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I remember the day clearly. It was a Saturday morning, early in April, and I was nine years old. I looked out the window of our garden apartment in Queens, New York, over a sliver of old woodland to the green diamond on 78th Street. Some kids were choosing up sides. The pile of leather mitts and wooden bats suggested that a game of baseball was about to be played. Girls were there, too. If I hurried, maybe I could play. I threw on a long-sleeved blue shirt, a white tee shirt over it, and my oldest jeans. “Don’t
be gone long,” my mother sang out. Preface |
The idea for Breaking into Baseball came unbidden on one of those drizzly late winter afternoons when it seems as if spring and baseball will never arrive. How many women, I wondered, dreamed as I once had of playing second base for the New York Yankees or becoming a sportswriter? How many others sought to umpire or work in organized baseball’s front offices? Why do women fans care so when organized baseball so often seems to care so little for them? Thus began a baseball odyssey – following the threads of history into the 19th century when women, even as spectators, were considered irredeemably ignorant of the game America was falling for. There were plenty of live women to consider, too: Toni Stone, who played second base – second base! – in the waning years of the Negro Leagues; Pam Postema, who explained what she thinks is the real reason she didn’t make it as an umpire to the Show; and lefthander Ila Borders, who played boys’ and men’s baseball, culminating in three-plus seasons in professional baseball, primarily in the independent Northern League. Baseball, it turns out, is a fine lens through which to consider how American women have fared over the past century and a half. Many fans and scholars of the game are familiar with the opening line of historian Jacques Barzun’s comment from God’s Country and Mine: “Whoever would understand the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball….” Few, however, know the remainder of Barzun’s comment: “…the rules and realities of the game – and do it by watching some high school or small-town teams.” Those who would understand the lot of contemporary American women would do well to take in one of the many girls’ and women’s amateur baseball (not softball!) games being played around the country, to observe women umpires at the Little League, high school, or college levels, or to sit in on the Association for Women in Sports Media (aka AWSM) annual convention. Breaking
into Baseball would have been a rather gloomy book had it only
considered the history of women’s exclusion from the game;
instead it celebrates the gutsy women who found a way to take part
despite the obstacles they faced. For at its best, I believe that
baseball offers a chance for reconciliation in the ancient wars
between the sexes. My field research, correspondence, and interviews
show the good that can come when someone – these days it is
as likely to be a mother as a father – takes a young girl
to her first ball game. The book was written for all fans, men and
women, who know that a day at the ballpark is the best possible
way to spend a Sunday afternoon. |
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