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Clare has been keeping tabs on the women’s pro softball season, which ended Tuesday with the Chicago Bandits winning the deciding game of the championship series over the USSSA Pride by a score of 2-1 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  The game was broadcast on CBS Sports Network, or channel 411 on our cable system.  Maybe numbers don’t matter, but ESPN gets channels 33 and 34.

My Xfinity homepage had nothing on the game, and neither did the Sun-Times.  This is what the Tribune had to say:  “The Bandits held on for a 2-1 victory over USSSA Pride to win the National Pro Fastpitch championship in Tuscaloosa, Ala.  The Bandits won the last two games of the best-of-three series.”  It probably was a coin toss between printing the box score or the WNBA standings, in which case the WNBA won.

I don’t know how many cameras are used in an MLB game, but I’m pretty sure it’s double or triple what they had on hand in Tuscaloosa.  Anything to the outfield came across onscreen as very, very far away, and dark.  The play-by-play announcer called the game as if he wanted to use as many sports’ clichés as he could fit into seven innings.  Commercials featured a country-and-western duo I’d never heard of performing in pro-softball tee shirts, along with an invitation to come visit Tuscaloosa.  (Not likely.)  I wouldn’t be surprised if the league got a good deal on the stadium, which is home to the Crimson Tide softball team.

The stands weren’t half-full from what I could tell, with little more than family and friends; it’s to the players’ credit that they played as if to a packed house.  For whatever reasons, Americans don’t like professional women’s sports nearly as much as they do amateur women’s sports.  Nothing I saw on TV Tuesday night did anything to change that.