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The new 44 / 375 balls are great for the men's game but our limited experience on these is that they get even softer as the game goes by. Since they already are 67% of last year's balls new out of the box, it's going to be my strategy to keep the game balls as fresh as possible.
What I dont understand is why it's even an issue. Why does the the ASA care about this anyway? When it's obvious a game ball is worn out and everyone on both sides and the ump(s) know it....what harm is there to the game in rotating it? The only issue I think is important here is that the balls are official (.44 / 375). From there, if teams provide their own game balls, there is no advantage or disadvantage to either team if that ball is changed out at the batting teams discretion. I guess you could argue that a team may try to change the ball every batter but is that a realistic occurance or more of a one in 6,000 games occurance? Really, this game ball rotation thing is kind of dumb anyway. I personally have been in games where we knew that the ball was a sock and / or been used in 25 other games that week at the park in question. Every park in Cincinnati is guilty of that. What we did depending on the situation was to purposefully hit the ball foul and well out of play so that the umpire would rotate the ball.
The associations need to realize that we will all accept the change in the ball to offset bat technology but they need to give the players and teams some controls over the quality of the game as possible. We pay for everything now which is understandable in these economic times but we should have more quality control as a result. No softball player should ever have to hit a worn out ball, especially if their own team provided them.
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