LJ softball: A chat

By Ed Piper

I had an informative conversation with Rich Cardenas the other day.

The setting was La Jolla High's softball field (renovated a couple of years ago). The occasion was pregame, before Cardenas' daughter, sophomore pitcher Emmy Cardenas, and her Viking teammates thumped Hoover, 10-0, in a league game. That brought La Jolla's season record to 12-9, not brilliant but pretty darn good in view of the Vikings' 0-25 record two years ago.

Rich Cardenas is a constant presence at LJHS softball games. Since Emmy chose to attend La Jolla High as a ninth-grader two years ago, her father has sat behind the backstop, tracked his daughter's pitches, checked in with her between innings, and generally kept a watchful eye over Emmy like a father hawk. On this date, he also was pressed into duty as first base coach when the Vikings were batting.

And that was where the conversation began. The unspoken question was why the Vikings, with an all-star pitcher like Emmy--who was named Cal-Hi Sports Freshman of the Year last season--are not dominating the opposition.

The short answer is, other teams are good, too. Other teams have decent pitchers, as well. By the way, softball, if you have ever watched it, can be dominated by a strikeout pitcher who mows every batter down. It almost gets boring, while watching such a pitcher can also be an appreciation of the art of pitching from the circle (not mound) surrounding the pitcher's rubber.

In our exchange, the elder Cardenas allowed as how there are at least two levels of pitching that factor into the win/loss equation. The first is a pitcher who consistently gets the ball over the plate. The Hoover pitcher in the game that followed had fairly good location (called "control" in my day). That part was okay.

But the second level of pitching is, can they get the opposition out? Some pitchers with location can, some can't. It turned out the Hoover pitcher couldn't get all the Vikings out: they put runners on base in each of the first three innings, pounding across two runs in the first inning, two more subsequently on the way to 10 total.

Surprisingly, Emmy Cardenas was struggling a little with her characteristically good location, walking a couple of Cardinals back-to-back. But not bad enough to allow a run. As the final score showed, she shut out the team from major league Hall-of-Famer Ted Williams' alma mater.

In Rich Cardenas' experience, school teams like the present La Jolla High team and others have and need about five girls experienced in travel ball, the non-school counterpart to the school team. That way, five of the nine fielding and batting positions are occupied by players who are fairly good, and who have experience under real game situations.

Two years ago, when La Jolla didn't have five girls from travel ball, the team had a good spirit to it, but they lacked a pitcher and almost every game was called after five innings due to the mercy rule. (They had to put different position players in the pitching circle, and some did better than others.) Read that: they didn't have enough good players to make them competitive.

The other part of the conversation had to do with young players sustaining injuries. Younger athletes have soft tissue that hasn't formed totally. Thus, youth and high school players may sustain injuries that an older athlete, an adult, whose tissue has developed more fully, wouldn't suffer.

I mentioned the topic of young girls heading the ball in youth soccer and suffering neck injuries at a high rate, because they don't have highly-developed neck muscles. Many youth leagues have done things to discourage younger girls from heading the ball, like outlawing it entirely.

Subsequently, catcher/captain Jackie Farias, shortstop Kelsey DeFalco, and the rest of the Vikings, with Emmy Cardenas pitching, went out on the field and stuck it to Hoover.