Is softball sexist?

But ... I'll wager that the small ball causes quite a few of those errors. You force the infield in to the point where there's less reaction time for the defense.

I was at a state-tournament game last Monday, and the one team had the third baseman AND the second baseman parallel to the pitcher.

 

OK, now you wanna talk sexist, here's this.......

Covering a high school (girls) state softball tournament about a decade ago. Was at a large, pretty nice, multi-field city-owned facility with concession stands, restrooms, etc. in a brick building.

Some Yahoo comes over the loudspeaker and announces that all indoor restrooms will be women/girls only for the day. All the males must use the three porta johns in the rear of the complex. So three porta johns for how ever many number of men in attendance.

About an hour later, same announcer says that in order to keep play moving along, porta john No. 1 will be reserved exclusively for umpires. (apparently all of whom were men) So that leaves two porta johns for how ever many men were in attendance.

Another hour later and the lines for the two public porta johns have grown rather long. Then one rather large, um, gentleman decides he needs to take a dump for the ages, the kind you can smell from 10 miles away. Well, you can scratch that porta john off the list. So that leaves ONE porta john for the rest of the men in attendance.

Meanwhile, there are no noticeable lines extending out of the brick building where the permanent restrooms are located for the women/girls. And a whole lot of men over in the bushes.

Now, if that isn't sexist.......

 

Of course there is no real way to tell without a comprehensive analysis of game action, and the people with motivation to do that (current coaches) also have a huge motivation to selectively skew the data so it supports their small-ball preconceptions.

My own off-the-cuff guess is that in aggregate, bunt-situations do not result in an increase in errors, since the ball is not hit as hard and the defensive players usually know exactly what they are going to do with the ball when they get it.

Of course, in individual cases, everything goes backwards. All of a sudden you find a third baseman who cannot make the sidearm throw. A second baseman forgets to cover first. Bunt goes straight to the pitcher, who throws to the wrong base.

Again, no way to know unless somebody kept season-long PBP charts for a lot of teams and actually analyzed what was going on.

 

Also, and especially at the high school level, the outfielders really don't know how to track a ball in flight. Even when they do make a play on the ball, they often don't know the situation as to which base to throw the ball back into the infield. That's a weakness in softball that doesn't get exploited near enough.

 

Oh yeah it does. A team I covered, the fans knew if we got the ball over the heads of the infielders, that was money. Something exciting was about the happen and the scoreboard was going to change.

 

That comes down to the lineup selection process, where the CF is usually the kid not quite good enough to play 2B.

The defensive spectrum is really screwy in HS softball; for a lot of coaches it goes,

SS-3B-1B-2B-LF-CF-RF, with C usually somewhere about 3rd/5th.

 

There are more women's softball scholarships available than men's baseball.

 

Adding to Starman's reply, that also may just go back to poor coaching at the lower levels. I don't know how else to explain it. In my area, even the 1A girls have played extensive travel ball since they were 10. They can all play.

 

I'm referring to total scholarships, from all sports.

 

At least in watching two daughters play softball, here's my take on why fielding can still be so bad at the high school level: because of the aforementioned indispensible pitchers. At the youngest of ages, coaches put out pitchers (many of whom from early ages have worked with paid pitching coaches) who can blow the ball by any and every hitter, and everything is a strikeout or a walk. This happens in house AND travel leagues. So fielders, growing up, don't get a steady diet of tracking grounders and calling for pop-ups, at least not at a frequency compared with baseball players.

 

Yes, because grown women play on the same-sized field as 10-year-old boys.

Move the bases to 75 feet (from 60), the mound to 50 (from 43) and the OF fences back to 275 (from 200) and maybe high-level softball would become something other than a strikeout/bunt marathon interspersed by the occasional home run. You know, a game with triples, double plays, no annoying slap hitting, etc.

And do you seriously think that a major-league hitter, given a week or so to get his timing down and to adjust to pitches that are not always breaking downhill, would not absolutely destroy college softball pitching? Someone would get killed. Jenny Finch whiffed guys who hadn't seen softball pitching. Give them a week and they would crush her.