Softball isn’t baseball, and yet we’re told it is. We’re told from a very young age that if we want to play baseball, we have to satisfy ourselves with this different sport entirely, a sport that should have its own rich heritage and history but instead, despite the fact that it comes from a different place, is looked down on as inferior to baseball[1].
This is not a piece about Sarah Hudek. I don’t know her motivations, and I can’t blame her for taking a reported softball scholarship to a well-reputed university instead of continuing to play baseball at a community college in Louisiana. I don’t know what her thought process was, I don’t know what might have gone into this decision, but I do know that even if she had continued to play baseball, there wasn’t really anywhere for her to go after two years.
It’s hard enough to find and maintain and grow a competitive college baseball team on the anemic number of scholarships maintained and mandated by the NCAA. I can understand why a coach, especially a D1 coach, especially a D1 coach in any kind of competitive conference, would shy away from giving any part of a scholarship to a woman, and why a woman might not be able to take even the piddling amount potentially offered to attend an expensive university.
This isn’t a story about that, though. It’s a story about false equivalencies. If you took an American football player and told them that sorry, you’re not… I don’t know, it’s hard to make the analogy here. But if you told them that they couldn’t play American football, that they had to go play some other sport… like Canadian football, where the rules are different but the same, where it’s looked down upon by those “in power” and where salaries are so much less, and they had to play this other game since childhood because of some characteristic, that’s what you’d have.
But Canadian football isn’t like that. Not every American football player is going to make the NFL, of course, and not every one of them is going to get a scholarship to go to college[2]. They all have the chance to try, though. Half of them aren’t sorted out at age five, told to go play Canadian football right away.
Softball isn’t baseball. The women’s version of baseball is baseball. It’s the same sport, played under the same rules, with the same ball, and the same field. This, then, is the problem—it barely exists. The United States does have a women’s baseball team, operated under the same federation as the men’s team. This is well and good, except that the selection out of baseball happens below then. It’s not an issue of having a national team. It’s the issue of having a middle school team.
Baseball[3] is like a pyramid scheme. You start out at the base of the pyramid in Little League, where there are thousands and thousands of players. A limited number of those play through middle school. Of those, a limited number play in high school. Of those, an even smaller percentage play for select teams or get noticed by scouts or college coaches. That turns into the minuscule percentage drafted or signed by a major-league team, which is a larger number than those that play minor-league ball, that leads to the ~750 active players on a major-league roster, a good number of whom didn’t actually come through the US-based pyramid, but instead an international one.
In order to be competitive, in order to develop a sport that is pleasing to the eye, and “high-quality[4]” you have to start with a huge base of the pyramid. When girls are told in in saccharine-sweet voice, “Oh, baseball? No, you want to play softball,” we choke off the base of that talent and make it almost impossible for the rest of the way up.
We all got really excited last year when AT&T put out an ad imagining the future with the first female major leaguer. For now, though, that’s going to remain wishful thinking.
If we’re going to ever have women playing baseball, it starts now, and it starts at the bottom. Mo’ne Davis can’t be the only girl at the Little League World Series. Sarah Hudek can’t be the only girl pitching in college. We have to stop peddling the doctrine of false equivalency.
[1] While softball may not be viewed as inferior de jure, it certainly is viewed that way by a majority of the sporting population (de facto). Additionally, there has been no real viable professional softball league to date. All this leads towards this question: If men played softball, and women baseball, which would be considered the "legitimate" sport?
[2] Though, with the 85 scholarships each D1 school not under restrictions is empowered to offer, a hell of a lot of them do.
[3] All sports, particularly ones with little leagues.
[4] Whatever the hell we’re deciding that means this week.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.
Subscribe now
Oh, and men do play softball. Around here there are far more men playing softball than women.
Parents steer their girls to softball because that is all they will be able to play in HS and college. And there simply aren't enough Sarah Hudek's out there to compete with boys at the HS and college level.
The solution is to get the HS and colleges to have women's baseball teams. Limited resources says that will not happen in my lifetime.
As steps like this emerge and demonstrate that, yes, girls can certainly compete with (and in Davis's case, defeat) boys, the idea of girls and women playing baseball becomes less a strange idea and more of a reality.
As someone who was shuttled into RF on his little league team because a girl had a far better throwing arm than him at 3B, I can assure you that women can and do succeed at this sport at a young age when given the chance. (She could hit, too!)
Are there any good articles out there as the origins of softball as a girls sport? I know that as recently as WWII Tom Hanks was coaching women playing actual baseball, but in the intervening years they've been moved off into softball. At the same time, women's soccer, basketball and even ice hockey have developed in ways that are almost indistinguishable from the men's game (from a rules standpoint, that is). What would it take to reverse this and get Girls/Women's Baseball to be the thing at the youth, high school and college levels?
