groundouts. People don’t hit her hard.”
But the fearlessness that Fowler described is as much a part of why any of those pitches work as Bahl’s grip, spin rate or strength regimen. She wasn’t just able to throw those pitches when she took the field against UCLA; she wanted to throw them in front of a packed house against the most famous brand name in the sport. She needed that stage to be her best.
Gasso described it as the ability to find “a space of focus that others can’t.” She said Keilani Ricketts found that space as a junior. Paige Parker discovered it as a sophomore. Each had plenty of success before what the coach identified as the moment of evolution. But it took time to master the real-world application — imagine the difference between learning a language in a classroom and trying to ask for directions in some metropolis in the middle of rush hour in a rain storm. The underlying ability is still there, but it sure is harder to make the words come out right.
The noise doesn’t distract Bahl. It only sharpens her focus.
“She is afraid of no one and nothing,” Gasso said. “She is quite different from any freshman I’ve ever seen.”
And she isn’t the only one who thinks so.
“For me, as a catcher, it’s not often that you find a pitcher that almost has the same mentality that you do,” said famously competitive Sooners All-American Kinzie Hansen. “When we’re on the field together, it feels like I’ve met my match.
“That chick will go blood, sweat and tears with me on that field. She’ll do whatever it takes.”
Success and Short-Term Memory
The confidence will be tested. Part of the magic early in a phenom’s career, Fowler noted, comes from calling on experience earned through high school and club titles. Success is all those select few players have ever known. They’ve always been the best. And they don’t know enough yet to know that won’t always be the case.
But everyone gets hit. In Fowler’s case, the wakeup call arrived during a series at defending champion Washington. The Huskies knocked her out of the box in each of the final two games. She remembers sitting blank-faced in the airport, not quite panicking but entirely unsure what to do next until Mike Candrea told her to come by his office when they got back to Tucson and talk it through.
Even while singing Bahl’s praises in the preseason, Gasso admitted she was curious to see what would happen when that moment arrived for her freshman. She’d seen enough in scrimmages to know that Bahl didn’t take losses well — which can be a good thing. But seeing what happens when adversity arrives in games that count is something else entirely.
Her former club coach suggests that moment will be just another part of the folklore. In last summer’s PGF national tournament, Bahl gave up early home runs against rival Lady Dukes. She settled down and pitched a shutout the rest of the way, but the early runs proved decisive in defeat. Swift said she told the coaches she wasn’t leaving the tournament without a title and proceeded to pitch them through the losers bracket.
Meeting Lady Dukes in a rematch in the final, she struck out 20 in a nine-inning victory.
“After she gave that up, she just started mowing them down more and more,” Swift recalled of the initial defeat. “She’s unique in a sense that, with the way momentum can overtake pitchers and it becomes an avalanche, not with Jordy. She processes it, it happened it’s over, nothing you can do with it.”
The performance against UCLA lent credence to that assessment. Called for multiple illegal pitches, Bahl almost literally shrugged, went back to the rubber and got the out anyway. In the adrenaline of that moment, she could have unraveled. She thrived. There will be bigger moments and greater challenges than a club tournament or a February non-conference game, but make of the evidence what you will.
In at least one respect, Bahl can never be another Monica or Cat, as Swift suggested. The sport has changed too much. It was changing in 2010, even as Fowler threw both ends of a doubleheader on back-to-back days in the third week of the season. Bahl isn’t going to do that. She isn’t going to start 40 games or throw 300 innings. Gasso still sounds pained every time she talks about sending Paige Parker out to the circle again and again early in her career. The coach didn’t even let Bahl finish a potential perfect game in her debut — although she didn’t take her out of the UCLA game.
It may help that, whether closer to Rachel Garcia or Odicci Alexander in production, Bahl could eventually make her presence felt at the plate. She hit better than .500 for Nebraska Gold and had a place in Gasso’s batting order in the season opener against UCSB (although rarely since on the deepest team in the country).
But the thing about the great ones is that they become the standard by which others are measured. Someone is going to be the standard for a new generation. Maybe we’ve just seen her arrive.
That’s what matters. That’s what we should enjoy. The possibility that even our grandest expectations are insufficient.
“It was just cool to watch,” Fowler said. “A young freshman, nobody had seen her. Of course there was all the hype, but when you put it into practice and you see the highlights, it’s really exciting.
“It’s fresh for our game, and our game loves that. They love some new magic.”