Soft balls are not soft . After a few innings they mush up a little. though The outfield is tougher in softball. When a hardball is hit you can turn your back and run to where it is going. When you get there it is pretty close to where it should be. Soft balls curve ,raise ,drop and knuckle a lot more. You have to keep your eye on it every second.
If you play high competition softball it is a game of catching rockets.
Girls play fast pitch a lot. That is a pitching game. The ball curves ,drops and moves very wierdly . It is hard to hit and they throw it hard.
It would be tradition in schools for women to play softball. It is a very athletic sport and requires talented athletes.
I have just finished my third year as head coach of a Little League baseball team. This year the boys were mostly third graders. My daughter played girls’ softball last year and the year before, grades 3 and 4. I watched both teams play many other teams over those years. I would put my third grade boys up against a 10U girls’ softball team playing either sport (except my boys don’t pitch yet) and probably give them 50/50 odds. Although girls might mature faster in some ways, they are not necessarily more coordinated. The boys hit the ball harder, and throw harder and more accurately at the same age, regardless of height and weight. Two of my three best players were the two smallest guys on the team.
I am afraid that is not the case. Basketball was invented to be played by men, and its early popularity was spread in large part by its adoption by the YMCA. It was already a major men’s sport at the college level by the time WWI broke out (bear in mind the sport was invented just in 1891.)
It HAS been played enthusiastically by women almost since it was invented, which it itself unusual, but there has never been a period of time when basketball was primarily played by women.
Yes and no.
Taller girls can make better pitchers. As intimidating as it is when Randy Johnson’s 6’10" frame is standing on a hill 66 feet from you, the motion of the pitch in softball allows a long-legged pitcher like the 6’3" Cat Osterman to be practically standing in your face when releasing a pitch. That’s in addition to the fact that extra height can help you get the leverage to throw the ball faster.
Being taller helps baseball players at (power) hitting and the same is generally true for softball players. But hitting in softball calls not only for power, but all forms of finesse hits like bunts, drags, slaps, etc that are slightly easier to do for smaller players. Division I college softball teams range all over the map in height, as opposed to baseball teams where it is rare to find players shorter than 5’9 or 5’10".
Actually, your field hockey example is a perfect demonstration of how nationally and culturally determined these things are. Men play field hockey in quite a few countries, and anyone who’s watched field hockey (men’s or women’s) knows that it’s no place for the faint-hearted.
One possible reason that field hockey is largely restricted to women in North America could be the presence of lacrosse for men. Lacrosse is virtually unknown in prominent men’s field hockey countries like Australia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, etc.
Hehehe, this is the funniest thing I’ve read today. What bizarro high school did you go to?
Like other people said, the divide is mostly cultural. There are some practical differences in the conditions of play that make softball slightly easier physically. There are differences in men’s and women’s bodies—no doubt about that—and things like shorter baselines, a closer pitching distance, and fixed outfield boundaries make for a game that is competitive in a different way than baseball. For instance, most women can’t throw as far or as hard as men, so making the field smaller compensates for that.
From what I’ve read about high-level play they’re both quite challenging games, but in slightly different ways. Fast-pitch softball is a pitcher’s game. Given the shorter distance and different physics of the ball it can be close to impossible to hit the darn thing, even for baseball players who are used to 85–95 mph fastballs. The bats are shorter and are not optimized as well as baseball bats, and the balls obviously don’t travel as well as the smaller, denser baseball. So if the batter does get a hit, it doesn’t go as far. This means that defensive field play is more critical than offensive scoring, and strategy and teamwork becomes slightly more important than pure athletic ability.
If you put good baseball players in a softball game, they’d probably get trounced until they got used to the differences. Same thing with the softball players in a baseball game. Given the differences in physical ability, I could see mixed male-female softball games being interesting, but mixed baseball would probably not be very much fun for the women. Top-level baseball competition pushes the abilities of men to the point where there aren’t all that many guys who can hack it; women who can play at that level are exceedingly rare.
Well, to be precise they are non-existant. None have ever, ever been able to compete against men at the top levels of any sport. Those that have appeared against lower lvl pros were pretty much publiciity stunts. Ever hear of the Colorado Silver Bullets? Put a pro (A, AA or more) male baseball pitcher at the women’s softball rubber and no woman will get a hit, ever. Same with in basketball, have you never seen a WNBA game? Come on! Why are we even playing around with this question? Is the OP required by Title IX or something?
Hehe, Title IX.
The bolded section is a complete non-sequitur.
The fact that professional men might be able to beat professional women in sporting contests in no way explains why women generally play softball and men generally play baseball. Just because women can’t hit as hard or throw as far as men, and just because a men’s baseball team would beat a women’s baseball team, doesn’t mean that women couldn’t play baseball against one another.
The OP was not suggesting co-ed pro leagues; he was simply questioning why men generally play baseball (against other men) and women generally play softball (against other women).
BS. Young athletic boys who were raised on baseball play softball when they become fat and middle aged. There’s no ‘tradition’ about it.