The most frustrating thing is that while there may be noise on a national/international level about changing things, it's the local level where change has to happen, and hasn't really so far.
Baseball and softball are different, and if you want to play at the college level, you need to play at the HS level. And if you want to play at the HS level, you need to play it at a younger age than that.
Title IX does not require them to add women's baseball. As an example, UCLA had a world class men's gymnastics team but shut it down in the 80's to balance out Title IX scholarship levels. They kept women's gymnastics.
Google Books preview here: https://books.google.com/books?id=oJuwTnbkmUMC&q=softball#v=snippet&q=softball&f=false
For example, the Seymours found a 1909 pamphlet called "Athletic Games in the Education of Women" in which the authors "expressed the view that although regulation baseball contained the greatest educational possibilities, it presented problems for women: the hard ball, the heavy bat, the long throws, and the complex rules."
Two decades later, in 1929, the American Physical Education Association "asserted that the 'intricate technique' of baseball was 'too difficult for the average girl to master'; to obtain its educational benefits ... sponsors must alter baseball's rules 'to fit the peculiar needs and abilities of girls and women.'"
Girls are treated less well than boys because they play softball instead of baseball? That's implicitly implying that softball is an inferior endeavor, despite your protestations to the contrary. C'mon.
You know why girls play softball? It isn't a conspiracy. They play it, because that's what girls do. They could care less if that offends your purist principles. I've known plenty of female players that played hardball through the age of 10 or so. At that point, they almost universally move to fast-pitch softball, and it isn't because the big, bad male-dominated world forces it upon their sweet innocent souls.
Few girls stick on baseball teams past that age because that's when the strength and speed of boys begins to outstrip girls. There are certainly females who can continue to compete with males past that point, but those with the ability and desire to so are few. That leads directly to the other reason, it is significant and obvious, young girls don't want to be the only female on a team of boys.
The rare girl who can compete with males at a high school level might well be "one of the boys". Yay. But as a softball player, that girl will dominate because any female with the size, strength and speed to hold her own against males is going to be a top tier player in an all-female softball league. It's just great I guess that a player like that sticks on the high school baseball team to salve your ego, Kate, but most players and parents would rather have an opportunity for a scholarship, to play for a national team or even to play professionally. You do know there are professional women's fast-pitch leagues, right? I guess those teams don't meet with your expectations of success, but that's far more your problem, not theirs.
If a woman is going to play in MLB someday, she isn't going to be a pitcher. She'll be an ex-softball player who slips the strength mismatch by relying on speed, defense and contact hitting. There *are* players like that out there, right now. You want to complain, wonder why pro teams aren't considering female players with those abilities. Spare me the trope of girls being "forced" into softball.
For the record, I have two daughters who play fast-pitch and I've coached and supported teams for many years. Not once have I ever felt that girls were given short shrift, that somehow fast-pitch softball is a second-class sport compared to baseball. That's insulting, Kate, and the kind of soft sexist thinking I'm sure you fancy yourself as being above.
My only complaint is how the two sports are supported financially. For example, our local municipality just approved $13 million in field improvements. They gave $12 million to the boys baseball fields and $1 million to the girls in an area with a strong girls program. I know boys participation in baseball isn't 12 times the girls softball participation rate. Now that is worthy of censure, not just the mere existence of a softball league in the first place, as you apparently are wont to believe.
Your writing might be first-rate, Kate, but your thinking and conclusions on this topic are severely flawed.
"Not once have I ever felt that girls were given short shrift, that somehow fast-pitch softball is a second-class sport compared to baseball."
"My only complaint is how the two sports are supported financially. For example, our local municipality just approved $13 million in field improvements. They gave $12 million to the boys baseball fields and $1 million to the girls in an area with a strong girls program. I know boys participation in baseball isn't 12 times the girls softball participation rate."
Your second statement directly contradicts your first. Your municipality totally considers softball a second-class sport compared to baseball.
That same municipality has won the Texas high school girls title twice in the last five years, the local travel teams are highly competitive and our local girls regularly gain admittance to top college-level programs. Yes, the local fields could use repair, the backstops are falling down and the parking sucks. But none of that has anything to do with the product on the field or opportunities afforded to the participants.
My argument is that fast-pitch softball as a sport is not inferior to hardball and that girls are not somehow forced into a less desirable athletic path. That apparently is not how the author of this piece feels. I disagree. If she wanted to make a point about how female athletics are underfunded even 30 years after Title IX, fine, but that was never her argument. It was that softball isn't as good as baseball, so girls should play baseball instead and if they don't, it is due to rampant sexism and that's asinine beyond belief.
Her 5 foot 6 110lb sister played boys varsity water polo because there was no girls team at her school. She then went to work on a crab fishing boat in Alaska.
I can't wait for the day when I see a woman in Spring Training and that day will come sooner when we have girls baseball at the high school level.