In watching the World Series they have repeatedly shown young Mo’ne Davis. A 13 year old girl who can throw a 70 mph fastball and threw a shutout at the Little League Worlds Series. People are saying how she is such a great example to other girls.
But I cant get over is her “example” is she went outside the mold and played baseball whereas most girls just play softball. and if she had, would we have ever heard of her?
And it begs the question of why girls play softball anyhow and boys play baseball?
Now I’m guessing is it started years ago when softball was considered a “safe” version of baseball and therefore girls should play it because we KNOW girls are more fragile - right?
Well times have changed and Mo’ne, and the 4 other girls who have played in the Little League World Series before her, have proven this wrong. Yet we still are stuck on thinking of the past.
Thing is if girls are segregated to softball only teams, they just dont have the ability to shine. And how can they shine? Have you ever watched college level women’s softball? Because of the size of a softball you cannot throw or hit the ball as far.
Quick note - my sons baseball team used to have one girl on it. What I’ve seen is about 1 in 12 age 6-12 year old baseball players are girls and they are often the best on the team.
Because during the Little Legue ages a larger percentage of girls can still play on the same level as boys. After that age the gap becomes wider and wider. Mo’ne is probably in the top .1% of atheletes at that age and can probably hang a lot longer. But she is certainly not typical. During Little Legue ages girls often develop faster and are bigger than the boys and often stronger. That ends quickly after that.
My cousin had to fight with the PTB (Powers That Be) to be allowed to tryout for her high school baseball team. While they had a softball team, it was marginal at best, and the baseball team was pretty good. She played first base and she caught. They made the playoffs for the three years she played.
Out here in “The Sticks”, many rural high schools can not feild enough male players to form a baseball team. They often recruit some of the local softball players to the team. It is not unusual to see three of four girls on the diamond.
I do know that the girls that play baseball are often some of the better players on the team. They often feel that they have to “prove” themselves to be “good enough” to play with the boys in a boys game. IME, to acheive this status, they train hard and long with the expected results.
If you were to ask them why they do not play softball, many of them will tell you that softball is not competitive enough for them. The girls that play baseball in high school are often the best female atheletes in the school. As Loach said, the top .1 percent.
I have, and do watch college softball. It is a very competitive sport. It is not as popular as baseball for many reasons. Not the least of which is that it is no longer an olympic sport. While curling is. Really? Curling? Yes! When softball was an olympic sport, the players were household names, at least in my families homes they were.
I would like to continue, but it is way past my bedtime. G’night, 48.
Same reason fat men in bar leagues play softball. Baseball requires a higher skill level, probably absent in the talent pool available for the league. Baseball is way too boring among unskilled players, too many pitches out of the strike zone, too many swings and misses, too many players who can’t throw the ball across a 90-foot diamond.
When I coached little league (hardball) I had one girl on my team. Mindy became the hero in one game, because she was the only player who was not too macho to learn how to bunt properly. And she was the fastest runner I had, and beat out the bunt.
I have coached Little League teams for several years. We had mixed T-Ball teams but after that the boys played baseball and the girls played softball. Girls can play baseball in our town but in the years I have been coaching there has only been one girl (that’s one on any town team of any age, not just one that I coached) and her parents signed her up for baseball by mistake. She stuck with it for the season but didn’t come back.
One part of it is that girls don’t like playing baseball with boys. Some of the boys are hyper-competitive. Some are just plain hyper. Some are poor sports. Some are bullies. Some are crybabies (they still cry at 12-13 years old if things don’t go their way). Nearly every boy I’ve coached fits into one of those categories. I have coached some nice, respectful, hard-working boys, but they are a distinct minority. Most young boys are not fun to play with or coach.
Young girls treat softball as a fun game. They don’t care as much as the boys about winning. They don’t pick on the girl who strikes out all the time. The ball is bigger and is pitched more slowly so they hit the ball more often which makes it more fun. I think that if you tried to set up a girls-only baseball league the girls would still prefer to play softball. It’s more fun.
Men who grew up playing baseball play softball when they get older. It’s not just the over the hill guys. My friends and I started playing softball in our 20s when we were still able to play baseball at a high level. Baseball is a battle. Softball is a fun, low-pressure game.
Yes there are some differences in the makeup and emotional maturity between boys and girls, but it also depends on the league you find. For my daughter we found a league focusing on learning the game and having fun, and there were a few girls in it. That was in San Francisco, the Bill Lange League. I wonder if they’re still around? With that league’s focus and leadership, anyone being a jerk wasn’t tolerated.
I coached ‘little league’ when my kids were growing up. They all played baseball, 2 boys and their 1 younger sister. Anyway of the three kids, baseball “stuck” most with my daughter (with her 2 brothers it was soccer, and dancing). She went on to a small high school and played baseball there, but the difference in speed and strength become greater in the high school years.
