What a job by Ueno the Japanese pitcher, throwing 28 innings in 2 days to carry her team to the gold medal. I think watching fast pitch must be like watching dead ball era baseball, lots of bunts and emphasis on getting 1 run. A lot of people I have spoken to don't really enjoy it. I understand why, but I thought the final was a good game, the fact that the underdogs were on top, but only just, for much of the contest, made it interesting as a spectacle. What I do think gives a stunningly predictable pattern to the game is the tie breaker rule. The extra innings in the Japan v Australia bronze medal game were tense, but entirely predictable in terms of what was going to happen each innings (yawn !).
A bit of a crisis at last week's Euroball (see left for a few photos of the European Championships), meant that I had to "leap into the breach" and pitch 5 games at short notice. It reminded me again of the unhappy lot of the slowpitch pitcher. You can do very little to actively win a game for your team, but it's all too easy to throw the game away. It requires a certain amount of masochism to go up there every week and throw that ball all too slowly over the plate for everyone to hack at whilst your team mates stir restlessly at every ball. It's time they got a bit of credit - so here's to slowpitch pitchers everywhere - remember, your enjoyment is built on their suffering !
Channel 5 provide a valuable service for those of us too tight to subscribe to NASN or MLB TV by screening 2 MLB games a week, but I do wonder sometimes about the way they present them, especially the Wednesday night game. They have two particularly irritating habits:
The first is jumping into games 10 or 15 minutes after the start and not showing the first innings. Now, I have the ability (via my pvr) to start recording a game on the hour and then start watching it at 10 past, I find it a bit bizarre that a TV channel apparently can't show a game 10 minutes behind 'live'.
The second irritation is their habit is missing out innings in longer games if they aren't showing them live. Now we all love Johnny Gould but I can't help suspecting that if they missed out some of the discussion of David Lengel's moustache, or the plugs for next week's games during pitching changes, then actually it might not be too difficult to fit those extra innings into the show.
Joe Posnanski has been musing about the make up of winning baseball teams recently, which got me thinking about similar questions for Softball. Are a lot of good players better than a couple of super heroes surrounded by a bunch of no-names ? How many good players do you need to be a good team ? Conversely, how many rookies or plain poor players can a team carry without being dragged down by them ?
Softball is a game that makes it hard for one good, or even great, player to dominate a game. Pitchers can't control a game like they can in baseball, and a team can't rely on one great batter to carry them in the same way a cricket team can. Softball teams benefit from a lack of poor players more than by the presence of one or two super stars.
This is particularly true when batting. Your team's big slugger can hit a home run every at bat but unless other people get on base around them that won't give you enough runs to win. Even three or four strong players in an otherwise weak line up will find it hard to build big innings. The other side to this is that, because everyone gets the same number of at bats, really weak batters have a big impact in the line up.
On the fielding side things are different at the top end, a couple of strong fielders can have a disproportionate effect on the play of the team, because not all fielding positions are created equal. A good short stop and one or two high class outfielders can hide a multitude of faults. To a lesser extent weak fielders are also less of a handicap than weak batters. One can be hidden at catcher and another protected by their fellows in the outfield so a team can carry a couple of poor fielders without suffering unduly. More than a couple of weak fielders though and suddenly things get more difficult !
So Softball teams get more benefit from not having weak players than from finding a super star, but so what ? Most teams are largely social affairs, where ability is not necessarily the main factor when deciding playing time. Does this have any practical application when the identity of the players you have on your team is largely beyond your control ? Well yes, I think it does actually. The easiest way to improve a team is to have fewer bad players. Therefore, as a captain or coach concentrate on getting your weaker players playing better, make sure all your players have a basic set of skills. Concentrate on that and it'll take your team further, and faster, than improving the play of the stronger players.
Lions V's Wombats: 09/05
This was the plate final at the 2005 Labor Day tournament in Nottingham and is one of my favourite games ever. We fell 6 runs behind in the first and never really got back into contention until the 7th. In the 8th I drove in the tying run and then scored the winning run. It doesn't come much sweeter ! Any game where a member of the opposing team is in tears at the end is generally a good one. As I reported at the time........
"Trailing 10 - 16 half way through the 7th Innings of the plate final the Lions roared back to force the game into extra innings, held the Wombats to a single run in the top of the 8th and took the game 18-17 in the bottom of the innings. A six run top of the first had given the Wombats an early lead which they never seriously looked like losing until the Lions late, late rally. The Lions were never in the lead until the winning run crossed the plate. An epic games that had it all, the first Lions final to go into extra innings and the first one we won !"
