Question’s in the title.
Also would like an explanation on the differences between games of softball and baseball.
Thanks
ETA: probably better suited for IMHO… shucks
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Actually, it’s better suited to the Game Room.
Bunting thread from General Questions to the Game Room.
I’ve never really understood that one myself. Women/girls tend to have smaller hands and you’d think they would be better off handling a smaller baseball than a softball.
When watching youths play baseball and you see a few girls playing with the boys you would think the sexes are really equal. But the truth is after puberty boys really start pushing ahead of girls and even the best girl athletes would have trouble competing at boys events.
So therefore, they have created their own separate sports and softball is one of them. IMO
As to your question softball was originally created to be an indoor version of baseball or a version of baseball which would be slower and have fewer injuries.
The most obvious differences between baseball and softball are the dimensions of the playing field and the size of the ball. The softball itself is bigger, of course. The field is smaller, bases closer together, pitcher standing closer to home plate. The bat is different for softball, more of a straight cylinder and lighter.
According to this article, you can blame Title IX for directing women to softball.
Back in the 50s and 60s, pretty much all organized school sport was male sport. And typically the boys played softball up through about junior high or high school then switched to baseball. Softball was the scaled down & safer version of baseball.
Aside: Boys played soccer only up to about age 7, then switched to real American Fuhball. Soccer was also seen as a simplified and safer game versus the real thing.
Fast forward to the 70s when it became conceivable that girls could want to play sports. They started organizing girls teams using the safe versions of the games they already had. Softball and soccer. Definitely separate and definitely unequal. Exactly what you’d expect a bigoted society tentatively feeling its way into a more enlightened future to do.
And here we are today still retracing out those first tentative steps. The difference is those girls who were pioneers in the 70s are now senior coaches.
The Accepted Wisdom was that delicate, fragile wimmin weren’t capable of dealing with the speed and physicality of baseball. The ball was too hard, it went too fast, the bases were too far apart for their legs to carry them around, etc.
I’d like to see a college baseball player survive playing against a top-ranked women’s softball team. He’d be toast in less than 3 pitches.
Actually, just about the only folk playing softball are Chicagoans!
Lots of guys playing 12" kittenball with gloves elsewhere!
College players? Try Albert Pujols or Barry Bonds or Mike Piazza trying to bat against Jenny Finch, top-ranked softball pitcher on the Team USA 2004 Olympic softball team. In 2004, at the annual softball game between the AL and NL in spring training, she was a guest coach for the AL. AL was down 9-1 with Mike Piazza up when she took the mound. What happened next was instructive. All the fielders sat down where they were. They knew nobody was gonna hit the ball. They were right.
The crux of the matter is that everyone’s reaction time is about the same, roughly 200ms. That’s not nearly fast enough to make contact with a ball coming at you at 95mph. What elite players do is train themselves to accurately predict the future. They discern tiny cues in the pitcher’s motions to guess where the ball is going - inside, out, high, low. The ones who get good at it become good hitters. In Finch, they were presented with something completely alien. The windup, the delivery, everything about a top-flight softball ace is utterly foreign to baseball players. So all their swings were based on their reaction times alone. To a pitcher like Jenny Finch, reaction time swings are laughable.
From a good SI article here.
In fairness, the same thing would happen in reverse.
Since there’s no WMLB (yet), let’s take the women’s softball collegiate all-star batters and put them up against MLB pitching. Or against top-ranked collegiate baseball pitching. The softball hitters will not do well.
The games are similar. They are not the same. And at that rarified level of performance, nobody, no matter how talented and skilled, is enough of a natural to do well at some other game approached cold-turkey.
Many MLB players play golf. And given that they’re excellent athletes, they play pretty well. But not PGA tournament well.
Yeah, well, I was basically just agreeing with silenus. Apparently, it’s become a thing with me.
Also, I thought the article was fascinating. The discussion of elite players and reaction time was not limited to baseball.
As a kid growing up in Calgary, there wasn’t baseball available in my part of the city so I played fast pitch softball.
Well, it was Albert Pujols and it actually took four pitches…
There are women who play baseball. Quite a few. My boss is in the Women’s Baseball Hall of Fame.
One of the reasons I like soccer is because it is exactly the same, men’s or women’s… same size field, same size ball, same rules.
Yeah, I would imagine everything about the pictching delivery, including the rising nature of the throw, would completely screw up any elite-level MLB player. The interesting thing, to me, would be how long it would take for one to adjust (if at all.)
That’s actually a relatively new thing, at least internationally. The 1991 Women’s World Cup (the one that not only wasn’t aired live in the USA, but they didn’t even show highlights until the next day - even though USA won the thing) had 40-minute halves; I think it was because there were serious concerns that the weaker countries (not necessarily the ones in the tournament, but weaker national teams overall) couldn’t handle 45-minute halves.
In 1995, they compromised; 45-minute halves, but each team could call a time out during play (I can’t remember if it was one for the entire game, or one per half).
Of course, Jennie (not Jenny) Finch pitched from 43 feet out. At 60 feet, major leaguers would have utterly destroyed her; the adjustment would have taken, at most, one turn though the order. I doubt a major leaguer would have actually swung and missed. Finch’s velocity topped out at 81-82 MPH, which is not going to fool any major league hitter if she’s throwing from the same distance.
The Finch phenomenon was cool but a function of distance. Lots of other college pitchers in women’s softball would have been equally hard to hit from 43 feet, just as I could doubtless blow away any major league hitter if you let me pitch from 35 feet.
I was told it has to do with the structure of the elbow.
The levels of estrogen and testosterone in your body will affect how your bones grow, and this results in certain anatomical differences between the genders, and one of these has to do with your elbow joint.
Women, I’m told, have an elbow that is better suited to an underhand thrown than a man’s, while men have one better suited to an overhand thrown than a woman’s.
While there will always be outliers, this would make women on average better at underhand pitching, men on average better at overhand pitching, and it seems natural that the different genders would gravitate towards sports they were physiologically prone to be good at.
I have no idea where those "n"s came from. 
Sorry about screwing up her name. The game is a softball game, played on a softball-sized field. Something I found intriguing (among many things) in the article was :
You say it’s a function of distance. The article (excerpted from the book The Sports Gene by David Epstein) goes into detail about what I briefly touched on in my second paragraph. I don’t want to go into it more (fair use and all) and I certainly didn’t mean to create the impression that this woman overpowered MLB hitters. The thrust of the article really is about what it is that elite athletes are seeing and doing that others don’t. As I said, it’s about a lot more than baseball.
The Colorado Silver Bullets were a team consisting of top level college softball players playing baseball. While they existed they routinely got beat by single A and below level teams.
Even more so it is a function of different angles and ball movement, really not that much different than when a submariner comes out of the bullpen and screws up everyone’s timing. This experiment has been done before. A major league level hitter will do poorly against a top level softball pitcher for a while. After seeing a couple dozen pitches he will start knocking them over the fence.
I’m trying to remember which book I read that delved into it. It may have been Andy Roddick Beat me with a Frying Pan in the chapter that dealt with if there were any sports in which a woman can compete with men.