The best pitching matchup of all time

Fast-pitch softball is baseball in its purest form. Most hitters are asked to bunt and move runners over. Defense is at a premium, since one mistake is more likely to cost a team a game. Pitchers routinely throw complete games, and the bullpen is only used when a pitcher is getting shelled.

Graham Hays of ESPN.com wrote an excellent series of articles about professional softball. The centerpiece was about one of the best pitching match-ups in the history of the game, Jennie Finch vs. Cat Osterman. You really should check the articles out.

To those who don’t follow softball, it’s hard to understand how big Jennie Finch vs. Cat Osterman is. They are the two best pitchers to come out of college in the last decade, with only one other pitcher close to their level (Monica Abbott). Finch has an ERA of 0.11 this season. No, that’s not a typo. In comparison, Osterman’s ERA of 1.21 seems high, but it is still one of the best marks in the league. She has also struck out 126 batters in 70 innings. Both are Olympians and have pitched for the U.S. national team.

Finch and Osterman’s collegiate careers intersected by one year, but the two may have never faced each other. Arizona and Texas only played each other once that year, on Feb. 8, 2002, but I can’t find a box score or a recap of that game. And even if Finch and Osterman did pitch against each other that day, That was in the first week of Osterman’s collegiate career — most people didn’t know how good she was yet.

I don’t know if they had faced off each other in the pros before (my guess is yes), but unfortunately, National Pro Fastpitch doesn’t get much publicity. I was able to watch every single Women’s College World Series game on TV in June, along with games in the regionals, super regionals, and even some regular season games. Maybe I haven’t been looking hard enough, but I have yet to see a NPF game on TV. And all of NPF’s teams seem to be located in the Midwest and Northeast. So it takes articles like Hays’ stories to give pro softball exposure.

I am lucky, I’ve gotten to see both pitchers play in person, while they were in college and getting decent national exposure. The crowds were animated, the teams were into it, and you could tell you were watching two of the best athletes in the country. If only more people had that opportunity. I really think pro softball could grow in this country if given enough time. And exposure, like Jennie Finch making MLB hitters look silly on This Week in Baseball a few years back.