August 25, 2004
Olympic Gold
Just wanted to offer a tip of the cap to Cat Osterman, Lisa Fernandez, Jennie Finch and the rest of the U.S. women's olympic softball team for so convincingly winning the gold medal in Athens. I wonder, though, if their opponents might have finally discovered a weakness - after all, in the gold medal game the U.S. gave up their first and only run!
Jim
Posted by Jim Storer at
08:37 PM
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It's really great to see our softballers go out there and just crush the opposition. It kinda takes the sting out of being left out of the baseball competition and the hated Cubans winning again.
All the same, though, I wonder if the separation of all the girls and women into softball instead of baseball is making the eventual introduction of women into organized baseball that much farther away. As it is, the best female athletes who play a stick-and-ball sport are all channelled into something different enough from baseball so that the skills don't transfer so easily.
While I think it would be the rare woman strong enough and quick enough to compete at a professional, much less major league level, I've got to think that there are a few outliers who could compete at that level if high school girls and college women played baseball instead.
As it is, the whole pitching mechanics in softball are just too different to judge whether Jennie Finch or Lisa Fernandez could do what they do if they pitched a smaller ball, overhand, at a batter's box farther away, at taller batters with wooden bats. Finch can strike out major leaguers who play by her rules, but how much of an adjustment would it be if one of the elite softballers switched to hardball?
Adam
It is amazing the total dominance of the American women in softball. It reminds me of the original Dream Team in 1992. Nobody could hope to come close to beating that Dream Team. The softball team did the same to their competition. Pretty much made a mockery of it.
adam is right.
the problem is that girls are practically pushed out of little league into an inferior game. i want to believe that it is NOT because too many men are afraid that females could actually compete on an equal playing field if we were taught the right way to play from the beginning. i see a LOT of women who are larger than some major leaguers, like Ms. Finch so it can't just be a size question. and since females are full grown at 13 (skeleton) we could be taught to throw filthy breaking stuff a lot earlier without worrying about hurting our growing skeletons. As for playing in the pros, i know that there were at least a few females on Negro League teams. So why not now?
I'm glad they didn't blow out Taiwan like they did against other teams in the tourney. This is the real "Dream Team" in this Olympic games.