6 fascinating ways softball pitching is different from baseball

Montana Fouts pitched 230 innings in her senior season at Alabama in 2023, with 24 complete games among her 31 starts and an additional 13 relief appearances that resulted in four saves. In an extra-inning win over Texas, she went all 11 frames. In a two-day stretch against Longwood, she threw a shutout one day and a perfect game the next.

To those wired with a baseball brain, these pitching achievements sound absurd, like something out of Old Hoss Radbourn’s long-gone era.

But for a fastpitch ace like the right-handed Fouts -- one of the stars of the MLB-backed Athletes Unlimited Softball League, which gets underway Saturday in Rosemont, Ill., and Wichita, Kan. -- going deep into games and being available almost daily is business as usual.

“This is a lot, but in high school, in the state tournament, we got in the loser’s bracket, and I threw 400-some, maybe 500 pitches in a day,” said Fouts, who has taken her talents to the Talons in the AUSL. “That is very extra. But if I’m in my prime pitching shape and my coach needed me to go both games of a doubleheader, I could do that.”

As you know, there’s something underhanded going on here.

A baseball starter’s schedule includes so many rest days, and the baseball pitching injury rate -- exacerbated by extreme velocity -- is so prevalent because the overhand motion is unnatural. The shoulder and elbow need time to recover from it.

Softball pitchers, on the other hand, are able to deliver so dependably because their more natural underhand form produces less elbow and shoulder strain.

But while that simple premise is easy to understand, you might not realize the impact it has on how softball rosters are constructed and utilized. Or that the gap between how pitchers are managed in baseball vs. softball is actually shrinking.

With the help of some AUSL players and executives, we’re able to identify six key points about pitching that will help MLB fans better understand the growing -- and evolving -- sport of softball and the styles we will see in this fun startup league.

1. Pitchers don’t consume as many roster spots.

Having durable aces available to pitch -- even on back-to-back days, if need be -- limits how many pitchers a team needs to navigate a season schedule.

At the college level, there are roughly one-third as many softball pitchers as there are baseball pitchers.

The AUSL’s rules require teams to carry at least five pitchers on their 16-player rosters for the 24-game season. You’re not likely to see more than six, max.*

*In the event of injuries to pitchers or position players, there will be a shared pool of player reserves available to the four AUSL teams, with pecking order on a given day decided in reverse order of winning percentage.

Compare that to MLB, where pitchers typically take up 13 of the 26 active roster spots.

“I honestly think we could get away with four pitchers,” said Cat Osterman, a softball pitching legend now serving as general manager of the AUSL’s Volts. “When I played pro, we had four, because we just rode an ace. Although, that’s kind of changing.”

Indeed, some college programs are moving away from a traditionally ace-oriented model and getting more creative with their pitcher usage. Because of this, softball and baseball are starting to more closely resemble each other than they once did.

The AUSL’s Blaze built their pitching staff with that more modern mentality.

“For me, it’s all about pitch shape diversity,” said Blaze general manager Dana Sorensen, herself a former star pitcher for Stanford. “I need somebody whose vertical shape is up [the riseball]. I need someone who has a shape going down [the drop ball, or sinker]. I need somebody who can execute glove-side. I need somebody, if we can, who has arm-side command. And then, who has good changeups, and how can we mix and match that? So we try to take shapes of pitches and neutralize barrel paths as best we can.”

The staff, therefore, is built less around the concept of “starters” and “relievers” and more around the idea of having a variety of different looks to navigate a given lineup.

And softball head coaches can employ their pitchers more creatively than baseball staffs can, because …

2. Pitchers can leave and re-enter games.

Imagine Pirates ace Paul Skenes shutting down an opponent for five innings, handing it off to the bullpen for the sixth, seventh and eighth, and then closing out the same game in the ninth.

It’s impossible in MLB not just because the rules don’t allow re-entry but also because no training and coaching staff would allow such an important arm to cool off and then ramp right back up.

Mitigated injury concerns in softball make re-entry (once per pitcher) feasible.

“We can figure out the soft parts of the lineup to match up with,” Sorensen said. “You know, are you putting a string of lefties together, and do I have a lefty specialist? Or are you more flyball heavy, and do I have the riseball to counteract that? And so we can be more creative and let a starter go maybe three outs or six and then bring in the other pitcher, and then we can bring that starter back in later in the lineup.

“That way, we're minimizing the exposure of the starter. So it's kind of like baseball [with the aggressive bullpen usage], but a little bit more creative with the re-enter rule.”

The AUSL lets relievers exit and re-enter, too, only adding to the creative options on the table.

Also note that the AUSL, unlike MLB since 2020, does not have a three-batter minimum. So a team could bring in a lefty to face a single lefty and then go right back to a right-handed pitcher.

Of course, being readily available often does not come without significant training on the part of the softball pitcher, and …

3. Durability is derived more from the legs than the arm.

Like baseball pitchers, softball pitchers practice arm care.

“I do a lot of band work, a lot of mobility,” Talons left-hander Mariah Lopez said. “A lot of deep massages, and I like to ice.”

