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SOFTBALL LINKS |
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Green Pastures
by Dave
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Last night, while watching the semi-finals of the Little League Softball World Series (LLSWS), I checked my e-mails between innings. I had resolved to not write anything about the LLSWS, lest I end up being hyper-critical of an event which is, in retrospect important for the advancement of the sport. The e-mail came from Brad in Texas who wondered, "what's up with the grass infield?" I wrote back to Brad that I had the very same question immediately upon tuning in to the program. Why does Little League insist on playing their marquee softball competition on a field entirely inappropriate for the sport?
Several years ago, I got into a somewhat heated discussion with a father of two girls who played in the softball division of our local Little League. He complained that their was gender bias in the league (undoubtedly there was and is to this day) because the boys "get to play on the 'good field' while the girls play on the lousy ones." When I asked him what he meant, he said the boys play on the one good field next to the concession stand with the well manicured, grassy infield. I replied that I wasn't offended by the custom since softball is played on a skin field. He laughed and told me that just wasn't so. He had seen tons of softball games played on grass fields. I asked if he had ever seen college, high school, ASA, or any other sanctioning body's games (other than Little League) played on a grass field. He got kind of angry with me and the details of the remainder of the discussion don't warrant further discussion. The point is, this Little League father believed softball is frequently played on a grass field. There was nothing I could have said to this fellow to convince him how wrong he was.
Let's be clear about a few things. Fastpitch softball is not hardball played with a bigger, yellow ball with 60 foot bases, by girls. The games are undeniably cousins, or siblings, but the play is not all that similar. Softball is faster than baseball in relative terms. There's more bunting. Defense is different since there is little time to recover from a flubbed grounder. At the 12U level, at least with LL's rules, the games do appear to be close cousins but the reality of fastpitch play style, as it moves up the ladder, is very different than hardball.
Grass infields change important aspects of that play style. For one thing, the slower infield changes bunting. Even a poor bunt has a decent chance of being successful when it hits grass and immediately slows. Grass infields also remove slapping from play since you can't bounce a ball over the third baseman's head when playing on grass, at least not when 12 year olds are doing the slapping. Grounders have less chance of getting through for the same reason. Routine grounders, for example, to second become far more difficult when the ball is slowed to the degree it is on grass. Hard grounded singles become better opportunities to score runners from second than they should be because the ball takes a half second longer to reach the fielder. There's a reason why every other sanctioning body utilizes skin fields for their games.
It probably is not apparent, however, to the LL powers that grass infields change the game. Based on the level of play I watched last night, the grass did not impact the outcome of games. There was little bunting by the four teams. Only one team attempted bunts more than once or twice. I saw zero slappers on the four teams. And baserunning was very safe with even good teams with sizeable leads not trying to score aggressively. The two games were very much like the 12 year old baseball games I had been watching and not very similar to the fastpitch softball games I've been watching all summer. I doubt Little League even gave a second thought to the style of field.
Little League rules are more similar this year to those of other sanctioning bodies. Last year they used an 11 inch ball while the rest of the country played with the 12. This probably yielded more offense as the bigger ball is, obviously, pitched at slower speeds and easier to hit because of its size. Still there are important differences which make the game different than the ASA variety.
There is no dropped third strike rule in LL play. I have to admit that this could be an improvement as I have watched too many games this year turn on a dropped third in late innings. It is difficult to find qualified catchers at this age. On the other hand, any purist would disagree. The dropped third is just as much a part of the game as the infield fly rule. Most good catchers in ASA play do not drop third strikes frequently and when they do, they usually have no trouble tagging or throwing the batter/baserunner out. Many tournaments, even at 10U, use the dropped third rule without a huge impact. I think I'll sit on the fence on this one.
It is my understanding that in Little League runners cannot leave base until the pitched ball reaches the batter. If I'm wrong on this, please feel free to correct me. That was the rule when I was involved with LL. I haven't seen where it changed. In other sanctioning bodies' play, the baserunners may leave their base when the ball is released by the pitcher. That may not seem like a huge difference to the layman but it slows the stealing runner by at least a half second. As a consequence, I believe, there was little stealing in these semi-final contests except on first and third situations. That changes the game quite a bit. There is a ton of stealing in ASA play unless a team has a very well trained catcher. This also changes the opportunities for runners to advance successfully on fielders choices of all kinds. That further removes bunting from the mix. On some occassions last night I saw decent bunts result in the lead runner being thrown out. I was surprised by this and at first blamed it on poor baserunning. Then I remembered that the runners had to wait until the ball reached the batter. I won't sit on the fence on this one. I don't like holding the runner back in this fashion. It creates a different game.
