There are plenty of numbers available to make the case that one of the best pitchers of all time has never been better as the National Pro Fastpitch playoffs begin in Hoover, Alabama, where the five-team professional softball league will crown a champion.
We'll get to them because, as these things go, they are remarkable.
But those numbers tell the story of what Monica Abbott has already done for the Chicago Bandits this summer, as the team enters a best-of-three semifinal against the Akron Racers. To understand why the former University of Tennessee All-American and United States Olympian ranks among the most dominant athletes in sports at the moment, not to mention the most intimidating, we need to start with math of a different variety.
The distance between the pitching rubber and home plate in softball is 43 feet. A ball thrown 72 miles an hour at that distance leaves a batter with the same reaction time as a baseball player trying to hit a ball thrown 101 miles per hour. Abbott stands 6-foot-3, which means that when such pitches leave her left hand, she is far closer than 43 feet.
From the batter's eye, it is less a pitcher throwing a ball than Ronda Rousey throwing a punch.
"By the time she releases it, she's like already halfway to you," said Natasha Watley, now a foe with the top-seeded USSSA Pride but also a teammate in Japan's professional league and formerly with Team USA. "Her speed and her movement, I think it's all of the above."
The precise measurement may depend on the particular radar gun, but Abbott gets the ball moving faster than most interstate speed limits, consistently able to record speeds above 70 miles per hour. No one in the NPF throws harder. Perhaps only Japan's Yukiko Ueno is in the same conversation.
Currently an assistant coach at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Lauren Lappin retired from NPF after last season but has a history with Abbott dating back to when they were teenagers in California and later on Team USA.
"You look at her frame, and then you watch her wind up, and that's just a whole lot of length coming at you real close," Lappin said.
Yet here is the catch. Abbott has always been able to do that, to strike fear in the hearts of batters. She set the NCAA career strikeout record and earned a place on Team USA because that rise ball, thrown that hard and from that release point, made for a unique skill set.
What this season shows is the difference between someone wanting to be better than everyone else, which it could be argued she already was, and wanting to find her best.
"We could have made that statement years ago, that she is arguably the best pitcher," said Shannon Doepking, now the head coach at Dartmouth but formerly Abbott's catcher at both Tennessee and with the Bandits and other teams in NPF. "And then you watch her continue to improve and get better. To put up the numbers that she's putting up this season, I think it's just incredible."
Ah yes, those numbers.
Abbott entered the postseason with a 13-1 record and 0.31 ERA in 90 1/3 innings. No other pitcher with at least 30 innings was within a run of that ERA, and the only person even that close was Cat Osterman, one of the handful in the discussion with Abbott as the best of all time. Abbott struck out 149 batters in the regular season, the total second only to the Osterman, and her rate of 11.5 strikeouts per seven innings was the best in the league.
She allowed four earned runs in the regular season. All four of those runs came in the same game against the Akron Racers (she still struck out 10 and got the win).
She made 12 starts in the regular season and recorded 11 complete-game shutouts.
The only other run against her, and the only loss she incurred, came in a relief appearance in which extra-inning procedures placed a runner on second base to begin an inning.
"For me, I feel like I've just evolved as a pitcher this summer," Abbott said. "I've had some really good years, and even in years that some people might think aren't that great, I've thrown some really good games and things like that. So it's more so, I think, just that this year I have evolved as a pitcher and just continuing to grow in my specialty."
Not exactly a slacker herself, as evidenced by a quick rise through the coaching ranks despite balancing a playing career, Doepking dreaded those moments in college when Abbott would convince, cajole or corner her catcher into bullpen sessions in the football team's indoor practice facility. She watched as Abbott, if she missed a spot or wasn't satisfied with a pitch, made marks on the field to record the imperfections and later ran sprints for the transgressions. Those sessions were interminable, "a catcher's worst nightmare" as they dragged on and on. They were also impressive.
"I appreciated watching somebody like that and what she was putting into it," Doepking said. "I think it kind of puts things in perspective for your average athletes like myself. Somebody that great, somebody that talented, is outworking a lot of people. It says a lot about why she is where is today."
She was also stubborn almost to a fault early on, unwilling, Doepking said, to do anything different for fear of messing up what worked so well. It continued to work well in the NPF, where she won a championship as a rookie with the Washington Glory in 2007 and pitched a no-hitter in her first postseason start. But it was also in the NPF, in addition to the Japanese league that plays a bifurcated schedule on either side of the summer league at home, that she grew. The league is too small and populated by too many good players for anyone to survive in the long run sans change.
In something as small as Abbott's revamped windup, where an exaggerated motion brings her briefly into the kind of crouch reminiscent of a downhill skier before she rises and launches toward the plate, there are signs of a professional at work. It would have been difficult to convince her to change her windup in college, Doepking said, let alone to change it after years of success at the international and professional levels. But any edge is worth exploring, from the refinement of a nasty changeup to more movement on her pitches to that trigger mechanism in the windup. All of it building toward the results on display this season.
