ABOUT FASTPITCH AUTHORITY

A college coach gets a hundred emails a week with a girl's stats in them. He believes almost none of it.

That is not cynicism on his part. It is arithmetic. Numbers a parent types into a form cannot be checked by anyone, so a coach has no reason to weigh them — and the girls who really did hit .480 get thrown out with everyone who says they did.

Fastpitch Authority was started by Kevin Bass in Double Springs, Alabama. Kevin played professionally, founded Bass Bats and Bass Gloves, and has a daughter who plays travel fastpitch. He kept watching real ability get ignored because it arrived as an unverifiable number.

So we do it the other way round. Our staff measure every athlete ourselves, on calibrated equipment, and every single result carries a record of how it was taken — the device, the serial number, when it was last calibrated, who ran the station and under what conditions. If we cannot show our working, we do not publish the number.

Her game statistics come from Flex Scorebook, our free scorekeeping app, kept live by her coach during the game. Nobody enters them afterwards and nobody can adjust them later.

And every girl who plays enough gets ranked, whether her family pays us a penny or not. A ranking that only includes paying customers is not a ranking. Paying cannot move her up, and neither can attending our events — position is not for sale here in any form.