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Valerie Arioto: True Facts

By Nick Kranz
She looms in the shadows while pitchers tremble on the mound, knowing that certain doom is awaiting in the on deck circle.
She looms in the shadows while pitchers tremble on the mound, knowing that certain doom is awaiting in the on deck circle.

Before (and after!) you read this article, vote for Valerie in the Lowe's Senior Class Award as the top senior softballer in the country this year. As of last night the best player in the county was only in 5th place, which is an entirely unacceptable state of affairs. Do your duty!

Valerie Arioto is really good at softball. But, exactly how good is she? She's already a member of the USA National team. She's won a national player of the week award. But can honors like that truly measure what she's done and what she's capable of? What follows is an assortment of true facts. Some of them may have a bit more ‘truthiness’ to them than others. I’ll let you decide which are which.

  • Valerie Arioto hits a home run every 5 at bats. Yes, you read that correctly. Every time she hits a ball that enters fair territory, it has a 20% chance of flying over the fences.

  • Arioto takes walks to occasionally show opposing pitchers the kindness of mercy

  • If you created a softball team that started 9 Valerie Ariotos, they would average approximately 14.5 runs per game*
  • Arioto only pitches because if she records outs quickly she’ll get to come up to bat again sooner.

  • Arioto averages more than a base per plate appearance. It’s true; a single is actually a slightly-worse-than-average outcome.

  • Physicists and philosophers alike have been unable to answer the age old question: Could Valerie Arioto throw a pitch so nasty that not even She could hit it?

  • Arioto has more walks than outs this season.

  • Barry Bonds’ statistical surge in the 2000s is widely assumed to be fueled by performance enhancing drugs. In reality, Bonds used a time machine so that he could get advice from Arioto on how to maintain a .500+ on base percentage without sacrificing power. Despite her advice, he was never able to OPS near Arioto’s current mark of 1.738.

  • Arioto has more than twice as many walks (47) as a hitter compared to walks she has allowed as a pitcher (22). Put in another way: Val walks 37% of the time she steps up to the plate. Opposing hitters walk 6% of the time when they step to the plate against Val.

    • And we’re just scratching the surface. CGB reader challenge: Give us some of your own Valerie Arioto facts. If you need an inspiration, just check out these stat lines.

    *I used Bill James’s Runs Created stat to estimate how much a lineup of Ariotos would score in seven innings. I have no idea if RC reasonably translates to the very different run scoring environment of college softball, but for the purposes of this silly little article, I think it suffices.

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