But in the fast-paced world of fastpitch, it’s actually leg conditioning that makes the biggest difference in a pitcher’s day-to-day availability.

“A lot of our speed and drive and everything is not really shoulder- or elbow-based,” said Emma Lemley, a right-hander who just completed a stellar senior season at Virginia Tech and is now on the Blaze, “It's all really leg-based.”

In softball, the legs are what tire before the arm, especially with pitchers tossing from a flat circle in the center of the diamond.

“Not that the lower body is not important in baseball pitching, because obviously it is,” Osterman said. “But you have a little bit of momentum created with the mound that we don’t have.”

Pitching from a mound creates a natural downward plane. In softball, the action on the pitches delivered from the circle emanates entirely from the pitcher’s hand, and …

4. Velocity is more than it might seem.

Baseball’s evolution toward an environment in which the average four-seam velocity is now around 94 mph and many pitchers routinely top triple digits is well-documented.

But Statcast has also helped highlight the nuance of “perceived velocity,” which attempts to quantify how fast a pitch appears to a hitter by factoring both the raw velocity of the pitch and the pitcher’s release point into the equation.

Though we don’t have as much in-depth data for softball as we do for the MLB level (at least, not yet), this concept of perceived velocity is important to keep in mind. The pitcher’s delivery surface in softball is flatter than it is in baseball, but it is also much closer to the plate. The pitching rubber is 43 feet from home plate instead of 60 feet, 6 inches. Factor in the forward movement of the pitcher during the windmill motion, and it’s more like 37 feet, on average, from the release point to the plate.

So while softball velocities don’t reach the range of those baseball speedballs, a 70 mph pitch from that distance gives the batter a reaction time equivalent to an MLB batter facing a 100 mph pitch.

That’s why it was so wild earlier this year to see Tennessee junior Karlyn Pickens (who will be AUSL-eligible next year) set an NCAA record with a 78.2 mph pitch.

But as in MLB, pure velocity can only get you so far in softball, and that’s why …

5. Repertoires keep evolving.

The premier fastpitch pitchers can change speeds and looks and deceive batters with multiple pitches from the same grip. Like MLB pitchers, they employ “tunneling” methods that make different pitches appear identical to the batter as they come out of the hand.

“The great pitchers in this league have two, even three, elite pitches,” Talons outfielder Victoria Hayward said. “Some of the hitters in this game, it doesn’t matter where you throw the ball. If you don’t have elite movement and elite velocity, it’s kind of over. So the best pitchers in this league are able to beat you one way through a lineup and, the next time, give you a completely different look.”

As in baseball, elite softball pitchers can deliver fastballs that seemingly defy the laws of gravity. The riseball, like the four-seamer, drops less than a player at the plate would generally expect, giving the illusion that the ball is not tethered to this earth.

Jennie Finch, an AUSL advisor and MLB youth softball ambassador, became a legend because of her mastery of the riseball. It was her bread and butter.

Osterman, on the other hand, was known more for her deadly dropball, which fell off the table and befuddled batters.

Taryne Mowatt earned acclaim in leading Arizona to back-to-back national championships in 2006 and 2007 largely on the strength of a confounding changeup.

Osterman, though, sees the softball world evolving from one in which pitchers are associated with one signature selection, feeding into our above point about pitcher usage changing, as well.

“[Few] pitchers are really masterful at one pitch,” Osterman said. “They have a bigger repertoire. You don’t have the money pitch all the time. That’s where we have to be creative the second or third time through the order. And although softball is way behind baseball in technology and scouting trends, with those things becoming more prevalent in our sport, pitchers are going to have to figure out how to keep evolving when they get to pro ball.”

If you’re curious about how the selection of pitches from a given repertoire will function in the AUSL, the league will be using the PitchCom on-field communication system between pitchers and catchers, the same as MLB.

But unlike MLB, there’s sometimes an added dynamic to a pitcher’s role, because …

6. Pitchers still bat.

The universal designated hitter era (not to mention the decades of especially weak-hitting pitchers that preceded it) has made this an outdated concept in the minds of those who have strictly watched baseball.

But yes, AUSL teams can pencil their pitchers into the batting order.

It’s optional. Instead of a designated hitter, teams can use what’s called a designated player, or DP. A lineup is made up of nine to 10 players. If a pitcher is batting, the team will have nine players in the lineup. If a pitcher does not bat, the team will have 10 players in the lineup, with the DP remaining in the dugout while the team plays defense.

All told, pitching in softball and pitching in baseball are generally worlds apart. But it’s interesting to see the ways in which these two pitching paths are becoming more similar. And as the AUSL possibly expands its schedule and number of teams in the coming years, the way pitchers are utilized will inevitably evolve even more.

Still, generally speaking, if you like the old-school concept of a starting pitcher having ownership of a given game, the AUSL is likely to provide it much more frequently than the modern bullpen-oriented MLB.

“You definitely start every game with the intent of going the whole game,” said Fouts.