Talk:Softball
An alien attempts to understand...
All's well, in fact seems just like baseball, until this sentence: "The batter attempts to put the ball in play in such a way that he/she is able to reach base without being put out, which can occur in a variety of ways as well, including exceeding the number of prescribed good pitches." So how is one 'put out?' 'In a variety of ways as well' is no help. Where do the prescribed 'good pitches' fit in? (It's an unfortunate coincidence that, to a cricket fan, 'good pitches' refers to the state of the ground.) Ro Thorpe 23:51, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
- And I, myself, don't know what is meant by "exceeding the number of prescribed good pitches". The batter exceeds them? In what way? The pitcher exceeds them? In what way? I know that different versions of softball have various rules about the pitches, and I'm not an expert on softball, but I did play on an official league team a few years ago (as the pitcher, actually) and I'm not familiar with what you mean -- as far as I recall, the rules had three strikes and four balls, just like baseball, and that was it. And if I arced the ball too high, even if it went down through the strike zone, it was still called a ball....) Hayford Peirce 00:06, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
Pitching motion section
It should be made clear that all of this discussion is about "hard pitch", or whatever it's called (fast pitch?) -- top softball pitchers used to strike out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in exhibition games by pitching this fast at that distance. But *most* softball, or a lot of it, is "slow pitch" where, essentially, the pitcher is just *lobbing* the ball up to the plate so that the batter can hit it. Strike outs are rare. I drove other teams a little crazy by pitching as if I were lobbing a metal "boule" (petanque?) ball, backhanded, as it were, and it seemed to come in to batters a little differently with a different sort of spin on it. They could still hit it, but frequently not as successfully as with the usual American-type underhand toss. Hayford Peirce 00:29, 2 July 2009 (UTC)