NCAA softball is the game MLB wants baseball to become as it remains stuck in neutral
As Major League Baseball remains in a slow, plodding, methodical, analytical fight with itself, the similar game that was created for girls is thriving.
Of the many developments sports has seen in the last 25 years, the rise in popularity of softball was as foreseeable as the PGA Tour suspending top players for playing in a Saudi-backed golf league.
Softball, not baseball, is the perfect diamond game for the young generation.
The NCAA College World Series is in its final series, and Oklahoma is expected to defeat Texas, whose football team lost to Kansas, for another national title.
At least this one won’t be Steve Sarkisian’s fault.
If you are new to college softball, don’t judge the game when you watch the Sooners.
The 2022 Oklahoma Sooners softball team is one of the all-time teams in the history of major NCAA athletics. We’re talking John Wooden UCLA Bruin-ish good.
For Oklahoma fans, we are talking Bud Wilkinson good.
The Sooners went into Thursday night’s Game 2 College World Series Final series with a 58-3 record. It has played four games decided by one run; they have won 49 of their games by at least five runs.
Take the Sooners’ beatdowns out of the mix, and the sport of college softball is on to something.
As much as the Major League Baseball players, and the Major League Baseball Players Association, don’t want to hear this, the younger generation is not wired to consume the sport of baseball as its currently played.
Softball is an ideal new generation sport that is not played on a phone, or in front of a screen.
Softball is stimulation.
Baseball, as much as I will always love the game, is by comparison boring.
Softball is the game baseball once was.
Softball games are quicker. Softball games offer more action. Softball games have less dead time between plays.
The batters don’t roam around the batter’s box between swings. The pitcher catches the ball; she sees the signal from her catcher; she throws the damn ball.
The games last seven innings, and are routinely completed in a 2 hour and 30 minute window.
All of it explains why softball has become a quiet ratings machine for ESPN, especially the NCAA world series.
Despite the many efforts of MLB to shorten the length of their games, it remains the highway road construction project that will never end.
The random big league game still routinely pushes three hours.
Take the Seattle Mariners’ 6-3 win over the Houston Astros on June 8. It took three hours and nine minutes.
On May 31, the Cincinnati Reds defeated the Boston Red Sox, 2-1. A baseball game with three combined runs should be brisk; it lasted three hours and four minutes.
The only sport that can get away with three-plus hour games remains football; NFL regular-season games often take less time than an MLB regular-season game.
College football games often last longer than the entire Fast & Furious series, but that’s a different topic.
A tiny portion of MLB’s congressional pace is commercials, which is revenue.
A college softball game is not slowed down by the commercial breaks between innings, or pitching changes.
MLB remains in a fight with itself to undo many of the changes brought on by the reliance of extensive statistical analysis to improve a team’s chances of winning the game.
You can’t spell “analytics” without four letters.
Former New York Yankees great and current Miami manager Don Mattingly said last year, “This started 15, 16 years ago with the swing changes and the philosophy changes and the analytics ... and all that stuff.
“It’s been coming and it’s been building and now we’re at a point where I think it’s getting so much more attention because it’s just a game that sometimes is unwatchable. You talk to guys and they don’t even like watching games because nothing goes on in them.”
Don Mattingly is not exactly a baseball hater.
All of this is why MLB is jamming down pace-quickening measures, to the disgust of the purist who wants the game untouched.
It remains at the same point that venerable baseball reporter Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated, not exactly a baseball hater, called MLB’s pace of play, a “crisis,” which he detailed in 2021.
Exactly none of this means softball is primed to overtake baseball, maybe ever.
Baseball is an American sports original, and it enjoys all of those ingrained benefits.
It’s a man’s sport, and we are decades away before women’s sports are consumed at the same rate as the male equivalent.
Softball’s and baseball’s future as Olympic sports remains uncertain; currently, they are both not scheduled to be played at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
Both need a presence in the Olympics.
As someone who grew up playing, and watching baseball, a part of me will always love it.
But softball has become the better game.
