Lafayette’s softball team showed plenty of defense against Saltillo on Thursday, but needed more production from the plate.

The Lady Commodores fell to the Lady Tigers, 5-2, at the Lafayette High School campus in a crucial Region 1-5A contest that had playoff seeding implications.

While the first inning and a half was all offense, both teams settled down and let their defense take over for a stretch of nearly three innings where neither Lafayette nor Saltillo were able to get base runners.

The left side of the infield for Lafayette (9-10-1) played solid defense with third baseman Madison Cobbs and shortstop Morgan Manscoe combining for 11 of the 27 outs.

“Defensively, I’ve been very pleased with where we’re at,” said Lafayette head coach Greg Lewis. “Mo at shortstop did an unbelievable job and Madison made two or three unbelievable plays over there. Landry (Jones) saved us at first base a couple times as well.”

Saltillo pushed two runs across in the top of the first inning and one in the second before Lafayette’s Taylor Styers settled down in the circle. She kept the Tigers scoreless for two innings before giving up a run in the fifth inning and a solo home run in the seventh.

Styers had faced Saltillo in the late innings of the two team’s previous game, giving Lewis confidence his pitcher could have similar success on Thursday. Cobbs took over in the circle to get the final out of the seventh after Styers worked 6.2 innings.

“(Styers) did a very good job,” Lewis said. “I was hoping to get three (innings) out of her, or two, but what a great job she did. She didn’t want to come out in the end but I just felt like (Saltillo) had seen her a few times, they were starting to find a few holes on her. I just wanted to change something up and bring a little different speed (in the circle).”

Lafayette responded in the bottom of the first, tying the game with two runs of their own, but that was the only offense they would manage against Saltillo. The ‘Dores did not get another runner on base until the sixth inning when they managed to get some offense, but Davis was stranded at second.

The Commodores finished with two runs off three hits.

“I really thought we would hit it better,” Lewis said. “We came out in the first and hit it then I thought we lost our approach at the plate a little bit. We let the bat head lag and all of a sudden we got a bunch of pop ups.”

Saltillo has locked up the No. 1 seed for the Class 5A playoffs while Lafayette can be either the two or three seed out of 1-5A.