Pitch Counts for Softball

My daughter, Emma, pitches for the Williams College softball team, and will begin her final season next spring as a softball pitcher.  Amazingly, she has never missed a game because of a shoulder, arm or elbow injury.  The reason, I think, is because she has pitched fewer innings than the vast majority of college softball pitchers.  It’s as if she has imposed a pitch count on herself.

 

Softball pitchers routinely pitch far more innings than baseball pitchers.  The top pitchers on the top-ten collegiate softball teams pitched, on average, 242 innings last season.  Their male counterparts pitched, on average, 114 innings.  

Figure 1.  Beginning of peak muscle exertion.

Sideline geniuses explain that softball pitchers are such inning-eating monsters because the underhand pitching motion of softball is more natural than the overhand motion of baseball.  I think they’re right but that doesn’t mean that girls and young women should be pitching so many more innings than boys and young men.  The best evidence suggests that high-school baseball pitchers are twice as likely as softball pitchers to suffer a game-limiting shoulder injury per game pitched.  But, if girls pitch twice as many innings as boys then we would expect the number of injuries per pitcher to be roughly the same for softball and baseball pitchers.  And, that would be my best guess, having seen so many girls crippled by season-ending and career-ending pitching injuries.    

If softball pitchers were naturally able to fling softballs at 60 miles per hour with spin rates of 25 rotations per second, God wouldn’t have made buckets for dads to sit on.  And, it is mostly dads that sit on the buckets, at least for the current crop of softball players.  Motion studies of the softball pitching process find that shoulders and elbows are subject to extreme forces and torques beginning at the point illustrated in figure 1 and continuing through the point at which the pitcher releases the ball.   And, these forces are much greater than when softball players throw overhand.  So, it isn’t surprising that most softball shoulder injuries are suffered by softball pitchers. 

For years, I’ve been arguing on the sidelines of softball games that economic reasoning predicts that softball and baseball pitchers should experience similar numbers of injuries.  People weigh benefits and costs in deciding how much beer to drink on Friday night, how many hours to study for an upcoming exam and how many innings to pitch annually.  When weighing benefits and costs, softball and baseball pitchers are likely to consider the risk of injuring their shoulders per game pitched.  If softball pitchers face a lower risk per game pitched than baseball pitchers, then you would expect them to pitch more innings, just as people drink more beer in states with lower beer taxes.  Or, just as people slathered with sunblock tend to stay on the beach longer. 

My guess is that football players face a greater risk of a concussion per game than softball players.  But, that doesn’t mean that we should be unconcerned about the number of concussions in softball.  Similarly, the fact that softball pitchers are less likely to be injured per game pitched than baseball pitchers doesn’t mean that we should be less concerned about preventing injuries of softball pitchers. 

Parents, coaches and softball pitchers ought to consider adopting the recommendations made by a group of University of Florida orthopedists.  My daughter and I basically stumbled into adhering to most of them, including not playing year round and emphasizing good mechanics.  But, the handout would have helped us limit the number of pitches thrown during our practices together during her high school years.  It also helped that her high school did not have a softball team. 

Arming parents of softball pitchers with information may not be enough, because of the rat race of competing for admission into Ivy-league caliber colleges and scholarships at division-one universities.  It’s an example of what economists call a prisoner’s dilemma.  All pre-collegiate softball pitchers would be better off limiting the amount they pitch to prevent injuries but no individual player (or her parents) in the race has an incentive to unilaterally limit the amount they pitch.

If you go to the website of Little League Baseball and type “pitch count” into the site’s search engine, you will get a list of 503 documents, including tournament rules that impose pitch counts.  Doing the same thing at the website of The American Softball Association of America (ASA) yields “NO RESULTS FOUND.”  I couldn’t believe it, nothing about pitch counts.  Shame on you ASA.  The softball division of Little League Baseball says that its pitch count regulations “do not apply to and cannot be used in softball.”  Shame on you Little League.

 

My daughter initially wanted to go to Yale or Princeton, but after making campus visits and researching the schools, chose to apply early decision to Williams College.  At Williams, she pitched 125 innings last year.  At Ivy League Universities, the top softball pitcher threw, on average, 130 innings.  That’s a lot less than the top collegiate pitchers and substantially less than the top pitchers in the MAC conference, who averaged 190 innings, with one innings-eating monster pitching 268 innings. 

Why do pitchers at Ivy League Universities and colleges like Williams pitch fewer innings?  One of the reasons, I think, is because they can quit without losing their scholarships.  If colleges and universities offering scholarships explicitly or implicitly impose pitch counts on baseball pitchers, then I think they should impose ones tailored for softball on softball pitchers.   I'm so glad that my daughter pitches at a college that imposes reasonable ceilings on the number of innings she pitches.