Distance swimming back in the day. Gertrude Ederle smashed the male record by more than an hour in 1926, but the current women’s record trails the men’s mark by about 30 minutes.
Amateur Barbarian:
Being a jockey?
I went to OSU and worked in the intramural program. We had a kid come through (soccer player in high school) that was now about 7 feet tall due to a very late growth spurt - had never played basketball. But he played with his dorm team and improved.
Due solely to his height, he was asked to join the women’s practice squad and be the stand in for Britney Griner, who is a beast (and Mark Cuban talked about taking her to Mavs training camp, though he essentially admitted it would be a stunt). Even without solid basketball knowledge, he could replicate the skills of the most dominant player of the time pretty well. Though he improved enough due to coachability and unteachable height that he ended up on the men’s practice squad, then the men’s team. He got minutes this year due to our lack of depth.
Other people who have been on the women’s practice squad (ex-hs players who might have been good enough for small college ball, but nothing more) basically said that they had to play at about 75% to give the equivalent looks as D1 women’s teams. I heard a story of players replicating the Paris sisters at OU, and the team was taking them lightly, so Coach Budke told them to go lights out in the post, and they destroyed the team with blocks and dunks that no women’s player would make until the coach though the team learned the lesson.
The US women’s soccer team is one of the best in the world. They semi-regularly scrimmage against 15 and 17 year old boys teams and lose. They may have better technical skills, but they can just get out-athleted.
There’s no rule against using a softball motion for pitching in baseball.
When the Silver Bullets were being assembled, I was playing in the Men’s Senior Baseball League in Colorado. It’s a league for real baseball, but you have to be at least 30 years old to play in it. Many of the players played in college, but many only in high school (there were some former pros too, but none on my team.) We were asked to scrimmage with the SB’s on the down low (they didn’t want any media to see their actual skill level.) We were all in our 30’s and 40’s and mostly out of shape, while they were all fresh out of college scholarship softball players. We killed them. Their biggest problem was pitching, but they didn’t hit very well either.
Two women, Shannan Mitchem and Ann Williams, were given tryouts with the Mets in 1995, the year of the player’s strike. Both were cut during spring training.
There were minor leaguers in the 19[sup]th[/sup] Century and one famous minor league pitcher during the Depression. Read about Jackie Mitchell and her exhibition game against the New York Yankees in The Smithsonian.
As** Lamar Mundane** (and Cecil) says, there is no rule against pitching underhand in baseball. In fact, there have been some prominent submarine pitchers.
So why isn’t a softball pitch used? Even women routinely exceed 100 mph in pro softball, and I believe the record is over 105. I wonder what a pro male pitcher could do with that underhand snapper.
The softball speed is largely due to the shorter distance to the plate → 43 ft vs the distance in baseball → 60.5 ft. By the time the ball arrived at home it would have slowed down quite a bit in that last 17 feet. The shorter distance, and larger ball-size, might also make it easier to throw strikes with the fast underhanded -whip delivery. (Of course, the underhanded motion gives the ball a rising direction.) Although there have been many “submariners” in baseball, the one’s I’ve seen are really throwing sidearm with a underhanded bend of the arm, rather than a full underhanded windup (starting at the shoulder) that you see in softball.
With practice, I do think that Jenny Finch could survive an inning on a mlb mound, although she wouldn’t excel.
The problem is that Jenny Finch, while a supreme female softball pitcher, is not even as good as the top male softball pitchers. While Finch could get by for a short time as a novelty due to players not being used to her delivery, they would quickly adjust and tee off on her.
I proposed Finch as part of a hypothetical “Bill Veeck” promotion in a late season game. And I’m assuming she could pitch an inning without getting killed (literally, if not figuratively).
As a kid, in 1965, Charlie Finley of the, then, Kansas City Athletics, brought in the legendary Satchel Paige in to face “my” Boston Red Sox for 3 innings. Paige, arguably the greatest ever, was somewhere between 59 and 66 years old, depending upon the source. Satch faced 10 batters, allowing just 1 hit, 0 runs, 1 K and 0 BB. I remember “watching” it on the radio.