There are one or two important rule differences between LL and other bodies which while they impact the games, do not make as much difference as you might think at first blush. LL pitchers are restricted from pitching back to back games. In order to be successful in LL tournament play, you've got to have at least two decent pitchers. In ASA and other play, there is no restriction to how many games a pitcher can pitch. I have seen teams which rely on a single ace to propel them deep into elimination days. But, as I said, this doesn't quite have the impact you would expect. The reason is non-LL tournaments typically play three or more games in a single day during championship rounds. Sometimes a team must win four or more games in order to claim a trophy. This makes club teams stockpile pitching at least as much as LL teams since it is often not possible for a single girl at this age, even a monsterous one, to pitch three or four quality games in a day. But I suspect what I saw last night was the second best pitchers for these teams in the semi-final round since they need to hold their aces back for the championship if they want to have a chance to win.
Aside from these rule differences, I'm not sure what else is out there. But I did notice stylistic differences between the LL variety of play and the kind I am more familiar with. Corner infielders mostly positioned themselves at the infield cutouts. I don't know about you but our corner infielders generally play a lot closer than that. If we played a game and saw infielders that far back, we'd bunt endlessly until they came up. And middle infielders were deeper than I usually see them. One second baseman played almost all the way to the outfield grass like the way a baseball second basman might position himself. We occassionally play that deep but only when there is a lefty power hitter up who can't run very fast. The rest of the time, our second basemen play in front of the baseline, more towards first base.
I suppose the positioning could be a deliberate strategy employed based on the grass infield. Pitchers have an easier time fielding bunts when they are slowed by grass. There isn't the need to pull in the corners that exists with a skin infield. And playing your middle infielders deeper makes sense too since the ground balls are slowed and you have more opportunity to cut off balls that would otherwise be basehits. Outfielders have to play closer and quickly charge since they have to try to get to the few grounded singles in a hurry to prevent runners from advancing additional bases.
There were some other differences in the play I observed which had nothing to do with rule or field differences. I recognize that the talent pool is necessarily smaller with a community based team than it is with a successful travel club program. Clubs can recruit players from far away. If they build a successful program, the good players automatically come to them. In Little League, you either live in the area over which a particular organization presides or you don't. There are obvious advantages to this. But it does change the level of play since the talent pool is smaller.
I was not overly impressed with the teams that made up the semi-final round. My guess is the top 20 12U teams in ASA, NSA, PONY, FAST, etc. would eat these teams alive. The level of infield play was pretty good by the Texas team but the rest seemed as if they had two or more holes. Given the level of pitching, which I'll get to in a second, there was far less hitting than I would otherwise expect. Team speed, even given the restrictive baserunning rules, was not anywhere near what I have seen in other games. Outfielding skills were definiteloy subpar.
Top club teams are, of course, able to draw kids from as far away as an hour and a half, sometimes further. That gives them the opportunity to pull 12 high quality players together, practice them over the winter months, play close to 100 games together as a unit during any given year, and replace subpar players as the years go by. At the end of the 12U year, a very good team often has kids who, in majority, have played together for as long as four years, over the span of as many as 400 games. They know each other the way an NCAA team knows each other, sometimes more so. Also, because they have all this real world experience, they are able to find the right position for a kid (which sometimes includes the bench or on any other team but theirs) and fill in positions with very good players from far away. On the whole, good travel teams are far better than these LL semi-finalists.
As a result of the talent pool available to club teams, the good ones generally have high quality hitters from 1 to 12 or however many they carry on their rosters. In the high quality games I have seen, there is far more hitting than was evident in LL last night. The two winning teams did do decent jobs with the bat but there were far fewer hard hit balls and no homeruns. Given the mediocre pitching level, I would have expected to see more kids go yard. I have watched as high caliber club teams hit homerun after homerun against similar pitching. But even when the ball doesn't go out of the yard, even when outs are made, there are usually more hard hit balls than I saw during these two games.
