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Just letting you know I’m in College Park, Maryland, all day for my daughter Halle’s field hockey tournament. Limited updates today. Nearly done with boys track records, though.
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UPDATE:
Two things since I posted this on Saturday.
One, my pal Dave Byrne from the Lancaster papers reminds me about next year’s rule that will increase the distance from the pitching rubber to the plate to 43 feet (from 40) in HS softball. Slipped my mind; it will help to some degree, but only foragainst those pitchers below elite level.
And two, this should up in Mike White’s Varsity Blog from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Mohawk softball pitcher Rachelle Miller is making quite an impact in her freshman year. She has pitched three no-hitters in a row, including two perfect games.
No-hitters are everywhere.
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I posted this piece on The Ticker because (a) it was nicely done by The Patriot-News’ Jeff DeWees, (b) it’s topical, what with this being softball season, and (c) I knew it. Just knew it.
The gist of Jeff’s story is that softball is in danger over being a two-tiered scholastic sport. The first tier are teams that have the high-velocity club travel pitchers who utterly dominate a game. By way of evidence, he points out that in just one week there were two perfect games and two more no-hitters just in the Harrisburg area alone. Club pitchers delivered these gems.
The second tier is everyone else, teams with good to average pitchers who give up things like hits and walks and base runners and actually make games interesting.
Softball has become the sharpest two-edge sword in the entire scholastic sports sheath. On one hand, softball has always been about the pitcher, and in no team is one player in such complete control as a softball pitcher. And if you’re a softball coach, the first brick in your foundation is pitching. The better your pitching, the more secure your job.
On the other hand, when that dominant pitcher is in the circle, softball is just awful to watch. I actually like softball, but only when there’s something going on. I can even bear the walk, bunt, steal/passed ball, infield ground-out method of scoring. But 16 strikeouts and two foul pop-outs is not good theater. The idea that every half-inning will look exactly the same and yield the same results is not the kind of thing that will propel me out of the Barca.
As you know, wrestling is one my two favorite sports, and all I seem to hear is that wrestling is a “dying sport.” And that comes from people in the wrestling community. I give them credit for honest introspection, but I respectfully disagree: I think wrestling is still fairly healthy. I long ago accepted that full JV teams were a thing of the past.
But softball is at serious risk of dying at the scholastic level if more and more pitchers are developed at higher and higher levels. There will be a true have/have-not schism. And there’s not a thing anyone can or should do about it from the pitching end. I’m pretty sure that no one says to a quality pitcher, “Hey, you’re striking out too many batters! Give up a few triples, will ya?”
So there’s only one way to change this: Hitters have to get better. And that’s a much tougher chore. It is a lot easier to work with a pitcher on a daily basis and improve her arm rotation, release point and wrist snap than it is to work with 20 girls on their swings. So it’s time for softball to think out of the box and put more time into hitting than it does pitching.
It will take time and maybe even some money (you can’t practice excessive batting without pitching machines), but it’s the way to save softball from becoming a one-player sport.
