Oh yeah, one other thing: there is also a style called Modified Pitch or “Slingshot.” It’s fast pitch underhand, but the pitcher is not allowed to “windmill,” can only bring his pitching arm back (as opposed to forward and over his shoulder before releasing). It’s the best style of softball IMHO and the game more closely resembles baseball than any other style of softball. BUT, it’s not played everywhere.
A slight uppercut is natural.
It’s advisable for a player to make an effort to level his swing because, especially when beginning in slo-pitch, your uppercut is probably much, much too pronounced. Preaching “level out your swing” will bring the angle of swing down to a proper, very slight uppercut. It’s almost impossible to train the uppercut totally out of your swing.
Back in my prime as a rec-league* slow-pitch player, my greatest strength as a hitter was placement. I could shoot a grounder into an infield gap or put a bloop single into the outfield most of the time. When my mojo was off, or there wasn’t an obvious hole in the defense, I’d aim a screamer at the pitcher’s head. I don’t think I ever made an out doing that.
If a catcher tried to distract me by engaging me in conversation, I’d tell him where I was going to put the ball. Usually not much in the way of conversation in my next at-bat. 
*Shortstop and First Base are two critical positions. In co-ed play, we had women who were good enough to play those. That gave us a lot of flexibility for the rest of the lineup, like three or four men in the outfield.
Moonchild, I have never heard of unlimited arc slow pitch. That sounds horrible.
The leauges I’ve recently played in were NSA sanctioned, which means a 10 foot ceiling. It’s easy, easy, easy to hit. I have seen pitchers who can curve a slow pitch softball or throw a pretty effective knuckle. They may stymie an inexperienced batter once or twice, but they are far from unhittable. The biggest part of pitching is being able to locate a pitch and adjusting the depth of a pitch. A lot of batters have a hard time laying off that deep pitch that’s at eye level, but typically just pop it up.
And with the bats and balls out there today, almost everyone can be a home run hitter. A couple years ago I played on a team that was full of warning track power guys. Half way through the season (8 games) we had 1 team home run. Then a guy bought a Miken Freak bat. We had over a dozen home runs as a team in the next 8 games.
One thing i learned in a quick course in fast-pitch softball (assistant JV high-school coach) is that a fast-pitch swing is not the same as a baseball swing. The coach took me off working on batting practice when she heard me say things like “step into the pitch”.
And here I thought this thread was going to be about 12-inch vs 16-inch softball.
LOL Sixteen inch is pretty much a Chicago-area thing. We called it “mushball”. If you bought a new ball, you had to beat it with a bat on the sidewalk until it reached the right consistency.
There are actually 3 varieties. Fast Pitch, Slow Pitch, and Modified Pitch.
In **Slow Pitch **the ball can’t really come straight down on the plate. ASA (Amateur Softball Association) and most other competitive rules have a min and max pitch height for slow pitch. In ASA the ball has to be within 6 and 12 feet high at it highest arc. Anything outside of that is illegal. If you think it’s hard to hit, you’re mistaken. There used to be a class of slow pitch called Supers where 50 runs in a game wasn’t uncommon. ASA made a number of rule changes to speed up slow pitch to make it a much faster game. A few I can think of off the top of my head are:
[ul][li]you’re allowed to just sit down after hitting a home run; []some classes penalize you for hitting a home run (i.e. you are allowed to hit N home runs, after that it’s an out); []you’re allowed to steal once the ball crosses the plate. This was useful when slow pitch catchers would let the ball roll to the fence on pitches they didn’t catch. It takes a surprising amount off time to wait for a catcher to amble over and pick up the ball. [/ul] [/li]**Fast Pitch **is mostly known from high school and college; especially the Women’s College World Series. AFAIK there are only two or three states left that play slow pitch in high school competitively. Men’s Fast Pitch is an awesome sport. The big difference between men’s and women’s Fast Pitch is that women have to push off the rubber and drag while pitching; men are allowed to leap and boy can they bring it!
Modified Pitch is supposed to be the best of both worlds. A lot of the hitting of slow pitch, and the better pitching of fast pitch. Obviously the difference is in the pitching. In Fast Pitch, you’re allowed to windmill your arm one full revolution and pass your hip twice (if you’re starting the forward motion behind your hip). In Modified Pitch you can only pass your hip once; you can’t windmill. So basically you can bring your arm back, and sling shot it forward. It’s a good game. Most of the teams come from stereotypically blue collar areas like Michigan, New York, New Jersey; Georgia, Massachusetts.
Every year ASA registers over 245,000 softball teams comprising over 3.5 million players.
They also register over 83,000 youth girls’ fast pitch softball teams comprising over 1.2 million girls. A lot of people don’t know it, but there’s even a professional softball league in the USA. At least I think they’re still hanging on; though not by much.
In terms of softball, Fast Pitch sells the sport, but slow pitch pays the bills. Softball a dumb sport? I think the numbers disagree with you.
Yeah, in fastpitch it’s more of a ‘squash the bug’ type of movement where you rotate your foot to pivot into the pitch.