BEIJING – A bright-yellow softball sails foul over the top of the backstop screen at Fengtai Softball Field, and the crowd (actually, it’s more like an audience) responds with an “oooh!”
When the same ball caroms off an upstairs booth and is retrieved by a stadium usher, the fans slap their knees in delight. Then the usher turns to her right and throws the ball into the stands, very nearly bringing down the house.
Foul balls are a source of fascination and amusement to novice softball spectators in China. Whether spectators on the other side of the world can ever be as enthusiastic about the rest of the game is open to debate.
Mike Candrea, coach of the U.S. softball team, wants the world to just give the game a chance.
“This is a great team sport,” Candrea said after his team beat Australia, 3-0. His enthusiasm is understandable: In two Olympic tournament games, the U.S. has yet to give up a run.
Come to think of it, the U.S. has yet to give up a hit.
When Michael Phelps is breaking world records every time he gets his feet wet, he’s hailed as the superstar swimming needs, because breaking world records is healthy for the Olympics.
But when the U.S. softball team outscores the opposition, 14-0 – and does this without yielding a hit – it’s easy to see it as evidence there’s just not enough international competition to validate softball’s status as a sanctioned Olympic sport.
So the curtain is closing on Olympic softball, as well as its older sibling, baseball. Softball will be off the schedule four years from now, in London, and it will be Candrea’s mission over the next few years to find the time (his real job is coaching the sport at the University of Arizona) to help make a pitch for softball’s eventual return to the Summer Games.
Candrea doesn’t see anything wrong with the sport, though he concedes softball has been improved by some tweaking, including moving the pitcher’s circle from 40 feet to 43 feet.
“Fifteen years ago, we had that white ball, and we threw from 40 feet,” he said. “It was an ugly game to watch. It was an ugly game to coach.
“Now I think it’s an exciting game. We’ve done a lot of things that appeal to fans. We’ve moved the mound back, moved the fences back.”
Despite advances in conditioning and adjustments in field dimensions, softball is susceptible to that pitcher who throws with such wicked precision she brings everything on the field to a standstill.
The most memorable softball game in international history – Australia’s 2-1, 13-inning thriller over the U.S. during the 1996 Summer Games – featured nine perfect innings thrown by the losing starting pitcher, Lisa Fernandez. She lost because of a controversial tiebreaker system – a baserunner is placed on second to start each extra inning – whose implementation underscores how tough it is to push a runner across the plate against superior pitching.
Twelve years after Fernandez took a perfect game into the 10th inning, fans at Fengtai saw Cat Osterman strike out 13 Australian batters. And those who made contract were unable to hit the ball past the infield.
Pitching so dominating that no batter is able to take a clean swing is as hard to watch as it is to hit.
Candrea shrugs.
“You get to an Olympic arena, you get the best pitchers in the world,” he said. “And I don’t care if it’s major leagues or softball, great pitching is going to control the game a little bit.”
The U.S. team has great pitching. It also, at Candrea’s urging, has added some speed to a batting order no longer vulnerable to power outages at crucial times. Speed, power, a pitching staff that hasn’t allowed a hit, a winning streak of 16 games in the Olympics, an overall Olympic record of 26-4.
It would seem U.S. softball has everything. Well, everything except a future in Olympic competition beyond Beijing.
“After the games are over, we’ll worry about that,” Osterman said. “Right now, we have a gold medal on our minds. When we’re out there on the field, that’s the only thing that’s going through any of our minds.”
Osterman had just thrown a no-hitter, against the closest thing the U.S. softball team has to a rival, and the smile on her face turned strained as soon as she heard the words “Olympics” and “future.”
Candrea can’t pretend the future will turn positive by ignoring it. He’s talking softball, selling it, believing in a day when fans living 7,000 miles from the United States will cheer the ball that lands fair as wildly as they cheer the ball that doesn’t.
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