Baseball used to do the same but I'm not sure if softball just doesn't have the longevity of a career to show the same effects. I'm thinking it doesn't have the same wear and tear as throwing 100mph and different motion.
Agreed and I'm not saying it had no effect on those ladies arms. I'm saying the wear and tear is less for an equal amount of pitches.
I suppose but baseball players do that as well so it's a wash for the most part. Even then, softball pitchers aren't throwing 100 per session, not even close. I still don't know where the 700 comes from....clearly the 2000 was completely removed from reality. With 2-3 games tops per week and assuming the same pitcher pitches AND completes ALL the games, add in practice and the number is still 300-400. It is not realistic. In the post-season, particularly the CWS, the same pitcher may go all of 1 game and part of game 2. You will not likely see the same girl pitch 3 FULL games and practice in a week. She would be ineffective. After a certain number of pitches, the ball slows down and hitters start to make serious contact. Has it ever happened? Sure but that is an exception, not a rule, and it's likely some type of damage is done to the arm/shoulder. And as others have said, there is no way to measure the long term impact because most don't go on to play professionally.
I recall either reading or hearing about the most batters faced in a single softball game. The top five were all between 41-45; I believe the most was 44. Assuming seven pitches per batter, she'd be around that 300 mark. If we were combined Walijasper and Hoover, I doubt they've thrown more than 250-275 innings this season.
In the mid to late 90's the NPF started. It shut down for a bit, relaunched again in the mid 00's. As I recall, there's been 15 or so teams although only five or six of those are still active.
Yeah in 2013 and she's already a coach. It's a joke. Google it. No longevity to show hard data. I've seen enough through HS to know better.
I was at the LHSAA State Finals a couple weeks back. Sitting in the hospitality room with some HS coaches, we were talking about how, used to, if you had one pitcher you were set. Now, you'd better have two. I watched a 13 inning game. One team rotated a second pitcher in. The other rode the arm of one, and lost. She actually went farther on adrenaline that she should have. She was a Sr. and it was her last game to pitch. Her coach (which was her dad) went to pull her and put a greener pitcher but his daughter refused to be pulled- which is a problem that we could start another thread.
That would once again, be an outlier, not the norm. Most softball pitchers are at a pitch count of 100-120 per game if they pitch the entire 7 innings and face somewhere around 28-30 batters. Yep. Depending on what you have, your strategy could work or backfire either way. A 13 inning game will waste that girl eventually and if there is another game to be played, forget it. One of the girls I know here is the exact same....went to Regionals for 12U and they played 4 games on the weekend. She pitched all but a few innings. She is kra-kra and refused to come out....major mistake. Her arm was toast and the other batters started to pick her apart. She currently has a pitching coach, a batting coach, a nutritionist, and a sports psychologist, lol. She's just finishing 7th grade!
