How Lyndsey Grein and Elise Sokolsky's 1-2 punch has Oregon hosting postseason softball once again

EUGENE, Ore. — In the world of sports, the battle between pitcher and hitter is a unique one.

More so than in others, the diamond sports of softball and baseball require cohesion from every aspect of the team — even Shohei Ohtani can only hit one out of every nine times through the lineup and pitch one out of every five days. But, despite the fact that success requires the entire team, the game can ultimately be broken down into a series of one-on-one battles between the pitcher and hitter.

These aren't fair battles, though. The pitcher always has one distinct advantage: they know what's coming.

This fact has always, and will always, ring true throughout the history of these games. Even in the modern analytical age of baseball, when pitchers are judged more on the induced movement or the spin rate of their pitches, hurlers are still looking to add to their arsenal to keep hitters guessing. Per Lance Brozdowski, MLB starters used an average of 4.7 different offerings in 2024, an increase from the previous year and part of a trend across the last few seasons.

It's why, after finishing third in NL Cy Young voting as a rookie last year, Paul Skenes added a sinker as a seventh pitch to an already diverse arsenal, keeping hitters on their toes by not knowing what's coming. The idea of staying diverse to keep hitters guessing can also be applied at a team level. Across a pitching staff, it's important to have a variety of arms to give teams different looks.

This becomes especially true in college softball, a sport where lower strain on the arm compared to baseball limits the number of pitchers needed while, in turn, putting a higher workload on each individual member of the staff. Across a series, you need to be able to switch up what your opponent sees in the circle, which becomes much harder to do with fewer arms available.

With only five pitchers on the roster this season, it's something Oregon softball head coach Melyssa Lombardi aimed to accomplish. Heading into the year, the Ducks retained two members of their 2024 rotation, redshirt junior Elise Sokolsky and sophomore Taylour Spencer. They looked to add to that with a pair of transfers, Virginia Tech's Lyndsey Grein and Cal State Fullerton's Staci Chambers, as well as freshman Rowan Thompson. Chambers was a key addition to the Oregon bullpen, giving the Ducks a left-handed option for the first time since 2022.

"You need to have all types of matchups," Lombardi said of Chambers before the season. "She gives us that lefty-lefty matchup."

"This is our deepest staff that we've had since I've been here, most complete staff," she added. "They all are so different, not one is the same."

Grein quickly noticed the diversity of Oregon's pitching room after arriving on campus.

"The other pitchers are awesome," she said. "We're all so different in that everybody has their own specific talent."

For Grein, that specific talent is a dominating riseball that helped her become one of the nation's top strikeout artists as a sophomore at Virginia Tech in 2024, fanning over 8.8 batters per seven innings to place among the top 15 nationally. This year, she has taken her game to another level as the leader of the Ducks' rotation, pacing the team in ERA, innings, and strikeouts while winning 26 games, tied for the second most in the country.

As dominant as Grein has been all season, her excellence in the circle is not the sole reason that Oregon's 2.27 team ERA ranks as a top 10 mark in the nation. Every step of the way, Sokolsky has been her partner in crime, lowering her ERA by more than half a run from last season while tossing over 50 more innings. As Chambers missed time with an injury and Spencer fell into a bit of a sophomore slump, more and more has been placed on the shoulders of the Ducks' star tandem in the circle, with Grein and Sokolsky combining to throw 82 percent of Oregon's innings in this season.

With their different approaches, the two have been able to give hitters different looks all year. Both Grein and Sokolsky have been fantastic individually, but the Ducks are at their best when the two work together over the course of a weekend to shut down opposing offenses.

Both pitchers' games are built on the same three offerings: a rising fastball, a dropball that dives down and away to righties, and a changeup that does the same to lefties, but they attack with those pitches differently. Grein's game starts with her heater, which has whiffed bats nearly 33 percent of the time this season, working her other pitches off of it. Sokolsky, on the other hand, uses her excellent command that helped her to the Big Ten's fifth-lowest walk-rate this season, zoning her fastball at a top-20 rate in the country before getting to her changeup for outs.

As transfers, Grein and Sokolsky came to Eugene with pedigrees from their previous schools, but under Lombardi's guidance, have been able to elevate their games to the next level.

This isn't Lombardi's first experience with the transfer portal either, turning small-school pitchers like UC Davis' Brooke Yanez and UNC Greensboro's Morgan Scott into Friday starters for postseason teams in the past.

"One thing with transfers, it's the urgency that's required," Lombardi said. "There's urgency for us to really get to know each other on a personal level because the time is just shorter. There's urgency to really understand what they bring and then from there, my ability to enhance."

As a former backstop during her playing days at Oklahoma, Lombardi has an incredibly deep understanding of pitching. This understanding helped her quickly build a connection with Grein when she hit the portal this past offseason.

"Coach is a genius when it comes to pitch-calling," Grein said of Lombardi. "I've definitely leaned on her and can ask her questions in my bullpens, just talking about her philosophy behind throwing to different batters and what she thinks."

Following a sophomore campaign as a Hokie that saw her ERA drop by over a run and her strikeout rate climb by over 10 percent, Grein was expected to make an immediate impact out of the transfer portal for the Ducks this season. Lombardi knew what she had on her hands with Grein, whose riseball sits in the high 60s and can touch 70 mph with carry that forced opponents to make contact less than 75 percent of the time the pitch was in the strike zone this season, a combination of velocity and movement that Lombardi says makes it "tough" for hitters.

"She is who she is," Lombardi said of Grein. "So, what are the things that she's wanting to continue to grow at, and are those things that us as a coaching staff can help her with?"

