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Kat Osterman was the youngest member of Team USA when it won its last Olympic gold medal in softball in 2004. She is now the oldest member and is looking to cap off her career with another medal in Tokyo.
Much has been made of the veteran presence this pitcher will add to the roster. She is one of only two players on the team with Olympic experience and the only one with Olympic experience after softball was excluded from the past two Summer Olympics. she won the gold. Many of her current teammates remember watching her when they were still kids. To them, she ismama cat” But focusing solely on her leadership misses the catalyst that brought her back to the roster in the first place. Even at age 38, Osterman is one of the most feared pitchers in the sport, and she will be the driving force behind the gold medal. From Team USA.
Look out for her comeback season last year. After deciding to come out of retirement for her Olympics, she qualified for her national team in 2019, but as the Olympics were delayed due to the pandemic, she was made an unexpected addition. I am now facing training. This led to her being a surprise addition to the softball league, Athletes Unlimited, for her first season in August 2020. There she not only looked great for her age, but also looked great, eventually winning the league and taking first place in the individual player rankings.
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So to find out what it's like to work with Osterman at this stage of her career, and why she remains so consistent and unbeatable at 38 years old, check out her exclusive player There may be no one better to ask than the Athletes Unlimited athlete who served as catcher Gwen Svekis last summer.
“No one who steps into the box thinks she can beat him,” Svekis said. “I think that's what separates her. She never has a moment where she thinks she's going to lose her pitch, she's going to lose her at-bat, she's going to lose the game.”
Osterman was never known for his overwhelming speed. (Her work dates from her early to mid-'60s.) But that's part of what laid the foundation for such a long career. Her left-hander has always combined spin, cunning and deception to succeed, giving her a style that looks like this: You can easily continue developing and adapting it over the years.
It starts with her drop ball. This is Osterman's signature pitch, often commemorated in GIFs, making batters look foolish with its cartoonish sweep of an off-the-table motion. But it's not the breathtaking falls that make it so effective. That's everything else it can be. Osterman has extremely precise pitch control, which allows him to easily alarm batters with subtle changes. She may start by dropping it slightly while keeping her ball within the strike zone. Perhaps she falls off a step stool rather than a table. Then she might create an intermediate version where she falls off a chair. after that The pitch rolls off the table. Perhaps the first one was hitable. Maybe it was the same for the second person. But when they all look the same at first and the hitter doesn't know which one is coming, it can feel impossible to determine when to fire.
“It's not just the movement, it's the ability to find it and get off the ladder,” Svekis says of Osterman's dropped ball. “So she could start by putting a pitch on her hips, then put a pitch on her knees, then put a pitch on her ankles. And then make them all look very similar so you can You can make it chase you.”
This means that it is difficult to hit a drop ball on its own. But unfortunately for his opponents, Osterman's arsenal is deeper than that. Are you ready for the drop? Get ready for her to mix in curveballs, changeups, and rise balls.
“People can go in there and sit on her drop ball,” Svekis says. If you're late and the whole time she's sitting on one pitch and you don't get it, now you'll start guessing. Because she has the pitch of other elites. And once that process begins, it ends. ”
Stepping up to face Osterman can be as mentally taxing as it is physically, a guessing game that batters can feel destined to lose.If you can Can you identify the pitch correctly? Good luck handling her famous spin.
Curve balls can be wicked. Osterman has a particularly sharp backdoor curve that confuses hitters just like her drop ball. But what's really infuriating is her rise ball, her extreme deviation from everything. Everyone steps into the box against Osterman and expects a lot of pitches to come in the zone. Rise ball? No one thinks like that. (Although this has always been in her arsenal, she has historically used it infrequently, and she describes it as being the most difficult sphere to master for use in games.) She made her mark with drop balls. But Osterman has become increasingly accustomed to using rise balls as the ultimate way to confuse at-bats.
“What grew over the course of the season was that we became very into mixing her rise balls,” Svekis says of their experience working together last year. “When it goes off, it becomes ten times more dangerous because no one is expecting it.”
Tokyo is being cast as a chance for redemption for Team USA as a whole and Osterman in particular. She was the starting pitcher in the team's final Olympic game in 2008, when the favorites, the USA, lost the gold medal to an upset by Japan. (Final score: a heart-breaking 2-1.) This year marks softball's return to the Olympics, giving it not only a chance to avenge that loss, but a chance to do it on home soil in Japan. It will be done.
But Osterman's summer should be more than just a chance to vindicate his 2008 silver medal or match his 2004 gold medal. That in itself is a new chapter for the Olympics. Because no one needs to turn back the clock to see pitchers perform at an elite level. Because Osterman can do it now.
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