It's harder than it looks...
                                                                     George Hawley

When the time rolls around for the Sarasota senior softball winter league drafts, key Board of Director members have a lot of hard work to do.  The driving principles are to make sure that everyone who signs up for the draft gets on at least one roster with care being given to day of week preferences and that managers have the best information possible regarding availability dates, position preferences and skill ratings in order to promote parity.  A great deal of effort is put in the collection of player data sheets (It is vital that these be filled out online on the Association website at www.sarasotaseniorsoftball.org or on a paper form and turned in well ahead of the October draft meetings.)

Skill ratings are numbers from 1-12 that are assigned to players based on Board member subjective assessments and updated by each league's team managers at the end of each summer and winter season.  Draft lists are produced for each league with players of equal ratings listed as groups in alphabetical order.  Managers select from their league's list in a randomized order to help achieve parity after themselves being assigned positions in the draft order.  Pitcher selection is often an exception to the rule.  Sometimes pitchers are selected in a separate draft to make sure that one team doesn't get more than their share, possibly leaving another team "pitcherless".  It isn't a perfect system but overall has served the Association well for several years now.  (Snowbirds are another special category but that's another story.)

Pitchers turn out to be a relatively few in number and need special handling because there aren't that many who profess to have the necessary skills.  They are something like whooping cranes or California Condors.  This may be hard to understand when one thinks about tossing a 12 inch softball in a gentle arc toward home plate.  How hard can it be?  Moreover, idiosyncrasies are tolerated for pitchers that might otherwise be a subject for derision or worse:  Guys who show up late habitually, guys who disappear for weeks at a time in the middle of a season for elk hunting trips, guys who can barely walk to first base let alone run, guys who love to spend half the game arguing that their pitches aren't illegal.  Why are such antics excused for pitchers.  There has to be a reason or two.

First of all pitchers have to be either fearless or crazy to end up 40 feet from home plate dodging line drives traveling more than 90 miles per hour off illegal bats.  Not everyone can do that, even though the use of pitching screens is mandatory.  They are kind of like seat belts.  They only work if you get behind them which is kind of tough to do in 300 milliseconds anyway.  But there's more to it than that.

Pitchers have many constraints on their art, similar to pianists with only 88 keys, only worse.  First of all, it is required to toss the ball in such a way that, if not hit, it bounces off some part of a plywood rectangle approximately 34 inches deep by 17 inches wide from a distance of 45 to 51 feet away.  That's a distance precision of about 3/45 or less than 7%.  The angular precision is even more stringent at about 1.9 degrees of arc.  Try that with a wind gusting at 20 miles per hour.  To make it even more difficult, cagey old hitters seldom seem to help by offering at a ball that is more than a millimeter or two off.  One has to be psychologically strong to watch in dismay as a fourth ball just misses the board with the lead off man on deck and be able to rebound in an attempt to redeem one's self from the sin of a walk.

Would that the above were the only issues for a pitcher to handle.  Did I mention two outfielders colliding under a routine fly ball on what would have been the third out with the bases loaded or other miscues?  Hey, it's senior softball.  You can't be expected to pick up every routine grounder and actually get the throw all the way to first.  One out of three isn't too shabby.  In 14 innings on any given playing date senior softball pitchers throw over 150 pitches.  It makes major league pitchers look like wusses.  It doesn't help when you throw the first pitch in an inning for a ball, followed by a chorus of encouragement from one's infielders: "Get it over."  or "Just throw strikes." or "Make him hit."  But it's harder than that.

There are arc limitations on pitches.  A legal pitch must reach a peak height of a minimum of six feet and a maximum of twelve feet.  Are you kidding me?  God forbid you should throw a ball 11 feet, 13 inches.  Worse than that, the umpire's call is completely subjective.  "Illegal" rings out across the field after a perfectly respectable pitch that thumps on the board fruitlessly, the hitter smiling at his teammate, the umpire.  That's why pitchers prefer to have the opposing pitcher as umpire at home plate.  Only they appreciate the angst that evil word creates.  What's the point in arguing the call?  It's the pitcher's word against the umpire.  Who would you believe?  The same goes for flat pitches that barely reach six feet.  The cry of "AFLAC" emerges from the bench jockeys, a euphemism for flat that only encourages the umpire to continue to be overly critical.  Hey, it's only a game...

Here are some interesting numbers derived from the physics of pitching a softball:  in order to have a 4 inch diameter ball travel at a maximum height of between 6 and 12 feet and hit a board extending from about 45 to 48 feet from the pitching rubber, one must launch the ball in an initial angle of about 10 degrees to about 30 degrees from the horizontal at an initial velocity of between 56 and 39 feet per second (30 mph equates to 44 feet per second.). Assumptions include ignoring air friction and that the ball leaves the pitcher's hand at a height of 3 feet off the ground.  Simple, right? Or "easy peazy", as my wife likes to say before chipping a golf ball from a foot of rough to within 6 inches of the pin.  Any volunteers?