Possibly Too Serious: My Softball Stats Spreadsheet
Last week, I hit a home run in my slow-pitch softball league. Unfortunately, there were no base runners on, and since we’re only allowed three home runs per game, this was actually a setback, though we ended up winning. A slow-pitch home run isn’t much to brag about, especially since this league plays on a small enough field that our team is comfortable using a three-man outfield and five-man infield, but it’s notable to me because it was the first dinger I’d hit since 2017, which I know because I’ve compiled a spreadsheet with my career slow-pitch softball batting statistics.
My very first season is missing from the sheet because at that time it didn’t occur to me I might want that information, and several seasons’ worth of statistics are less reliable than the others because they were tracked by league scorekeepers and I transcribed them later. But this is also precisely the kind of low-stakes record-keeping that matches the effort required to do it well enough to provide actionable information.
For example, going into my team’s playoffs this season, I was batting .513/.520/.623 for my career line, and .520/.531/.800 for this season. Since I have game-by-game batting lines for this season, I know that my high slugging percentage is driven by the home run and by an early season game in which I hit three doubles, two of which were kind of fluky.
Based on that surface-level analysis, one might judge that I’m basically hitting to my career averages, and the park/league factors plus a little luck are driving up the slugging percentage.
However, now that I’ve brought up park and league factors, it’s worth examining those a bit. The first two seasons for which I have batting lines, 2016 and 2017, were in a co-ed work league. I was also in my 30s at that point, playing shortstop regularly, and, crucially, counted on to hit home runs and extra base hits for my team. The league was not as good, defensively, as the leagues I’ve played in more recently, and my goals as a hitter were also much different. I hit four home runs in the 2017 season and slugged over 1.000. However, my batting average was .618 that year, in line with my better seasons in the men’s rec leagues — my top three season-long averages in the men’s leagues have been .579, .591, and .647.
That .579 season was actually earlier this year, in the spring 2026 season, when I changed my hitting mechanics after four straight sub-.500 batting average seasons (this year, the team's played a spring and summer season, and right now it's the fall season). The main tweaks I made were opening my pre-pitch stance slightly as a cue to actually coil before swinging instead of only using my arms to bring the bat through, and also to bring my hands closer to my body so that I could get more whipping leverage into my swing. Neither adjustment was aimed at allowing me to hit home runs, specifically, but to hit the ball harder through the infield and perhaps line drives past outfielders.
Which brings me back to the spreadsheet. My career batting line averages are made up of two seasons in the work league (2016-17) where I was one of my team’s top hitters; three seasons in men’s leagues (2024) where I was transitioning back to slow-pitch after having played hardball and then a few seasons of a modified fast-pitch league, yet did pretty well; four seasons of struggle (2024-25) that I chalk up to injury issues and age-related deteriorating skill; and then the three most recent seasons (2026) in which I’ve been fighting back against time.
Coincidentally, since there’s no reason to expect them to have turned out this way, my batting lines the past three seasons basically line up to my career averages of all those seasons together. I’m not hitting as well as I did in the work league or those first three seasons back in slow pitch, but I’ve also been much better than the middle trough. I am not satisfied; I want to be better than I am. However, while the mechanical adjustments are inarguably working, and I feel good at the plate, the statistical record suggests I have the capacity to play at a higher level than this.
I wouldn't have understood that without the spreadsheet. I’m going for it.
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I don’t only keep my softball stats; I also track every book I read and TV show or movie I watch. Here’s a writeup of the books I read in 2023.
The photo is of me batting in my work league in 2015, the year I didn’t keep stats. I wish I hadn’t started my swing with my hands so high.
Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let’s do this again, sometime.