UCLA softball star Megan Grant is cookin up

The energy of energy, you understand?

The energy of friendship, the ability of persuasion. Power of optimistic pondering, energy at the plate.

Megan Grant’s energy.

If there’s one factor in American sports activities that’s going to get people to sit up, lean ahead and have interaction, it’s the home run. We all dig the long ball.

If something can get somebody to run home and flip on a softball recreation, it’s a big-time slugger from a big-time college mashing homers like no person before.

Heard about Grant? She’s the UCLA softball participant who’s hit an NCAA-record 40 home runs (so far) this season.

Forty! In 147 at-bats! That’s a home run every 3.68 at-bats!

If you’re questioning, Mark McGwire hit a home run every 7.3 at-bats in 1998, the yr he completed with 70. And Barry Bonds went deep every 6.52 at-bats in 2001, when he hit his MLB-record 73 home runs.

Whenever she will get requested about her historic home runs, the red-hot, red-haired hitter is like, shucks: “I mean, it’s incredible,” she said. “I’m just honestly blessed to be able to say the number 40. But, yeah, that’s all I can say.”

She just desires to be thought of as a onerous employee and a good teammate. But what Grant is going to be remembered for most is as the founding member of softball’s 40-home run membership.

Her fortieth home run got here in her 58th recreation this season and on her seventh profession grand slam — Grant Slam? — in the Bruins’ NCAA regional last victory over South Carolina last weekend.

Forty, a spherical quantity of round-trippers with a ring to it. And a candy echo coming so soon after the Bruins girls’s basketball crew received its first NCAA championship, historical past to which Grant also contributed as a reserve before softball beckoned.

Side quest accomplished, the left-handed-hitting senior stepped back into the box to help the Bruins chase a thirteenth championship on the softball subject.

Grant is soaking up the expertise, and encouraging her youthful teammates to, too: “‘Enjoy this, it’s so rare to be here’ … and, ‘Hey, we can do this, we can do it together.’”

A .469 hitter, she leads the nation in slugging proportion (1.333), on-base proportion (.650) and OPS (1.983). She bats second in UCLA’s NCAA record-breaking lineup that shattered Oklahoma’s 25-year-old earlier document of 160 home runs. UCLA hit seven home runs during two tremendous regional wins against Central Florida this weekend to push that document to 200.

With a 9-1 win Friday and a 14-4 victory Saturday, the Bruins superior to the Women’s College World Series for the thirty fourth time and for the third time in Grant’s astounding tenure.

UCLA senior Megan Grant (43) high-fives teammates during a win over UCF Friday at Easton Stadium.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Tip your helmet and toss Grant her bouquets — flower energy — because there she is popping up on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” and on the MLB Network. One of three finalists for the USA Softball Collegiate Player of the Year award, she’s acquired guys discussing her exploits on a dad pod in any other case devoted to NBA takes. Fans dressed up as cooks as a tribute to her nickname, “Chef Megan.”

Star energy, energy broker. Grant is a lift-all-boats attraction for a sport that’s been steadily carving out space in the public consciousness.

All over the nation, faculty softball groups have been breaking attendance information. And scores are up, up, up; ESPN said this has been its most-watched faculty softball common season since 2009, with video games averaging 292,000 viewers. The MLB-backed Athletes Unlimited Softball League is getting into Season 2; Grant was drafted No. 4 total by the Portland Cascade.

“People will pay to see her play,” said Lisa Fernandez, UCLA softball legend and affiliate head coach.

Fernandez also is the final supervisor of the AUSL’s Utah Talons, for whom UCLA’s other senior slugger Jordan Woolery will play this summer time.

The Bruins imported the latest in a lineage of Bay Area dynamic duos. The Oakland Athletics had the Bash Brothers, Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire; the Golden State Warriors gave us the Splash Brothers, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson. And now UCLA has Walnut Creek’s Woolery and Grant, of San Bruno — the Bruin Bombers.

They’re the first teammates in NCAA historical past to each hit 30-plus homers in the same season, with 74 between them.

And, yes, cooks! Like Curry before her, Grant is cookin’ the competitors, breaking the 31-year-old NCAA single-season home run document with No. 38 on May 9 against Nebraska.

Included among the document wreckage she’s leaving in her wake: Stacey Nuveman’s UCLA single-season document of 31 homers. For her profession, Grant wants only one more to tie Nuveman’s Bruins document of 90.

But Grant’s acquired to get a pitch to hit first. After UCF walked her six instances in two video games, she has 74 walks this season and 69 base hits. She also has 13 hit by pitches.

“It’s very similar to Barry Bonds, right?” Fernandez said. “It’s either a walk or a home run. Like, you pick.”

The story of the tape measure behind Grant’s greatness is the down-to-the inch precision of her preparation. The Mamba-esque magic is in the embracing behind-the-scenes monotony, powering through it.

“She was the hardest worker, always working. Never enough,” said Ray McDonald, Grant’s coach at the San Mateo-based Warrior Softball Academy since she was that child with an electric, bat-busting swing. “It was eating and sleeping, hitting, and you know, shower. The essentials.”

“When we recruited her, Ray, he was like, ‘Coach, you better be ready to work,’” said Fernandez. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, I know how to work.’ And [then] I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, now I understand how people must have felt when I played.’

“There is an aspect of this game that people don’t realize unless you are in it. To be great, there’s a — for lack of a better word — monotony to the process. Can you master the same move over and over again? And she’s committed to it. To her drills, to the process, to her routine, all of it. There’s a lot of people who are committed to it when they’re not doing well: ‘Oh, got to get back to my drills.’ She has been committed to that process from the day she stepped on campus.”

The course of contains working on her thoughts. That deep, deep breath before every deep, deep home run is a manner to keep centered. To keep in the second — and it is a second.

For softball. For UCLA. For Grant, who, with all this energy and duty, is hitting it out of the park.