"Personality-wise she's the same; she's goofy, she's silly, but she's always been a competitor," Watley said. "I think what has changed is just her being a smarter pitcher. Whereas when she first got on the national team, she just threw hard and relied on throwing it past people. I think now she's a smarter pitcher, where she's trying to set hitters up and she's trying to throw to a hitter's weaknesses or play with a hitter's strengths."
Watching someone come so close to perfecting a part of the game is all the more notable because when Osterman retires at the conclusion of the playoffs, Abbott may well be the last of her kind. Some basketball player in the years to come will wow us like LeBron James, just as there will be a soccer player as distinct from his peers as Lionel Messi or maybe even a tennis player as dominant as Serena Williams. But it grows more difficult by the year to imagine we will see another pitcher like Abbott or Osterman.
This has been a season of strong pitching in the NPF as a whole, yet take Abbott and Osterman out of the mix and the league ERA jumps from 2.86 to 3.11, a profound impact for two pitchers in a season of 120 games. Perhaps Keilani Ricketts, in her third season with the USSSA Pride, will continue to develop into that pitcher for a new generation, but there are few other obvious candidates to be not just excellent but dominant in the manner of Lisa Fernandez, Jennie Finch, Michele Granger, Osterman and Abbott. It is the same search currently undertaken by USA Softball and college coaches around the map.
What began by moving the mound from 40 to 43 feet and replacing a white ball with a yellow ball easier for a hitter's eye to pick up continues almost unabated. Hitters are stronger and better trained than ever before. Even if steered away from the extremes by rules and testing, bats remain livelier than ever before. Perhaps even the culture of youth softball and younger college recruiting, which may leave pitchers burned out physically and mentally, plays a part.
The NPF is naturally just an extension of the college game that provides its talent, and the evidence there is unmistakable. Offense has the upper hand in softball.
"I don't know whether we're just going through a cycle or we're just not developing pitchers any longer, I have no idea, but I do know there is a different climate in today's game than there was even 10 years ago," said University of Arizona and former Team USA coach Mike Candrea this spring. "I can remember when, God, you scored two runs and you felt pretty good, back in the day. I don't know the answers. I just know that the game right now, the needle has moved toward the offensive side more than it has the defense and pitching."
Abbott turns back the hands of that clock, which might be her most impressive manipulation of numbers.
Only a few weeks beyond her 30th birthday, she declined to discuss her future plans beyond a year-by-year approach. She acknowledged that 2020, the year softball will likely return to the Olympics in Tokyo, is something she thinks about, but those thoughts have more to do with what that stage means for the sport as a whole than any individual plans she might formulate.
She long ago proved her mettle in championship settings, winning a world championship in addition to league titles in NPF and Japan, but an Olympic gold medal would be a career-capping prize unlike any other for someone who won silver in 2008 but spent most of her career in a time without Olympic softball.
After all, while she is as good this summer as anyone has ever been, who is to say she can't be better?
Four more pitchers to watch in the NPF playoffs:
Lauren Haeger, Dallas Charge: You may remember her from such roles as Most Outstanding Player of the Women's College World Series or USA Softball Player of the Year. Certainly the best value pick as a fourth-round selection in this past spring's draft, which took place before she starred in the Women's College World Series, Haeger has teamed with former Cal All-American and Team USA pitcher Jolene Henderson to give the expansion Charge far better pitching than has often been the fate of the league's new entries. While most pitchers see their strikeout rates drop when they enter NPF, at least initially, Haeger has impressively held steady at just shy of a strikeout per inning.
Cat Osterman, USSSA Pride: As mentioned previously, these are the final few days of Osterman's storied career in the circle, one that first came to the attention of many fans when she was a lanky left-handed Texan good enough to train with the national team when barely out of high school, and who took a year's sabbatical at the University of Texas to win gold with Team USA in the 2004 Olympics. She remains lanky, left-handed and one of the best in the world. While Abbott's season is in its own stratosphere, Osterman leads the league with 14 wins and 164 strikeouts in 103 1/3 innings. She is 4-1 against the Bandits this season, although in a careful game of chess played by both sides, she and Abbott have not gone head-to-head in more than a year.
Sarah Pauly, Akron Racers: No pitcher in the league is responsible for a greater percentage of her team's wins than Pauly. The Racers are 10-5 in games in which she earned a decision and 12-20 over the rest of the schedule. Already the NPF's all-time wins leader, she recently recorded No. 100. Long overshadowed by Abbott and Osterman, just as the Racers are long overshadowed by the Bandits and Pride, she is capable of beating anyone on a given day. As a result, so are the Racers.
Jordan Taylor, USSSA Pride: The Pride have plenty of arms. Chelsea Thomas is in the midst of her best professional season, Keilani Ricketts is always capable of something special and Hannah Rogers is strong in her first NPF season. But the most intriguing belongs to the person filling a role rarely seen in softball. Not only does Taylor lead the league with 11 saves but that total is within spitting distance of the rest of the league combined (17). Even in college softball, only four Division I players ever saved more than 11 games in a season. Taylor was used in short relief in the regular season, and a 0.51 ERA and 38 strikeouts in 27 2/3 innings offer their own review of the innovation.