[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he best baseball game I watched all year wasn’t a major league contest. It wasn’t a Section I playoff tilt, either. In fact, it wasn’t even technically “baseball.”
On Monday night, softball teams from Oklahoma and Florida played the first game in a best-of-three College World Series finals. Seventeen innings and 5 1/2 hours later, Oklahoma came away with a thrilling 7-5 victory to put them just one win away from its second-straight national title.
The game had it all; lead changes, fantastic pitching, momentum shifts, sharp defense, and extra-inning heroics—about 10 innings worth of them—everything that makes baseball my favorite sport, just a little bit different.
But taking in the last 11 innings of this classic showdown, I couldn’t help but wonder; was anyone else watching?
I know my friends—inveterate baseball junkies—were. We had a text chain going from about the eighth inning on, dissecting the same minutiae we would be discussing if this were the Yankees and Red Sox squaring off in the ALCS.
As a fan of our national pastime, it was absolutely impossible not to get sucked into a game that, as of 9 p.m., I didn’t even know was happening.
But then I started thinking; when it comes to my coverage during the spring season, which would I rather spend two hours covering; baseball—a sport I played through college (and still do today)—or softball?
And it’s softball, 100 percent.
There’s something about softball, especially when both teams involved have a talented pitcher in the circle, that positively oozes the same sense of immediacy that old-school National League-type fans miss in baseball. Low scoring games, situational hitting, bunting and defense—capped off by the occasional home-run blast—that’s why we love the game, isn’t it?
And thinking back to this year’s Section I playoffs, we saw those kinds of games time and again, as evidenced by Eastchester, Mamaroneck and Rye Neck’s thrilling postseason runs.
So why doesn’t college softball get more love from fans?
Now, of course, the MLB is always going to be king when it comes to bat-and-ball sports in America. Recognizable stars and franchises, the longstanding tradition in our culture; I’m not expecting professional softball to leapfrog the majors in the national conversation.
But as far as televised college athletics go, softball is imminently more watchable than its male-dominated counterpart, so I’d urge you to give it a chance.
By the time you’re reading this article, the College Softball World Series will have already wrapped up, so it may be too late for this year.
But next year, if you’re looking for a good ballgame, don’t forget to check your local listings for a softball game.
At the very least, it has to be better than watching the Mets.
