You Play Ball Like a Girl!!!

"YOU PLAY BALL LIKE A GIRL!!!" I know pretty much anyone who has a passing interest in the game of baseball has heard this line from the movie "The Sandlot". If taken at face value, it implies that girls are inferior baseball players to boys, but if you look at it a bit deeper it implies that girls do not belong on the same field as boys. At the High School level, boys and girls are separated into two different sports that are basically the same but with slightly different rules. But why do they really need to be gendered sports? Why can't fastpitch and baseball just both be coed sports?

Once when I was coaching baseball practice, I was using a pre-chalked field from about 5-7 in the evening and at about 6:45 a very large man came up to me and he was quite upset. He told me that they had the field at 7pm for a game between two nationally ranked men's fastpitch softball teams and I had ruined their lines and the dirt in the field with my team. To make it up to him, I agreed to play on his team that night because one of their players had called in and said he couldn't make it. I came to the plate twice and while I did put the ball in play, both were grounders to third (I NEVER hit the ball the opposite way, being a dead-pull hitting lefty my whole life) because it was so hard to catch up to the fastball being thrown from so close. I didn't even get out of the box on the first one because the ball was hit hard and the defensive play was made quickly. My experience playing fastpitch after a lifetime of thinking it was "just for girls" proved to me that the sport was simply a different kind of baseball. In a way, it is not really even the same sport because different techniques and tactics are necessary for success. A different kind of swing is needed. Pitchers use a different kind of throwing motion and the field is a different size. So it really is a completely different sport and not just an easier version of baseball as people often say.

The idea of Jim Crow was that blacks and whites would be kept seperate with "separate but equal" facilities even though they were hardly equal. In many ways, the gendered sports of Softball and Baseball play out in a way like Jim Crow. There are many girls throughout the country who would rather play baseball but are told by coaches, peers, principals, etc. that they can only play softball. Even girls who excel at the Little League level eventually are pushed into Softball, even the most famous baseball playing girl in recent memory, Mo'ne Davis. Davis dominated the boys for a whole summer when she was 12, gaining national stardom and appearing on the covers of countless magazines and newspapers. But Mo'ne did not play baseball in high school or college. She played softball. Why is that? While I did meet Mo'ne at the after party of the ESPY Awards the year after she had her breakout, I simply told her she was an inspiration to one of my players, a girl who despite actually being older than Davis by a couple of years, looked up to her in awe.

TO READ MORE ABOUT GIRLS IN BASEBALL, LOOK FOR THE REST IN MY UPCOMING BOOK "You're Not Welcome Here: Stories of Discrimination and Exclusionary Practices in Baseball"