​​​​Softball and Wildfires

Cydney Sanders of the Oklahoma Sooners rounds second base after hitting a home run during the fifth inning against the Florida State Seminoles in Oklahoma City on June 8, 2023. (Ian Maule/Getty Images)

Commentary

Both the sport of softball and the devastation of wildfires were prominent in the news last week. The University of Oklahoma Sooners won their third consecutive national title, finishing the season on an astonishing 53-game win streak and with a final record of 61–1. Meanwhile, farther north, air quality was so bad as a result of forest fires in Canada that major league baseball games were canceled in cities such as New York and Philadelphia.

More on both of those stories in a moment. First, let me tell you the story of why I’m pairing two such seemingly unrelated topics as softball and wildfires in the same article.

Once upon a time, I coached softball. I had already coached high school baseball and soccer, but coaching softball was special because my daughter and her friends were my players. We started together when these girls were just 8 or 9 years old, competing in a 12-and-under league.

It came about this way: In some communities, where fairness and trying to provide a happy experience for all the kids are valued, the usual procedure when there are enough players to make two teams is to put a roughly equal number of older and bigger players (the 11- and 12-year-olds) and younger and smaller players (8, 9, and 10) on each roster. Not in our town. The established coach pulled a few strings and took all the older, bigger players, leaving me with the “runts.”

That first season was brutal. Our record was 0–19. The second year saw modest improvement: 3–16. But we put those two years to good use, working on fundamental skills, learning how to stay focused, and understanding the game well enough to make the right play. It all paid off in years three and four. We had only one loss in those two years, and we topped it off by winning the Pennsylvania 12-and-under state championship.

As satisfying as it was to win the championship, it came at a price to our family. We had made elaborate plans to visit Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks in early July. However, as we kept winning tournaments and prolonging our season, the vacation schedule kept getting pushed back. We were finally free to take our trip in August. There was only one hitch: This was August 1988, the year that half of Yellowstone Park was incinerated in a catastrophic conflagration.

The air quality was terrible, and so, instead of spending days exploring the parks, we left Yellowstone after 90 minutes and went north to visit relatives in Montana. Somehow, we never made it back to Yellowstone. Sigh. Advice to families: Do everything you can to take your dream vacation when you can, because you never know whether you’ll have another opportunity for it.

Now you can see why softball and wildfires are forever linked in our family’s memories. Now let’s return to the present and the newsworthy events of last week.

First, the softball. If you have never watched the NCAA softball playoffs, you might want to give it a try next year. The women I saw in the tournament played the game at a very high level. I was dazzled by the third basemen rifling the ball over to first, gunning it as hard as any guy could. There were spectacular catches in the outfield, including players leaping above the fence to rob opposing batters of home runs. It was fun to watch the individual battles between the mostly dominant pitchers—with their array of drop balls, risers, change-ups, sliders, and plain old heat—and valiant batters. If you appreciate tense, close, well-played games that usually don’t take more than an hour or so, NCAA softball is for you.

Oklahoma deserves all the praise it’s receiving. During their “threepeat” season, the team led the nation in batting, fielding, and pitching. And yet, with one exception, it never felt like the tournament games were mismatches. Most of them could have gone either way. The level of play was that high. The Sooners beat a tough Stanford squad 4–2 and 2–0 in the double-elimination tournament. In the final game, Florida State led 1–0 before Oklahoma’s No. 7 and 8 batters hit back-to-back homers in the fifth inning. The Sooners proceeded to close out the seven-inning contest with a hard-fought 3–1 victory.

It was Oklahoma’s depth, and the perennial sports phenomenon of players who aren’t stars rising to the occasion, that brought Oklahoma their well-deserved championship. The NCAA softball tournament was sports at its finest. I’m already looking forward to next year’s tournament.

With the Washington Monument in the background amid a thick layer of smoke, a Marine Corps honor color guard rehearses in Washington on June 8, 2023. (Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo)

Now, as far as the wildfires are concerned, don’t let the climate change hysterics spook you on this issue. Most importantly, don’t believe the reports that fires are becoming more frequent and are burning more acres. Such assertions rely on cherry-picked data—a tactic to which climate alarmists resort with shameful frequency. Yes, there are more wildfires in the United States now than 50 years ago, but far, far fewer than 100 years ago. See the data in the two graphs found on the Climate at a Glance website. And on a global basis, according to NASA, there has been a 25 percent decrease in lands burned since 2003.

Many of today’s wildfires are due to poor forest management—exactly the same reason that more than a million acres of Yellowstone Park went up in flames in 1988. Forests need to be thinned out. Timber harvesting is one way of accomplishing that, and it’s a mutually beneficial process, providing jobs and lumber for humans while promoting healthier forests. Unfortunately, in the name of keeping everything “natural,” firefighters in Yellowstone put out small fires before they could clear out much deadwood, and finally, the concentration of tinder in Yellowstone’s forests reached the point at which there was no stopping “the big one”—the mega-conflagration of 1988. Similarly, more intelligent forest management today can reduce the number of catastrophic fires.

Enjoy your summer, folks. Unless you live dangerously close to a poorly managed forest, the odds of a wildfire damaging your house are microscopic, and smoky air, such as that which blew into the northeast of our country last week, will be rare. And in the world of sports, as we crown champions in professional hockey and basketball, don’t overlook NCAA softball for your future sports entertainment.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.