Softball Image not improved by others’ ignorance
February 2, 2004

It is a dangerous thing to start to talk about something you know nothing about, especially with many others listening and judging you.

Whatever credibility Chris Laidlaw had with me in the rugby world has just gone completely after his Sunday Star Times’ article about my game. It is my game, and that of thousands of others who have had to listen to experts tell us similar rubbish.

Such as those who say “softball has wasted the chance to build on world dominance” and “chewing gum sport”. Comments such as “it is played by few people in few countries” and “they should stop trying to emulate their American cousins and create a New Zealand style of the sport”.

Chris, we have. It is called winning. You go on to admit that our successful sports are those such as rugby and netball where there are limited countries. Then you say that baseball is the same. Ouch.

Ignorance is no excuse for a columnist. A very little research would show that there is a healthy abundance of overseas players in the “big show” of American baseball. Think of Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Japan, El Salvador and so many more Caribbean and many others.

Study the NY Yankees starting line-up. And the Boston Red Sox. Or the Florida Marlins. Half the players in the World Series’ were “outsiders”.

Where do the big stars go in the American winter but to the Central American leagues where they have countless worshippers and those who try to emulate them.

Three gold and two silver medals in 20 years is a half-statement of praise. Five medals in five times is better because, like the Olympics and rugby world cup, it is once every four years.

Twice in two weeks there has been an article from someone who should have known better, using the space to belittle. Minor sports face what was once the bane of the American school of reporting. As in Melbourne, the message is to swamp the media with the top sports. Twelve pages of rugby, two of league and the others with snippets.

My message to experts is to stick to what you know, or do your homework. Yes, softball is the worst named sport in the world. Ask a batter who has been hit by a wayward, or deliberate, pitch. Ask the catcher, masked and suited, with a special glove, shinpads and reinforced shoes.

Ask the pitcher. He hurls the ball with a vicious spin which burrows it into his catcher’s glove with a force no throw could ever emulate and, sometimes, if the catcher is getting frustrated at not getting the pitch requested, the pitcher gets the ball back with a force which almost drives him backwards. Or he gets a hit smashed back at his Adam’s apple, or worse.

And why do players wear gloves? Not because they are soft, but because they need to catch the ball at top speed, and often to relay it to someone else for the second phase of the play.

Call it fastpitch, cut out the softball. Slowpitch for the social game. No more softball. Other sports have done it, such as netball, which forced basketball to be called indoor basketball in New Zealand for so long.

With our success rate it would not take long to create the new name image. Then perhaps poor columnists would, as Mr Laidlaw comments, be more than “vaguely aware the Black Sox were world champions. No. 1 in the pecking order of the sport, bestriding the sport like a colossus, the team everybody has to get past to win the world title, the glamour boys of their game” and so on. Faint praise in a column full of “hits”.

Ignorance is no excuse, Mr Laidlaw. This is no hip-hop, second rate imitation thing. It is the real thing. Real nice, intelligent guys, doing what they love, brilliantly. Get a grip. Be like so others who write about what they know.