Softball Pitching - How 43' Will Change High School Softball

Guest Post by Don McKay, Softball Editor for Bellaonline.

With High School Fast Pitch going to a 43’ pitching distance nation-wide next year, I thought it would be interesting to figure out how the increased pitching distance would change the game. Everyone expects scoring to go up, but by how much? Which pitchers will become more effective? What about team defense? If one could find Softball statistics when the pitcher was throwing from 40’ and compare them to statistics from 43’, particularly immediately after the transition, then the transformation of the game with the new rule would become clear. So I set out to find those statistics. Seems simple, right?

Some states have already switched to the longer distance (Off the top of my head: Florida, Oregon, Illinois, and Tennessee), but good luck finding comprehensive High School statistics from year to year – I do not think that they exist. The next logical place to look, then, was the college game. After about a month of searching, I established that the NCAA changed the pitching distance from 40’ to 43’ in 1987. The NCAA Softball page has statistics from 1982 onward, but for some reason does not have statistics for 1986 Division 1 softball, so I ended up comparing NCAA Division II Softball statistics from 1986 and 1987.

Now, a word about the NCAA statistics from those years – they only list the top 10 or 20 performers in a few categories (the 1986 Division II statistics page is only one page long!), and they do not list contemporary statistics such as On-Base %, Slugging %, Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched, or the like. The bottom line is that, while comparing the statistics between 1986 and 1987 provides some good insight for what to expect when High Schools change the distance next year, they do not provide as much detail as I would have liked. Here is what I found:

Offense

It is true that scoring will go up. Comparing the top 10 scoring teams from 1986 and 1987 results in an increase of about 9% per game (from 6.5 to 7.1 runs per game). Four teams were in the top 10 for both years, and three of those four saw more runs per game in 1987.

With more scoring, one would expect Batting Averages to rise, and they do so by about 12%. However, digging a little deeper provides some interesting data. Teams averaged two fewer At Bats per game in 1987 and there was only about a 4% increase in hits per game. More hits and fewer at bats per game explain the higher batting averages in 1987, but how do more runs get scored with fewer At Bats? The answer: Walks. Unfortunately, walks are not tabulated in the NCAA stats pages for 1986 and 1987, so we cannot tell how much walks increased, but it seems clear that High School batters will draw more walks next year than this year.

Pitching

More scoring should mean higher team Earned Run Averages (ERA), and indeed there is a 25% increase in ERA among the top 10 teams from 1986 to 1987 (0.59 to 0.74 runs). Total runs allowed increases by a slightly higher 29%. We have already determined that walks will likely increase when High Schools pitch from 43’ judging from the batting data, and our ERA data corroborates this. If Batting Average increases by 12% but scoring increases by 25%, then an increase in walks could make up some of the difference (along with more extra base hits, but there is no Slugging data and so drawing conclusions about Slugging is even more difficult).

Perhaps the biggest change in the game, though, will be significantly less strikeouts. To evaluate the change in strikeouts, we have to look at the individual pitching leaders, since the team statistics do not include strikeouts. Strikeouts among the top 10 pitchers dropped from 7.9 to 5.8 per game, a whopping 28% decrease in 1987! More walks means more runners on base, and less strikeouts means more balls put into play. A pitcher who can “pitch to contact” and produce easy plays for her defense becomes more valuable than before.

When comparing the changes to the offense versus changes to the defense, it is clear that pitching performance was impacted more than offensive performance, at least with the statistics we have available. As much as pitching continues to headline the game today, pitchers completely dominated the game when pitching from 40’.

Fielding

Perhaps the most surprising change that pitching from 43’ brings to the game is on the defensive side of the ball. More walks and more balls in play would put more pressure on the defense, and so one might expect more errors. In fact, the opposite is true. Among the top 10 defensive teams, Fielding Percentage remained essential unchanged, but there were 80 fewer errors committed, a drop of 13% from 1986.

In retrospect, this makes sense. In fact, I just saw a JV High School game that illustrated this point. The visiting team had a pitcher who was throwing about 56 mph and striking out most of our batters. This essentially made their defense become complacent, and when our side did put the ball in play, their defense made error after error. We won 4-2 and every one of our runs was unearned. More walks and less strikeouts means the defense has to be more focused on the game, and can actually perform better.

Conclusions

So, what can we expect to see next year when High School pitchers are pitching from 43’? Basically, more walks and less strikeouts with batters putting more balls in play resulting in more scoring chances. Conversely, expect defenses to be tighter and to generally play better as they become more involved than ever in the success of a team. In short, I think we will see more exciting softball, where hitting and defensive play is just as important as pitching.

I think we will also see pitchers who rely on overpowering batters struggle next year as it becomes harder to strike out batters. Those pitchers will have to develop some off-speed pitches and pitches with movement to adapt and this change will also make the game more interesting, I believe. I also suspect that some “average” pitchers will become more effective as their pitches will have 3’ further to break.

In short, buckle up – High School softball is going to change in every aspect next year! And that’s a good thing.