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TEMPE, Ariz. -- Show your work.

Math teachers have used those words to torment students for eons, possibly as far back as the original Pythagorean pop quiz. It's an instruction that suggests an answer, even the right answer, is just a number without an understanding of where it came from.

A prospective math teacher herself, Arizona State junior Kaitlin Cochran enters this season as the most dominant hitter in the nation. With Monica Abbott gone the way of Cat Osterman, an argument could be made she's the most dominant player in the nation. Say what you will about the value of pitching in softball, but no returning hurler outpaces her peers the same way Cochran does at the plate. Either way, the numbers she's amassed in the game's toughest conference prove she's unsurpassed as a hitter.

"As far as a college player, there's not many hitters better that I've seen in the two and a half years I've been here," Arizona State coach Clint Myers said. "She works very hard at it; she believes in herself as a hitter. She's got a chance to make an impact on any team she plays on."

Such praise falls from Myers' lips about as often as rain falls from the Arizona skies. It begs the question of how we got to an answer that seems so obvious.

There is an old joke about a fan who arrives in the ninth inning of a 0-0 baseball game and upon learning the score says, "Good, I didn't miss anything." Granted, the punch line is more New Yorker cartoon than "Family Guy" on the humor scale, but it at least partially explains why several thousand otherwise sensible people will sit in the stands or in front of a television for three hours in September to watch the Royals play the Orioles. That 5-2 result may be meaningless in the big picture of pennant races that had long since left both teams out in the cold, but an appreciation of the plays on the left side of the equal sign make it worthwhile.

Show your work.

Growing up in Yorba Linda, Calif., Cochran loved nothing more than watching Dodgers games with her dad, Patrick Cochran. But watching with her dad, a former baseball catcher, was an interactive experience for the budding softball player long before that became a buzzword for the television industry. The games weren't just about the final score.

"He always would go over situations when I was little," Cochran said. "Like, 'What do you do with runners on first and second; what's your mental plan up at the plate? Do you just want to move the runner over; do you want to get a good pitch to hit?' He would always ask me so many questions, so then I would be ready to answer them and it would be instinctive when it happened."

This isn't Todd Marinovich or Jennifer Capriati we're talking about. With headline-grabbing stories about infamous celebrity parents or murderous hockey dads, it is chic to rip parents who seem far too interested in living vicariously through the athletic exploits -- and even incomes -- of their offspring. Certainly college softball has its share of them. But in a culture that seems eager to divide every issue into polar extremes with nothing but a barren wasteland in the middle, parents who encourage kids to make the most of their talent sometimes get lumped in with the extremes.

Cochran took up the game after watching her older sister play and wanting to emulate her. Whether she played was always up to her. But as long as she chose to play, and as long as she said she wanted to be the best, her dad was there to push, praise and participate.

"I never knew how hard you really did have to work because when I was younger I did have a lot of talent and things came to me a lot more easily than, say, like my older sister," Cochran said. "My older sister, she worked her butt off. She would do whatever she could to become the best player she could. And things that would take her longer to do sometimes wouldn't take me as long to get.

"I think since I had that natural talent, I didn't understand why I had to work so much harder. But if you want to get to the next level, you're going to have to do that. It did take me a long time to figure that out. I always thought I was doing well -- I was doing just as well as everyone else. And my dad said, 'Well, if you want to stand out, you're going to have to push it even more.'"

The result was a player who hit .437 with 17 home runs, 61 RBIs and 12 stolen bases in 68 games as a freshman at Arizona State. She was named Pac-10 Player of the Week after her first week of college softball and went on to become a first-team All-American. For an encore, she hit .492 with 18 home runs, 59 RBIs and 27 stolen bases last season. The only slump in her sophomore season had to do with the number of strikes she saw. Despite a self-described propensity to occasionally expand her strike zone, a claim echoed by Myers, she walked 59 times last season and struck out just 14 times.

"It's kind of scary," Myers said. "Katie has an uncanny knack of making good contact and her balls just find a hole. If you take away the pitches that she hits that she got herself out on, she might have hit .700."

A fan of numbers -- what else would you expect from a calculus aficionado -- Cochran studies her stat line and sees room for improvement on the bases. She's not a classic speedster like former Pac-10 rival Caitlin Lowe, but she runs the bases aggressively and well. She was caught stealing fewer times last season than as a freshman, despite attempting to swipe nearly twice as many bases. And as she points out, teams are going to have to think twice about walking her if it essentially means putting her on second base.

Up to this point, everything adds up. Add together talent, instruction, support and an aggressiveness that borders on maniacal on the field, and it's not entirely surprising that the result is the most intimidating hitter in college softball. Where the equation takes a turn toward trigonometry is in how the game's most intimidating presence in the batter's box may be its gentlest soul off the field.

Cochran was composed and direct in answering questions after a disappointing exit from last season's Women's College World Series, but most of her sentences in happier times are punctuated with an embarrassed grin as her eyes inspect the ceiling. The college junior in her checks herself before she gets too carried away, but there is a childlike joy when she starts talking about the process of hitting or heroes like Ted Williams and Jessica Mendoza. And while the powers that be at USA Softball told her after last summer's Olympic tryout that they liked almost everything about her game, they also suggested she might want to work on being less in awe of her surroundings.

"I just need to act like one of them, whether or not it's true," Cochran laughed about playing alongside Mendoza and others. "I have to just act, I guess."

And now, even as she spends most of the year at school in Arizona and large parts of the summer on the road in the summer softball circuit, nothing appeals to Cochran as much as sitting down with her dad and granddad to watch the Dodgers.

"It's my favorite thing to do," Cochran said. "My grandpa and my dad and me, we would always watch baseball games because it was our favorite thing to do. We're boring people."

Not surprisingly, the student enjoys occasionally trying to get the best of her teacher.

"The tables have kind of turned, too," Cochran said. "Like, I ask him questions about what he would do. He always has the right answers, but still, I try and quiz him because he quizzed me for so many years. It's kind of like a mind game we have."

One thing that's clear is that while pitchers may occasionally stumble on the right answer with Cochran at the plate, it's unlikely they'll ever be able to solve her.

Graham Hays is a regular contributor to ESPN.com's soccer coverage. E-mail him at Graham.Hays@espn3.com.