It is difficult to really get a handle on the pitching level from the TV set (even a big one) but I found the girls reasonably good though not quite as good as I had expected. There are excellent 12 year old pitchers out there for sure. Some few throw as hard as 60 mph with outstanding control and remarkable movement. There's a kid on a 12U NSA team from Kentucky who hits 60 often, throws five legitimate pitches, and usually ... wins. The typical high quality ace on a good ASA 12U team is around 55 or above, unless she has pinpoint accuracy and excellent movement, in which case slower pitchers can have a lot of success.
The radar gun on the TV set last night told me these girls were throwing around 50-55. 55 was rare and 52 seemed to be about the norm. I question whether anyone threw as hard as 55 but there's no way for me to prove the point. I suspect the radar gun was not calibrated properly as one pitch, obviously off-speed, registered 63. There's no way that was accurate. But based on my observations of the time it took for released pitches to reach home, I question even the 54s and 55s. I've caught pitchers throwing everywhere between 40 mph and bona fide 60. I have caught literally hundreds of thousands of pitches, observed an even greater amount, and feel I have a pretty good sense of how hard a pitcher throws by judging release point and catcher mitt impact. If I had to guess at the fastest pitches I saw last night, I would liberally call them low 50s, maybe 52-53. Most of the rest were at best, upper 40s, a few low 40s.
Movement seemed a little weak. I saw one girl who threw a decent screwball and I watched a handful of decent change-ups. Most of what I saw were peel-off drops, fastballs and fastball that looked like the pitchers were trying to throw other sorts of pitches. One or two pitchers had good control, often hitting the outside corner, whether it was called a strike or not (something I don't wish to get into at this juncture - plate umpiring was poor!) There were no rises, flip drops, drop curves, or other movement pitches which are commonplace in 12U tournament ball involving club teams. At the absolute least, I would have expected to see more changes thrown. I have called more changes for my pitcher on one batter than I saw in both games combined!
During one game, the announcers claimed one pitcher had something like 8 pitches which her father called from the dugout. It is very possible that a girl this age is working on 8 pitches. The Kentucky girl I mentioned above had 5 very workable pitches. Even the best of the four LL pitchers had no more than 3 functioning ones. Maybe her father was calling multiple pitch types but the movement isn't there yet on at least five of them. The best pitches I observed last night were peel-off drops (though I suspect that's all the pitcher threw - in other words it was her fastball); fastballs; one decent change; and a couple screws. The best aspect to the pitching was the ability of one girl to hit the outside and low corner repeatedly.
I said before that I would have expected to see more hitting. Given the 50 mph fastball pitching which was more the norm in these two games, I'm surprised a few balls weren't hit out of the yard or at least back to the fence. Even average tournament teams I have observed - ones that do not draw from a big geographic area - have no trouble pounding pitching like this. There did not seem to be any big hitters in any of the four lineups involved. I don't expect twelve lil' slammers but I do expect more than was evident.
One of the things I found most interesting last night was the age mix of the Connecticut team. If I'm not mistaken, of the 11 or 12 kids on their roster, 7 were 12U eligible next year. These girls took their lumps in this semi-final game, making many errors and not taking advantage of their opportunities to change the game - particularly in the first inning. I sincerely hope they aren't too upset today about the beating they took. It is remarkable to see such a young team go far in any tournament. I'll go out on a limb here and predict that we will see this team again next year, perhaps in the finals. These 11 year olds gained invaluable experience they ought to bring back to the LLSWS next year.
There have been a few times over the past couple of years in which I have seen predominantly 11 year old, mixed age teams go far into 12U tournaments. That is not the norm, however. Usually even very good mixed age teams get slammed. That's why many organizations stick with one age. Often a team of 11 year olds will bring in one or two 12 year old pitchers just to keep them competitive. Then the next year they'll play as exclusively 12 year olds. Very few predominantly 11 year old teams play more than a game or two on elimination days. This Connecticut team will presumably return most of their players and, if they have pitching, they'll be hard to beat.
I've gone on long enough about the LL semi-finals. Hard to believe but I started this thread just to say fastpitch softball is played on skin fields not grass! But now I have done what I set out not to do - be critical of Little League play. Understand that this blog is just a place to voice my opinions about things. I don't have anything per se against LL. They are good ambassadors of our sport - they get the TV coverage. If you'd like to watch the champinship game, which should involve better pitching than the semi's - it'll be broadcast tonight on ESPN2.
I'm sure I'll have something to say after the finals. But I'm going to try to be positive this time around!Labels: little league
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