Round the bases on a softball diamond 22 times and you travel a mile.
Round those same bases 396 times and you travel 18 miles. That's roughly the distance between Prairieville, Louisiana, hometown of LSU senior Bailey Landry, and the LSU campus in Baton Rouge.
Now add Landry's total bases, walks, stolen bases and hit by pitches and you get 399. Which is to say Landry has traveled a greater distance around the bases for the Tigers in her career than she did to reach campus in the first place.
But ask LSU's most recent opponents and they might well swear that Landry traveled to the moon and back for as often as she circled the bases against them.
Landry, whose Instagram feed may lead Division I in the amount of crawfish pictured, is espnW's softball player of the week after a five-game stretch of near perfection at the plate.
Landry came to the plate 18 times in five games, wins against Central Arkansas (twice), Georgia Southern (twice) and Louisiana Tech. She batted .813, walked once and hit a sacrifice fly. She drove in 10 runs -- three more than LSU's opponents scored. And while a master practitioner of the short game has speed to spare, those hits included two doubles, two triples and a home run.
She struck out in her first at-bat of the week. With the exception of the sacrifice fly against Georgia Southern on Saturday, she then reached base in her next 14 plate appearances.
LSU these days is a far cry from the hitless wonders who reached the Women's College World Series in coach Beth Torina's first season in Baton Rouge. With both Torina and hitting coach Howard Dobson in their sixth seasons, the Tigers have a lineup that should be able to withstand the graduation of leading run producer Bianka Bell. Landry is one of the biggest reasons.
That's a big deal in Baton Rouge for more than just the obvious reason.
The last Louisiana native to earn first-team All-SEC honors at LSU was Ashlee Ducote in 2000 (a season in which she was also a first-team All-American). An LSU player has earned first-team all-conference honors 22 times in the years since, including Bell last season. That span includes all five of the program's World Series appearances. Not one of those honorees was homegrown.
That wouldn't be such a big deal -- drawing some of the best that California, Florida and Texas have to offer is hardly a liability -- if not for the small matter of rival Louisiana-Lafayette and its parade of homegrown stars like Ashley Brignac, Danyele Gomez and Christi Orgeron.
Along with the crawfish, Landry's Instagram includes scenes from the 2012 World Series, where she was just a fan eating ice cream in the grandstand and cheering on the Tigers. LSU didn't so much recruit her as harvest her, the program's rich history tilling the softball soil that grew her.
And as the past week suggests, her bat can take a team a long way.
Previous winners: Washington's Taran Alvelo (Feb. 15)