A few days ago I was doing a hitting lesson with one of my students, a young lady named Avery. We got to talking about why the success rate for hitting in fastpitch softball is generally so low.

That’s when she said something profound that her mom Abbey had told her that I hadn’t really thought about in that way: Hitting is 9 on 1.

I think most of us tend to think about the battle between the pitcher and the hitter, i.e., how the pitcher is trying to get the hitter to miss the ball or at least mis-hit if she does make contact so doesn’t go too far. But while the hitter is up at the plate standing alone, the pitcher has one other person in front of her and seven others behind her to help her get the out on that weak hit.

That’s a pretty unfair advantage, don’t you think? Picture a basketball game, or a soccer match, or hockey game, or pretty much any sport where scoring means getting the object at the center of the game into the other team’s goal.

You don’t have to be Mr. Vegas to figure out who is going to win that contest, no matter how skilled the player on the one side is.

Yet when the scoring opportunity comes up for a player in fastpitch softball (or slow pitch, or modified pitch, or baseball, etc.) she’s facing a whole phalanx of opponents whose only goal is to prevent her from achieving her goal. Seems pretty unfair, doesn’t it?

And that’s why the stats of a game, even if kept honestly (versus the person who scores every contact as a hit or anything close as an error, depending on whether his/her team is at bat or in the field), don’t always tell the whole story.

For example, a hitter can slam a screaming line drive directly at the face of the opposing shortstop, who throws her glove up in instinct to protect herself. If said screaming line drive goes into the glove and the shortstop’s palmar grasp reflex (yes that’s a real thing) causes her hand to contract around the ball, the hitter is out.

Never mind that she smoked the pitch that the pitcher mistakenly threw over the heart of the plate. One of the seven fielders happened to be in the way of the ball as it was on its way to being a double and turned that great contact into a drop of a few percentage points in her batting average.

Or what about the well-hit ball to the outfield that goes to the person the other team is trying to hide? She puts her glove up over head to make sure the ball doesn’t hit her, and instead it nestles softly in the web like a bird landing in its nest.

The hitter did nothing wrong, and the fielder, quite frankly, didn’t do anything intentionally right, but the fielder gets high fives while the hitter gets nothing except another ding against her batting average. And those are just the extreme examples.

During the course of the game most times there are seven fielders behind the pitcher, plus the pitcher herself, whose job it is to make sure the hitter doesn’t reach base. And then you have the catcher whose job it is to clean up anything around the plate. That’s a pretty stacked deck.

The only way the hitter can be absolutely assured of not being out after contact is to drive the pitch over the fence. And while the number of hitters doing so has increased dramatically over the last several years, those are still a low percentage of all contacts made.

So the next time you’re wondering why failing 7 out of 10 times at the plate makes someone an all-star, remember that the odds are stacked against the hitter from the beginning. And beating 9 on 1 odds is a pretty good reason to celebrate no matter how it happens.