Grein's strategy was to diversify her arsenal to become a "chameleon," as Lombardi puts it, who can see a batter numerous times throughout a game and continue to give them different looks.

"She's a riseball pitcher and wanted to have a dropball," Lombardi said. "So that's all we worked on in the fall and over break."

That desire to expand her pitch mix was also driven by one of her new teammates, shortstop Paige Sinicki, who Grein said gave her some of the toughest at-bats in the offseason.

"Lyndsey's just a competitor," Sinicki said. "I remember back in the fall, I had a home run off of her, and then literally the next at-bat she struck me out."

"It definitely made me work hard on developing something that spins down too," Grein said.

That hard work has paid off this season, resulting in a 33 percent whiff rate and a 69 percent in-zone contact rate on her drop ball, both of which rank among the top 10 nationally.

While Grein may have made an immediate impact for Oregon this year, the story wasn't the same for Sokolsky when she came to Eugene after an excellent freshman season at UConn. Just a few weeks into her sophomore campaign, she was shut down for the year with an injury and forced to redshirt. Coming back after missing a season was a challenge at first, but one she was able to overcome with a mental reset.

"I can either come into the season after redshirting being timid, and I think originally I did," Sokolsky said. "I just know I've been waiting for this for so long, so I wasn't gonna let myself get in the way of what I was gonna do."

After her year off, Sokolsky came back even better, leading the Ducks with a 2.59 ERA while only trailing Scott in innings pitched. It was then that Sokolsky began to hone her signature changeup, a pitch that would elevate her game once again this year.

"I feel like it kind of came out of nowhere," Sokolsky said of her off-speed offering. "I had it, but it wasn't used as often, and then we realised, oh, this is what it can do."

The pitch itself sits in the mid-50s, about 10 miles per hour slower than her fastball, looping in to throw batters off. Sokolsky has excellent command of all her pitches, with a 58 percent zone rate that ranks among the top 20 hurlers in the nation, but especially likes to strike her changeup. She landed it in the strike zone 65 percent of the time this season, but batters made contact with just 62 percent of those pitches, one of the lowest rates on any changeup in the country.

"I think it just catches them off time," Sokolsky said. "They can know it's coming sometimes, but maybe the spin just throws them off. If I could stand in the box on my own changeup, I'd love to, just to see what it looks like."

"Her changeup is just next level. It's really, really good," Lombardi said. "To be able to throw that in any count the way she does it and just the way that she hides it, it makes her rise and her drop and everything else look that much better, and it doesn't allow you to cheat on one speed. You have to respect it."

As previously mentioned, Grein and Sokolsky have combined to toss over 80 percent of the Ducks' innings this year. Together, that's been a total of over 280 frames that they dominated to the tune of an ERA just a hair under two, as their complementary styles in the circle have essentially made one otherworldly pitcher that can attack hitters however they want with a wicked fastball and a filthy changeup.

Oregon has been led to where it is right now by the combined powers of Grein and Sokolsky, hosting a regional for the first time under Lombardi. However, Oregon was overlooked nationally throughout much of the season due to its relatively weak schedule, which only included seven games against teams that are currently ranked or were ranked at the time.

But in those games, it was the Ducks' pitching that always stepped up when they needed it most. Oregon's offense averaged 7.8 runs per game, a mark that ranked fifth in the nation, but against ranked opponents, it fell to just 3.9 runs per game.

Meanwhile, the Ducks' pitchers dropped their average of allowing 2.3 runs per game (fourth in the country) to just 1.7 runs per game against their best opponents.

In Oregon's massive win over the current No. 3 team in the country, Tennessee, back in February, Grein and Sokolsky tossed seven shutout frames, allowing just three hits, while battling a 13-strikeout performance from the Vols' Karlyn Pickens. When the Ducks took a pair from No. 8 Florida State at the Jane Sanders Classic, Grein and Sokolsky each tossed a complete game, shutting out the Seminoles while putting just four runners on base across 14 frames.

And against UCLA, they threw 17 of Oregon's 18 innings with just a 1.24 ERA to lead their team to a win in the most pivotal series of the Big Ten regular season.

As the Ducks head into this weekend's regional — hosting Stanford, Binghamton, and Weber State — they will need Grein and Sokolsky's best now more than ever. Lombardi has asked a lot of her aces this season, and the workload their arms have endured has begun to show down the stretch. Grein started in the circle for three straight days for the first time in her career against UCLA, and since then, has posted a 9.28 ERA and 2.093 WHIP across her last 14 ⅓ innings as her walks, homers, and hits allowed have all skyrocketed.

But luckily for the Ducks, Sokolsky has stepped up when her team has needed her, posting a 2.22 ERA across 28 ⅓ innings during that same time.

"Lyndsey can't be perfect all the time. She's been amazing this whole year, and she's going to have [Elise's] back later on," Sinicki said after Sokolsky threw five shutout innings to clinch the regular-season Big Ten championship against Michigan State, a weekend that saw her toss 15 ⅔ of Oregon's 19 frames.

As explosive as their offense is, the Ducks won't make it far in the postseason without their pitching. Sokolsky has been an absolute work-horse down the stretch, but Oregon will need Grein to bounce back to the form that landed her as one of the 10 finalists for USA Softball's National Player of the Year award.

"She's thrown a lot for us for sure," Lombardi said of Grein after the Michigan State series. "What I love is that her recovery methods are really, really good. She's been lights out for us all year and will continue to be lights out for us."

Oregon will play Weber State in its first regional game on Friday after Stanford and Binghamton. First pitch is tentatively set for 4:30 PM at Jane Sanders Stadium.