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Florida High Schools To Pitch From 43 Feet
by Dave
Thursday, August 25, 2005
According to the Naples Daily News (registration required), the Florida High School Athletic Association will move the softball pitcher's circle back to 43 feet for the 2006 season in the interest of increasing player (presumably pitcher) safety. Florida will be the first state to change the pitching distance to the college distance. This rule change will apply to all varsity and jv games.
I don't know exactly what to make of this change. I'm not convinced that just doing this can prevent a high percentage of injuries which occur to pitchers on balls hit back to the box. When I read this, I wanted to gain a better understanding of what this 3 feet will mean. So I did a little mathematical exercise I will share with you.
First off, you need to have a starting point for hit ball speed. I always thought a hit ball was about twice as fast as a pitched ball but I am unable to find anything even close to that online. I did see that, at least with respect to baseball, the NCAA restricts the speed of a hit ball. This manifests itself in testing of bats which can be certified for use. I honestly do not know if the NCAA does the same for softball but I'll assume they do. I'll also assume high schools follow whatever the NCAA does. I saw some baseball bat studies which indicate a speed of around 100 mph is probably close to reality. That equates to around 111% of the pitched speed. Given that good high school softball pitchers throw anywhere from 58 - 66, I used a batted ball speed of 70 mph. This may not be 100% accurate but this is what I used.
70 mph converts to 77 feet per second. At 40 feet, that means the pitcher has .519 seconds in which to react to a batted ball. At 43 feet, the time is .558 seconds. The difference is .04 seconds. That is not a lot of additional time. The only way I can think of to get a sense the length of time .04 seconds takes, is to watch a digital clock or use a stop watch. I don;t have a stopwatch handy and the only digital clock I have handy reads out seconds. If you watch a one second readout and see how long one second is, consider that within that one second, there were 25 periods of time equal to the additional time a pitcher will have to react when the pitcher's plate is moved back 3 feet.
So if going back to 43 feet doesn't do it, what else can we consider? I suppose we could require that bats hit balls at no greater speed than say 50 or 60 mph. Every 10 mph reduction would add about another tenth of a second to the reaction time. That's a considerable improvement. But on the other hand, we really do not want women's softball to be reduced to some gentile sport where women can wear frilly dresses and big sun bonnets like some sort of throw back to the roaring twenties. Fastpitch softball is a tough game where players can get hurt just as baseball is a tough game where players can get hurt. It is an exciting game mostly because it is so very fast.
I don't want to sound as if I am taking a "who cares" attitude about players. I have a couple daughters who are in the line of fire or, if you will, the circle of fire. But I wonder what exactly the right thing to do is without hurting the sport. The original move to 43 feet was to provide greater reaction time to batters in order to remove the overwhelming percentage of strike outs which were ruining the game as pitchers became faster and faster. I think that was the right move. The game needed more hitting. But it also need greater safety, not because it is girls playing it but because the dangers are a little over the top.
I watched my 10 year old daughter nearly break a pitcher's shoulder with a simple line drive. When I told her coach about this, he told me a story of how his daughter at the age of 15 broke a pitcher's jaw. There just should not be so many readily available instances of such injuries to pitchers such that everyone knows one off the top of their head. Anecdotally speaking, there just must be too much danger.
But if the pitching distance and bats alone cannot do the job without wrecking the game, I think the best alternative is to change the protective gear which pitchers wear. We put helmets on even professional hockey players. We require catchers to wear face masks and helmets. We even make the batter wear a helmet and, more and more frequently, those helmets come with a face mask. It seems a simple, logical step to adjust pitcher's protective gear in order to improve their safety.
Perhaps the equipment currently available is not up to the job. There are fielder's face masks and other devices out there. But at least partly because there has not been a call from the softball "industry," there is currently not a huge selection of protective pitching gear. If the highest level of the sport would conduct studies and work with the manufacturers, we might have a workable solution which would become the norm as the highest levels would model such gear for us. It would be a trivial matter to convince a girl to wear what Jennie Finch is wearing on TV! I think that's the best answer to this very real problem.
In conclusion, I applaud Florida for at least trying to address the safety concerns for pitchers. I don't think it does the complete job, however. I suspect the way to address this is via newly developed equipment. I sincerely hope the softball establishment partners with industry to develop protective gear for pitchers and then champions it in a manner which will make every girl want to wear it.
 
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