No, it was universal. And not only did they have an extra player, 3 players stayed on the “defense” half of the court and the other three (“forwards”, I think?) stayed on the “offense” half. NO one played full court.
Exactly. It’s not like Justine Henin played on a smaller court than Rafael Nadal to win the French Open this year. In fact, tennis is a perfect example that illustrates the point that some are trying to make here.
Another non-sequitur. Are people completely oblivious to the points they’re making here?
Your statement (whether correct or not) is totally irrelevant to the point you are trying to make, and to the post you are responding to. Just because some guys switch to softball when they get “fat and middle aged” in no way explains why young, athletic women play softball.
Look at the women playing college softball; there’s absolutely no reason why they couldn’t play baseball. The fact that they don’t is mainly a product of tradition, and of the fact that softball was deemed to be an appropriate game for women in a time when attitudes to women in sports were rather more, ahem, neanderthal.
Is baseball a harder game than softball, in general? Sure. Are men, on average, likely to be better at baseball than women? Probably. But neither of those things make women incapable of playing baseball against one another.
I can’t speak for everyone, but my daughter played baseball starting with T-ball, progressing through Coach-Pitch and then two years of Kid-Pitch, but switched to softball when she turned 12. Her reasons included it was more fun for her to play with a whole group of girls her age than to be one of a small handful of girls playing in a large group of (pre-adolescent) boys. A large part of that was because on the softball field, she was one of the “stars”, while on the baseball field the general attitude was “she’s just a girl” and was relegated to the bench or outfield.
That general progression seems to be pretty common in the youth leagues around here. A lot of girls play baseball with the boys between the ages of 5 and 10 or 11, but as puberty approaches they begin to prefer hanging out with other girls. And the boys don’t seem to be too upset about them leaving. Oh, well.
SC
One that ends at 16-years-old. The puberty fairy did not bless every member of my graduating class, let me tell you (well, at least not the later stages, with the body hair and the height and the girth).
Close but no cigar. Men and women compete on an equal field at the highest level in Equestrian sports. I think its the only co-ed Olympic sport.
Karen & David O’Connor, both US Equestrian Team members and many-time national, world, and Olympic champions, are married.
I realize this is one sport of many but it is not true that there is no sport in which women regularly rank alongside men at the highest level.
The problem I have with this argument is that the explosion in fast-pitch women’s softball, in schools and in the Olympics, seems to have occurred entirely since the 1980’s.
I attended high school and college during the 1970’s, and neither school had either a women’s baseball or a women’s softball team. I don’t think my schools were uncommon for that era.
Now, by the 1980’s, attitudes toward women in sport were no longer “Neanderthal”. So I’m still a little puzzled as to why, when schools started offering a stick-and-ball game for girls and women during the 1980’s, they all gravitated to fast-pitch softball.
I agree. The large softball is harder for small hands to handle than a baseball. The underarm sling is more powerful than the overhand throw once you learn how to do it. The pitcher is only 45 ft away and the ball is there before you know it.
I don’t see softball as being any easier than baseball.
I agree. The large softball is harder for small hands to handle than a baseball. I think the underarm sling is more powerful than the overhand throw once you learn how to do it. The pitcher is only 45 ft away and the ball is there before you know it.
I don’t see softball as being any easier than baseball.
A reasonable question, one with more than one possible answer.
But, while attitudes may no longer have been really old-fashioned in the 1980s, there was still the attitude among many people that women can’t, or shouldn’t, play the same sports as men. Or, if they do play the same sport, then concessions need to be made to account for their weaker stamina. The fact that professional women tennis players still compete in best-of-three-set matches, rather than best-of-five like the men, is one example. Personally, i refuse to believe that Justine Henin or Maria Sharapova or Serena Williams or Amelie Mauresmo are physically incapable of playing a five set match.
Hell, the attitude that women need different sports in on display in this thread, with some people using the argument that women are not as strong or as fast as men to try and push the idea that there is something more “natural” about women playing softball rather than baseball.
Now, it may be that the reason that women ended up playing softball rather than baseball is that women wanted to play softball rather than baseball. I’m completely open to that idea, but even if true it would still leave open the question of why women wanted to play softball rather than baseball. And i don’t think i’d discount tradition and ingrained notions of gender difference as possible motivating factors.
If anyone here actually believes that women are incapable of playing baseball due to their alleged physical inferiority, or that a women’s baseball league would somehow not work, i’d ask you to explain precisely why you feel this way, and to offer some evidence for your assertion.
In the meantime, maybe you could watch this movie. 
Actually, during this year’s women’s college softball world series, quite a few of the announcers on ESPN were advocating for moving the pitcher’s mound back, arguing that the game was becoming dominated by pitching at the expense of hitting and fielding, and that this was leading to a decline in excitement and interest in the game.
And i agree about the ball. I play in a couple of friendly softball leagues, and even with my fairly normal, man-size hands i find it much easier to throw a baseball hard and accurately than it is to throw a softball.