Little League Softball pitching rules

[schwabach]

The southern version of Little League is Dixie Youth ... Pitching rules are tougher than LL in my opinion. A good thing.

We would always get to the season ending tournaments and NEVER have enough pitching to compete. In reality, following the rules, you would need at least 4 pitchers to advance. With our local rules, shortened season and a cap on roster size, it wasn't going to happen ... Unless of course you were one of the travel teams masquerading as a Rec team.

One year, we had one pitcher, 4 or 5 athletic girls and 4 or 5 that were just figuring out which hand the glove goes on to chase butterflies with ... Our pitcher threw a few good innings and we either had to save her or she was out of innings, I forget which ... So for the final 3 innings I inserted an athletic girl on the rubber to get us by ... They did their job ... To end the game, one of them plunked the first batter, struck out the second, plunked the 3rd, struck out the 4th, plunked the 5th loading the bases and then K'd the 6th ... Afterwards I realized what had happened and complimented the 4 pitchers for combining on throwing a no hitter ... The one who closed out the game raised her hand and said "What do you mean coach ? I hit 3 of them."

The terrorism approach to pitching. I remember a 10U game where our pitcher who threw pretty hard nailed a smaller girl. She was terrified to come up to bat next time.