BTW, I must correct myself about Pam Davis - she appeared in an exhibition game for Jacksonville, not an official Southern League schedule game.
Would the windmill windup be legal in MLB?
Here are the rules on pitching delivery. Provided the pitcher complies with the rules on pitching positions, I don’t see anything that would prohibit it. Bob Feller notably used a windmill windup.
Feller swung his arm back in his windup, but I wouldn’t call it a windmill delivery.
ETA: I do agree with your reading of the rules, though.
To be honest it’s not perfectly clear.
When this came up I went to Youtube and watched tapes of Jennie Finch. As she currently does it, her pitching motion is illegal, not because she throws underhand but because she steps off the rubber towards the plate before commencing the throw - you can leave the rubber a bit, but not that much. That said, I don’t think it would be that hard for her (or another similar pitcher; Finch is 33 now and hasn’t played competitively in a few years, so might not be the best current candidate for this experiment) to modify her delivery to meet the rulebook and still throw as hard.
Would she be an effective pitcher, though? No way. Finch’s pitch speed has been wildly overstated here; at her fastest she might have been throwing her fastball at 75-80 miles an hour, which is fast as hell to most people, but isn’t going to get it done at any level of professional baseball. (She is often attributed with much faster speeds because people hear that at the softball distance of 45 feet it’s “equivalent” to a 100-mph speed at 60 feet. But she didn’t actually throw 100. Actual timings of her pitches yeild results in the 70s, for the most part.)
Indeed, Finch’s pitching speed tells you a lot about how elite these sports are. 75-80 miles an hour is, for most people, VERY fast. Most adult men in good shape cannot throw a baseball that fast; I’m a big, tall guy with a good arm, and I’ve never thrown a baseball 80 mph. If someone threw you a baseball at 80 mph you’d wince catching it, or if you were hitting it’d be kind of scary. That’s fast. But in the major leagues that is a slow curveball. I don’t believe there is a pitcher in the major leagues who can’t throw at least 85, and those guys rely on excellent breaking stuff. Even knuckleballer R.A. Dickey can throw an 85-mph fastball when he wants to mix it up. 75-80, which is super fast to most people, is just not even close to MLB quality. Pitching from 60 feet, Finch’s stuff would have been beaten like a rented mule by a good single-A team.
Everything you’ve said is spot on.
Even so, on a regular basis, some star major leaguers will get up to bat against a female softball pitcher and strike out. When that happens, viewers come away thinking, “Whoa, that girl struck out Barry Bonds- she must be awesome.”
Well, not necessarily. It’s more that the size and speed of the ball and the distance the ball travels is VERY different from what major leaguers are used to. Given time to practice and adjust, I’m sure major leaguers would clobber Jennie Finch. But if she pitches to major leaguers who haven’t played high-caliber softball before, she may embarrass many of them. She often has.
Women won’t ever be good enough to play on a major league baseball or football team in any meaningful capacity.
But by God, they need to try out for the SEALs!
Never from 60 feet. I’ve seen the videos of her pitching to major leaguers and it was always from the women’s softball distance of 43 feet.
Sure, of course she can strike them out from 43 feet. At 60 feet her pitches would mostly end up as souvenirs for lucky fans in the second deck of the outfield bleachers.
Correct- even so, the major leaguers typically strolled up confidently and then struck out. Some had the good grace to laugh about it, while others (like Barry Bonds) fumed over being shown up.
WOmen’s softball is a lot LIKE men’s baseball. So is cricket. And the skills involved are very similar- they just aren’t identical.
Miggy Cabrera undoubtedly could LEARN to cream the pitches of top female softball pitchers- he just couldn’t do it cold. In the same way, he could probably LEARN to wield a mean cricket bat, but if he went up against a halfway decent bowler cold, he’d get embarrassed.