Saturday Cat Blogging

While there might be weightier issues in my life and in this country, I continue to be fascinated by USA Softball player Cat Osterman. This young lady currently holds the NCAA career strikeout record with 2265 (and she was the first player to record more than 2000 strikeouts). During her senior year, she averaged 2.2 strikeouts per inning, and she accomplished this not with a blazing fastball, but with such a huge variety of pitches and movement that batters regularly swung at balls and didn’t swing at strikes.

I didn’t expect to see Cat on the TV again until this summer when the USA Softball team would play some tournaments. And today, when I turned on a different softball game, there was Cat, as color announcer on ESPN. Her website doesn’t even mention that she is working for ESPN. Was it her first appearance? I think it was. I don’t know if she had done any announcing priort to this. She sounded very nervous, and sounded like she was reading a script. Other announcers sound much smoother.

The game I tuned in to watch, that Cat would announce, was between number 2 ranked Tennessee and number 1 ranked Alabama. As I write this, Tennessee’s star pitcher Monica Abbott was tied with Cat for the career strikeout lead. So Abbott’s first strikeout would have broken Cat’s record, and Cat would be announcing. What great drama and emotion! But it was raining cats and dogs, and the game had been rescheduled for later in the day on a different network: ESPNU, and I don’t receive ESPNU! Arrrggghhhhhh!