A very pleasant good afternoon everybody, and welcome to The Vet in sunny Philadelphia. Today's pitching matchup will be for the Phils, Curt Schilling, starting his sixth game this week, and for the visiting Pirates, Steve Cooke in his fifth appearance in the last four days.

This situation sounds farfetched, right? If Cooke or Schilling were to throw that number of innings, their arms would probably be dragging on the turf. But throwing a softball is very different from throwing a baseball, and Lady Lion hurlers, like Gypsy Gooding, routinely pitch multiple games in a week.

"You're pitching that much in practice," she explained. "If you pitch an hour in practice, you're throwing over usually a game's worth of pitches, so when you go into the game, it's not that tiring."

The best softball pitchers are just as strong in their first inning as their last. For example, in the University of South Florida Classic earlier this month, UCLA ace DeeDee Weiman pitched four complete games -- a total of 28 innings -- in three days. On her way to MVP honors, Weiman collected 53 strikeouts (13.25 per game), and surrendered zero runs on only five hits. In the last of her four starts, she no-hit Oklahoma in the tournament semi-finals.

Captain Leigh Bakun, as the ace of the Lady Lion staff, often has to bear the brunt of the workload. And while she, like Gooding, credits conditioning for her durability, she also takes a more physiological approach.

"Softball pitchers derive the majority of our power from our legs," said Bakun, who teaches pitching to young players in the summer. "Underhand pitching is a very natural motion for your arm, unlike baseball pitching."

Not only is baseball pitching an unnatural motion, it creates tremendous amounts of wear-and-tear on the arm, specifically the shoulder.

"The detrimental force on the shoulder in baseball is a distraction force, which tends to pull the shoulder out of the socket," said Sherry Werner, who's studying for her doctorate in biomechanics. And because the force exerted on the shoulder with every pitch is equal to the pitcher's body weight, she continued, significant damage can occur.

Werner, who contributes to Women's Fastpitch World magazine, further explained that the difference between the two deliveries is that in softball, the shoulder joint is kept in a more natural position, which places less stress on the tissues, tendons, ligaments and muscles around the joint.

Another major difference between the two types of pitching is the kinds of breaking balls each hurler throws. While your average baseballer usually throws about four pitches -- for example, fastball, curve, slider and change-up -- Bakun throws as many as nine.

In addition to five traditional baseball pitches, such as a screwball and a curve, Bakun throws two change-ups, a two-knuckle and three-knuckle, and a pitch called a rise ball.

"It's my favorite," she said of the rise ball. "It breaks up and in toward the batter. I also have this one pitch I call my screamer -- it's a faster fastball."

Note:

-- The Lady Lion pitching staff suffered a major blow this week as Heidi Hanna, the team leader in ERA last season, found out the shin splints that have bothered her all season are suspected to be a stress fracture of her left leg. She will redshirt this season. The team must now go with a four-woman staff featuring Bakun, Gooding, Beth Reeves and Misty Hackett.