Gill captained the team that day for the first time after I decided to quit. I wouldn't want to take anything away from her win but in many ways that tournament was the last hurrah of "my" Lions team. Felix and Ben never played for the Lions again. The team that played in 2006 would be a different beast.
The Soul of Baseball is a book about Buck O'Neil. Buck was a baseball player and in one sense this is a baseball book, and a good one. I've read lots of baseball books and many good ones, but not like this. This is a book that is about more than baseball. It's about life and what it is to be human.
Buck played and managed in the Negro leagues and then coached in the major leagues. In later years he was the driving force behind the Negro Leagues museum in Kansas City and a tireless worker in the cause of keeping the memory of the Negro leagues alive.
The author, Joe Posnanski, travelled with Buck O'Neil for a year. Buck had a profound impact on him, and if you read this book he will have an impact on you. Buck was a man who suffered greatly from racial discrimination and yet he rose above it. Buck was a man with a beautiful soul who lived life to the full. Read this book and you may find yourself questioning how you lead your own life.
I started watching baseball in 1996, so I've never seen a Yankees team managed by anyone other than Joe Torre. It's always been easy to see why many people dislike the Yankees but I've never been able to because I've always been so impressed by the class of their manager. It really is the end of an era. He had his faults of course but he must be a fantastic manager to play for and he'll be missed. Good luck Joe in everything you do in the future!
There is an unwritten rule in Softball that young players need to be aware of lest they commit a dreadful social faux pas.
The rule is this: It is bad form for a fielder to return the ball to the pitcher by means of a normal throw. If the pitcher has to scrabble in the dirt or leap like a Salmon to retrieve the ball all is well, but if they can just catch the ball without thought and get on with trying to get the batter out then you have just shown yourself up as a rookie...
It is a batters game and any attempt to keep your pitcher in a groove or let them concentrate on the batter is frowned on in all the best Softball circles. Why this should be is lost in the mists of times but trust me, if you want to be a real softball player always roll the ball back to the pitcher, just wide enough from them that they have to step off the rubber to go and pick it up.
I recently drew up a list of my favourite softball games. Thinking about it was an enjoyable exercise in itself, and I remembered a few games I had unfairly forgotten about, but also made me wonder about what goes into a 'favourite' game list, and I decided that it is a variety of things. These factors may sometimes contradict each other but hey, nothings perfect.
Perhaps the most basic is that a game should be a win. That is not an absolute necessity, but it is probably a bigger factor than anything else. A hard fought loss after a titanic struggle can be in there but if they are honest with themselves most people will not pick many. If you want a loss on your list (if only to show how broad minded you are) I would suggest you try to find a game where your team of no hopers gave the Champs the fright of their lives before they won on a blown call in the bottom of the 7th , or something near to it.
A game where you fall behind early only to rescue things at the last minute should be in there, in the plate final at Nottingham in 2005 we went 6-0 down in the first, were losing 16-10 in the middle of the 7th and won it in the 8th after scoring 6 runs in the bottom of the 7th to take the game into extra innings.
Alternatively a nip and tuck game where you stage a rally in the last innings, or defend a one run lead, can be even better. At the Manchester tournament in 2007 we played 7 innings in 40 minutes and scored 3 runs in the bottom of the 7th to turn a 4-2 deficit into a 5-4 win. In 2006 at Grand Slam 1 the Tripods played a 7 innings game even faster, in about 35 minutes, and came back to win by 1.
A game where someone puts on a really memorable personal display is good. I do not necessarily mean that you yourself did this. In the Tripods game mentioned above we had 2 Japanese guests playing for us. They were ludicrously better than the rest of us and it was a brilliant game to play in just because it was fun watching them perform.
Whilst you do not *need* to be a Super Hero if you do manage personally to do something memorable in the game that should definitely be a factor. In the Nottingham plate final I drove in the tying run in the 8th, then later in the innings I scored the winning run, which pushed it up my own list.
For me low scoring games are usually more memorable, though run fests can be OK if the teams are neck and neck throughout, or if your team come back from a large deficit to win (as above).
Wins that have a devastating effect on the opposition also score highly. If some of the other team are in tears at the end of the game that usually means it was a good win ! Allied to this is beating a team you do not like, or have always lost to before. A win against a team you used to play for and had never beaten before since you left should be right up there !
A win should also stand the test of time. I sat down a couple of weeks ago to pick my top 10 games and half of them were from 2007. Pick a list of games more than 2 years old and you will find it a lot easier to sift the wheat from the chaff.