Nine Little Vladdies

A new strike zone changed the way I saw the game

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The 8U Wildcats went down swinging.

After dancing their way into the quarterfinals via first-round default, the ’Cats drew one of the top teams in the league. (Let’s take a moment — all of us together now — to acknowledge that the governing body of a softball league, in which some of the girls had yet to celebrate their seventh birthday, intentionally created, seeded, and distributed a single-elimination bracket. When the snooty and snotty maître d’ from Ferris Bueller was weeping for the future, maybe he had 8U girls softball in mind.)

No one on the coaching staff was under the delusion that our season would continue beyond the Friday evening tilt. We were massive underdogs. Any chance to survive and advance likely would require the girls scoring more runs in this one game than they had tallied cumulatively all season.

But the Wildcats were ready to play, and our manager’s strategy gave the team a puncher’s chance. I must admit that when I heard this mandate in the pre-game huddle, I was dubious. Dubious and curious.

“I want every girl swinging at two pitches every at-bat no matter where the pitch is,” she instructed.

In a league where the ball-to-strike ratio suggests a county-wide case of the yips, we were forcing our girls to swing.

As the game unfolded, though, I began to appreciate the benefit of cutting the girls loose. The Wildcats would not go gentle into that good night — no, not a team that clapped, cheered, and howled its way through a one-win season with the smiles of world champions.

So they swung. And they missed. And sometimes they swung at pitches so far out of the zone that even Angel Hernandez would have had no choice but to call them balls.

But they also made contact. At times, good contact. And in the final inning, the Wildcats scratched a run across the plate. The dugout erupted in cheers.

11-1.

Meaningful runs don’t always impact the game’s outcome.

In the few weeks since the Wildcats raged against the dying of the light, I’ve given a lot of thought to the mandatory green light. See, at first I thought the Code Green directive was imposed upon the girls. In reality, it freed them up to be themselves.

Perhaps, if the girls weren’t employing a must-swing approach, there would have been a few more bases on balls. Perhaps, then, the final score might have been 11-2.

But what’s the opportunity cost of one more run — a run, moreover, generated by a passive approach at the plate and four bad pitches? Throughout the season, there were a number of times when an advanced hurler froze Wildcat hitters with heaters. I never enjoyed watching an overwhelmed girl take strike three and walk back to the dugout. Even worse was watching a girl take strike three and not realize it was time to return to the bench. I can only imagine how time sped up in the batter’s box.

Oh, to be granted the freedom to swing away.

And for one game — for four whole innings — the girls let it fly. Swinging, it turns out, creates competitive at bats. There was so much swinging, in fact, that, for a second, I thought it was the late-’90s and I was at a Big Bad Voodoo Daddy concert. (Sorry, that was bad.)

How should an 8U softball player who is learning the game and facing live pitching for the first time approach an at-bat? By swinging away! How else will you make contact? How else can a girl one day learn what pitches she does like to hit? Nobody signs up for Little League because they want to walk. And swinging away, it turns out, diminished the fear of striking out. We’ll swing our way to plate discipline… eventually.

Hall-of-Famer Vladimir Guerrero was a notorious bad-ball hitter. He could drive a pitch off his shoetops 20 rows deep. He had an uncanny ability to make contact, and he played the game with unbridled joy. I choose to believe that those two qualities went hand-in-hand. No one ever told Vladdy to stop swinging.

Technology around MLB today enables the cataloging of granular information on a per-pitch basis. Baseball Savant defines four areas of the hitting zone: heart, shadow, chase, and waste. Pitches thrown in the chase region are outside of the strike zone and beyond the borderline pitches (shadow), but not so far away to be considered wastes. If you wish to go down the rabbit hole, click here, but please come back before Memorial Day.

Giants outfielder Joc Pederson is having a good season on bad balls. Click here to see what happened earlier this season when he took a swing at ball four.

White Sox slugger Gavin Sheets went way up and out of the zone to turn a fastball around in Tampa Bay. You can see the result by clicking here.

I know, I know: No hitter is going to make a living swinging primarily at balls. But for the Wildcats, it’s proof that good things can happen when you swing the bat.

Next season, we’re going to have a lineup full of little Vladdies.

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