Another season of professional baseball is upon us, another season of a
sport that’s billed as the “National Pastime,” yet bars half the population
– the female half – from the playing field.
Major and minor league teams, as well as most amateur and semi-professional
clubs, have kept the game largely what it has been since its beginnings: a
chewing, spitting, macho game reserved for men. Women are allowed to watch,
but only rarely have they been allowed to come out of the stands and play.
Major League Baseball made it official in 1952, when teams were banned from
signing major or minor league contracts with women.
Baseball officials have not even bothered to explain why they’ve barred
women from play. Just about the only public explanation came many years ago
from former Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Voiding a contract between the minor league Chattanooga Lookouts and pitcher
Jackie Mitchell in 1931 – the first contract ever between a men's
professional team and a woman -- Landis declared that women were unfit to
play baseball because it is “too strenuous” for them.
Many others know better, among them famed home run slugger Hank Aaron. He
notes that baseball “is not a game of strength. The game needs a special
kind of talent, thinking and timing. Some women, as well as some men,
qualify. There’s no logical reason women shouldn’t be playing baseball.”
Certainly Jackie Mitchell had what it takes. Just a few days before Landis
voided her contract, she had struck out two of baseball’s greatest hitters,
Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig –- back-to-back -- in a Lookouts’ exhibition game
against the New York Yankees.
So why bar women? Perhaps it’s simply that professional baseball has been a
game that both reflects and reinforces the social mores that decree it to be
a man’s world. Women weren’t allowed to play in that world, or make the
rules or challenge or enforce them. Their role was strictly to cheer on the
men who ran the game, just as they ran society in general.
In any case, there have been few exceptions to the men-only rules that have
governed baseball. The 1952 ruling against professional teams signing women
has been violated a few times, and a few women have actually played for
minor league teams. But not many have done so, and not for long.
Only one woman has played above the minor league level. That's Toni Stone,
who replaced Hank Aaron at second base for the Indianapolis Clowns of the
Negro American League in 1953 after Aaron left the team to play for Major
League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves. It was difficult for Stone as the only
woman in the league. Even players on her own team treated her rudely and
roughly. But though she said “it was hell” at times, it was worth it to
“live my dream” of playing professional baseball.
Of the relatively few other women who have played the professional game, the
most famous were on teams in the All-American Girl’s Professional Baseball
League that operated from 1945 to 1954. Films showing their games make clear
beyond doubt that women did play – and can play –as well as men, and draw
crowds of thousands to watch them do it.
The women moved as smoothly and naturally as their male counterparts, threw
as hard and accurately and hit as well. They even slid into bases
aggressively, despite being uniformed in the short tunic dresses their
teams’ male owners insisted they wear.
In the years since the league disbanded, there have been several independent
women’s teams that have challenged all-male teams at the professional,
semi-pro and amateur level, in softball as well as baseball, and even some
mixed male and female teams that have played each other. A few women have
played on otherwise all-male college teams, and some have played on
gender-mixed high school teams.
The prospect of integrating baseball along gender lines to any substantial
degree still seems highly unlikely, however. Probably the best hope rests
with the thousands of girls now playing with boys on Little League teams and
other pre-high school teams that had once barred them.
What matters most is that the girls have been allowed to join in the
childhood joy that comes from playing organized baseball. But it’s
important, too, that those are the teams on which most professionals began
developing the skills that take so many years to perfect.
Many women have already developed the essential skills, and many more are
certain to develop them in the future. It’s time professional baseball gave
them the opportunity to use those skills at the highest levels of the game.
It’s the least we should demand of the National Pastime.
---
Dick Meister is a San Francisco writer and former semi-professional baseball
player. Contact him through his website,
www.dickmeister.com.