Because the girl version of everything has to be lame and crappy. Breaking a sweat and/or putting out an effort isn’t ladylike so the lame, crappy game of softball was invented.
Why does it persist? I have no idea. I played baseball with the boys.
To believe this requires a rather selective view of softball.
Quite some time ago I played in an industrial slow-pitch league. On our team was a former professional (NY Mets AAA) pitcher - he played left field, and was amazingly good (his throws from the field to the plate had to be seen to be believed), but was by no means the best player in that league.
I think the average boy would like softball more than baseball if they were presented as genderless choices. More hits, more running, more fielding. Most kids’ baseball games entail striking out, standing around, or sitting in the dugout. Ho-hum.
I played softball from about 6 to 13 years old. I was a crappy athlete, but I was still able to land a decent number of hits. I ended up quitting (in large part) because I was tired of my coach cringing every time a ball was hit my way (left field).
There are some good arguments for segregating women and men’s sports teams, I just don’t get why in this case they have to be separate sports. Men’s baseball, women’s baseball. Why is that the case in every other sport, but not baseball? It’s not like the WNBA has shorter nets, a sixth player and nerf basketballs, so why are women who want to play baseball forced to play a bastardized version of the game?
Don’t they have an extra outfielder? And the ball is weird. And they have a pitcher’s box like it’s 1885 again instead of a rubber. You can play slow-pitch baseball in the park if you want. Or kickball for that matter. It doesn’t have to be hyper-competitive. I just don’t understand why softball was invented or why it persists.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve never gotten either. Why isn’t baseball what girls play if they want to play a baseball-type game in middle school and high school? Are there not enough girls who can make the peg from third to first on a grounder if it’s a baseball-sized diamond?
It boggles my mind that this second-class sport survived into the 1980s as a sport for schoolgirls, let alone to 2014.
I’m going to be working with Boy Scouts, mostly in the 10-12 range, and I’ve always found kids at that age a lovable bunch of knuckleheads. Not that I’m disputing your experiences – just wondering why you keep doing it when you’re in an area with so many crappily-raised kids.
That sounds like the most likely reason, although you would think that the fact that there would be (slightly) more time to make the throw as girls (in the general sense) can’t run as fast as boys. There’s a reason the net in high school boys’ volleyball is a few inches higher than the one in girls’ volleyball. (The reason the rims in basketball aren’t different is, it would be cost prohibitive - and you can’t start doing it at college level as every player new to college basketball would have to be re-taught how to shoot free throws.)
It could also be a problem of resources. The vast majority of middle schools don’t have fields big enough for baseball (and besides, quite a few are in areas surrounded by houses, where baseball games become hazards for the people that live there); post-Little League baseball has to be played either on high school fields or city-maintained baseball fields. Softball, on the other hand, can be played at middle school level. This allows both to be played - something I doubt could happen if it was limited to just one or the other.
If you are talking about slow pitch softball, that observation is marginally correct. If you mean for it to include fast pitch softball it is utterly incorrect. The skill level required for fast pitch softball vs. baseball is identical in every way. The only mechanical differences are found in pitching and slap hitting. Softball pitching is underhand, baseball is generally overhand, but the skill level to deliver the ball accurately, with velocity and movement is the same. In fact, a good fast pitch softball pitcher has more different pitches than a baseball pitcher. Slap hitting in softball is roughly analagous to a drag bunt in baseball. Know why there aren’t more good drag bunters in baseball? Because it’s damn difficult to do! Slap hitting requires even more skill because of the combination of moving the body toward the mound while also swinging the bat (as opposed to holding it in one place as is done in bunting), yet a high percentage of girls are proficient at it.
Otherwise the mechanics are identical between the two sports. There are absolute speed differences, to be sure, but the smaller field size in softball more than makes up for it.
I base this on not only 30+ years of coaching both sports (volunteer) and giving individual lessons (paid) but am also a certfied instructor (paid, trained by 3 former major league players, one of whom is currently the hitting coach for a major league team). I travel the Southeastern US on weekends leading baseball/softball schools to teach the game to both coaches and kids. I separate the kids by age, but never by gender. There is no reason to - it’s the same skilll set and the girls usually put the boys to shame!
A little off-topic but in Iowa there used to be a game called Iowa girls 6 on 6 that had 6 girls on a team but only 3 per half. The game emphasized more passing. They dropped it in the 90’s.
You ought to try hockey. At least in our area hockey is totally coed until about age 14. I’ve been to many youth hockey tournaments where the top athletes were the girls.
And you know, 20 years from now those are the girls who will have no problem being managers of men because they learned at a young age how to deal with men.
