I don’t think baseball is much different than softball, I think females are athletic enough. Why did softball stick and not baseball, seems like the only major sport that did this, excluding the absence of female football leagues.
In: Biology
At the college level it is motivated by scholarship rules given Title resctrictions.
They need women’s sports that men don’t participate in in order to balance the inoordonate number of scholarships that the football programs provide.
This also helps reinforce the feedback loop that keeps women’s baseball from overtaking softball as a preferred sport since so few girls coach or play it relative to softball.
Softball itself exploded in popularity when (like Iowa’s famous 6v6 basketball) there was a serious belief that strenous activity could damage women’s bodies and the sports they played needed to be limited.
That’s largely been found to be bunk, but the legacy of ‘modified’ sports like softball lives on in the extracurriculars most commonly available.
Female baseball is actually growing in popularity. Pretty sure it’s catching on in Japan. The only biological reason that I could *maybe* see is that, in youth baseball, games can be absolutely brutal when kids move up to bigger field dimensions because it’s so hard for them to throw strikes. I would imagine it would be even harder for the average adolescent girl than boy.
But the real reason for the split is that, fast pitch softball actually was popular amongst men and women at first. It was played indoors. Then, TVs became ubiquitous, and men stopped playing fast pitch as much because they could watch their professional baseball league. Women didn’t have a baseball league so they kept playing soccer.
You need a lot more pitchers for baseball than for softball, so you need a lot more players for baseball. If you have smaller turnout you can still field a softball team.
Throwing overhand is much tougher on the arm, and needs a lot more rest between outings. A high school softball could get by with 2 good pitchers. A high school baseball teams 3 starters and 2 relievers at least. A really good team probably wants 3-4 starters and 3-4 relievers.
In short, that’s simply not the case. Women’s baseball was officially recognised by AAU in 2001. In 2004 the first Women’s Baseball World Cup was held. There are Women’s Baseball Leagues in several countries in addition to the US including Japan, Australia, Canada and even my own homeland the UK. Moreover there are now some women playing in professional men’s teams and the possibility of women playing in MLB remains open. Girls who have played in Little League teams in the USA and elsewhere have more opportunities to continue playing as they get older than ever.
Softball has tended to take the lead for a number of historical reasons but it has not been the only game in town for some time. It will be baseball for the men and softball for the women when the games are restored to the Olympics but only because certain thresholds for participation and organisation have not yet been met.
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