By Thursday afternoon, as Auburn's softball team made its way home to Alabama from Oklahoma City, Courtney Shea had watched herself the way so many people watched the sophomore pinch hitter a night earlier in the winner-take-all finale of the Women's College World Series.
She saw the final at-bat against Oklahoma as it had unfolded on television. She heard the voices on television as they talked about the scared look on her face, her eyes closed in contemplation before she batted, the deep breaths she took and the words she spoke to herself in the box.
In truth, she wore much the same expression and exhibited many of the same mannerisms as she had in pinch-hit appearances in the first two games of the championship round, one against the same pitcher, Paige Parker, that she faced in the decisive moment Wednesday night.
The way she looked wasn't purely the product of fear. She is by nature an impatient bundle of energy. But fear was there. It had to be.
"It's the top of the seventh and they're one out away from winning the World Series. I don't really think a lot of people would want to be in that situation." Courtney Shea
"I don't really think that's necessarily untrue," Shea said of the descriptions she heard. "You're going up to the plate with about 8,000 fans cheering against you, and they're all standing up. It's the top of the seventh and they're one out away from winning the World Series.
"I don't really think a lot of people would want to be in that situation.
"But once I took the first pitch and everything, it was a lot more comfortable. I thought back to my at-bat the first game, and I knew I could put a hard ground ball in play."
The Women's College World Series encompassed 15 games. That means batters came to plate in the neighborhood of a thousand times in Oklahoma City, each of those trips the culmination of lifelong dreams to play in ASA Hall of Fame Stadium and each at-bat in some way integral to determining whether or not that player would play any more games on softball's biggest stage.
A thousand times batters stepped into the box, the odds of success against each one of them individually. But none was as memorable or as moving as the one that ended with a ground ball to second base. The one that ended the World Series.
Not because so many people watched someone fail but because so many saw a woman willing to risk failure.
If courage exists in something as trivial as sports, it is in that act.
Just before she stepped to the plate, the camera caught Shea talking to herself as she swung the bat. The monologue continued as the first pitch came in low and hard for a ball. Some of the words were her own, bits of encouragement, but many were Beyonce's. Able to pick her own walk-up music at home during the season, she chose "Flawless." The tempo as much as the lyrics got her ready to hit.
Early in the postseason, sans walk-up music, she repeated the words to herself silently. As the moments grew bigger, she sang them aloud.
"When I go up to bat I just try to stay calm because I know when I stay calm I'm really good," Shea said. "And if I get too fast, then I'm not seeing the ball well. I think that happened to me in Game 2, and that's the reason I struck out -- I was just really caught up in the moment. I knew that if I could stay in the moment, I could do my job."
It is as difficult a job as there is in sports. A good hitter succeeds only one out of three times, maybe two out of five times as measured by on-base percentage. But starters get three or four tries in a game to get it right. A pinch hitter gets one chance, the odds stacked against her in any setting.
Shea, who went 0-for-3 in the championship series, said Auburn coach Clint Myers pulled her aside as the World Series began and told her that her job would be to bat if a game got to the seventh inning and the team needed a ball hit hard on the ground. It wasn't the role she envisioned for much of the season. Among nine Tigers with at least 100 at-bats, Shea's .495 slugging percentage trailed only All-Americans Emily Carosone, Kasey Cooper and Jade Rhodes. But squeezed out of the starting lineup by Haley Fagan's return from injury, she spent the postseason waiting for her one chance a game to help.
"It's extremely hard, and it's extremely frustrating, too," Shea said of a pinch hitter's existence. "In Game 2, when I struck out, I was like 'Oh my gosh, I hope [Myers] still has confidence in me to be able to come back the next day. Even though I didn't put a good at-bat together in the second game, I wanted to be able to have that good at-bat in the third game and just be able to help.
"It's extremely difficult because you're not seeing as many pitches."
She made up for that dearth of pitches in the seventh inning. On and on the at-bat went. Down 1-2, Shea worked back to 3-2. Then she fouled off four consecutive pitches.
"I think for the stage that it was, it was a pretty good at-bat," Shea said.
That is an understatement.
She felt that she rolled over the ball that she finally put in play on the 10th pitch. There was another, the second pitch fouled off with a full count, that sat in the middle of the strike zone. If there was a "what if" pitch in the at-bat, it was that one. She was on time, she just didn't catch it square.
"A lot of the other pitches she threw me, they were tough pitches to hit, and I was not about to give the umpire a chance to ring me up," Shea said. "That was one of my biggest things going into it is just trying to get deep in the count. ... She doesn't want to walk you. She was one out away from winning the World Series. She wasn't going to try to walk somebody, especially to give Tiffany Howard and Emily Carosone another at-bat."
"I think for the stage that it was, it was a pretty good at-bat." Courtney Shea
It was a brilliant at-bat in every way but the outcome, the part over which Shea arguably had the least control. Two nights earlier she smacked a hard ground ball that only a brilliant play from Oklahoma's Shay Knighten and a base running error prevented from tying the opening game. She hit this one a few feet farther left, to a defender positioned perfectly.
The cameras again caught Shea speaking, only this time not to herself. Over and over she could be seen saying "I'm sorry" to teammates.
"It wasn't even because I put a bad at-bat together," Shea said. "It was because the season was over. We had come so close. I had done the best I could in that situation, but I was just sorry for the seniors. ...
"I needed to hear from my seniors that it was OK, that they knew I had done my best. I think that was the biggest thing."
The result made Oklahoma champion. But Shea's at-bat reminded us of why we care in the first place.
