things kevin hates

Softball. I hate it. I’ve always been a baseball fan, I played baseball growing up, but I’ve always disliked all the bat-and-ball sports that try to be baseball without actually being baseball.* Cabbageball, wiffleball, and the like are all just shadows of the game they imitate. They can be fun, sure, but they’re nothing like actual baseball. The distance between bases is all out of whack, much of the strategy of bunting and stealing bases and so forth is lost, and they only exist because having kids throw fastballs at each other during P.E. class would require way too much extra equipment and jack up the insurance premiums quite a bit.

Softball has these downfalls, and more. At least the others don’t require gloves or helmets or other equipment beyond the bat, ball, and bases. But softball? All of the equipment of baseball, none of the advantages.

Perhaps the biggest reason I hate softball is the sheer aesthetic displeasure it gives me. We’ve all heard the schoolyard insult, “You throw like a girl!”** Well, when you’re playing softball, you pretty much have no choice. The ball is too big to be thrown like a baseball with a nice, fluid motion–we’ve all marveled at a great throw by an outfielder to nab a runner at the plate or a third baseman gunning it across the diamond to prevent an infield single. And it’s too small to be thrown like a quarterback spiraling a football sixty yards down the field, or like a soccer goalkeeper distributing the ball with a long throw to his midfielders to start a counterattack. Throwing a softball leads to an ugly motion with the arm trailing awkwardly behind the rest of the body. There’s no fluidity, and it simply looks painful. Probably because any time you throw a softball, it is painful. In no way do I want to denigrate the athletic abilities of competitive female softball players.*** They are obviously very talented athletes who train extremely diligently. I just wish they’d play a sport that didn’t make me cringe on a routine grounder to the second baseman.

Second, when I read the paper and look through the line scores of high school softball games, the invariable result is something like: Team A 1 run 2 hits 0 errors Team B 0 runs 0 hits 0 errors, with each pitcher having twenty strikeouts. When that happens every now and then, it means you got to witness a great pitcher’s duel.**** When it happens every damn game, it means the game sucks.

I see no reason why women can’t just play baseball. They play basketball on the same size court as the men and that works out just fine. Hmm, guess I shouldn’t have bothered with that last comparison. Seriously, though, I think we’re past the days when girls needed their own version of a sport.

*Not too long ago, however, I did see a pretty cool PBS documentary on stickball, and it looked okay. And obviously, kickball is similar to baseball, but it is not a bat-and-ball sport, so I’m not saying it isn’t awesome. Because it is, of course.
**I, of course, discourage such callous sexism, but it’s pretty much true the vast majority of girls never learned how to throw a baseball (or football, or anything else) properly.
***If you’re a competitive male softball player, you need to get a life.
****And believe me, I love a good pitcher’s duel as much as anyone. One of the two major league games I’ve witnessed in person was this one, in which Damien Moss pitched eight innings, giving up just one hit, while the Braves were held scoreless until they tied the score at 1 in the eighth inning before Gary Sheffield won the game with a walk-off solo homer in the ninth.