Invisible Women in America’s National Pastime . . . or, “She’s Good. It’s History, Man.”

Abstract

American popular culture holds that girls do not play baseball, and any news to the contrary is greeted with incredulity. But girls and women have played the national pastime since the game was first invented, in spite of the fact that softball has served as a vehicle for the most strident sex segregation in American sports. This article traces the tenacious participation of girls and women from the 19th century to the U.S. Women's National Team. Team USA medaled in the hard-fought, violencemarred Women's World Cup Tournament of 2010 in Caracas, Venezuela. At home, the team is invisible, and the players must battle for access to the game. What can be done to open the doors for them?

Not America’s Game: The Globalization and Post-Westernization of Women’s Baseball

“…Still these girls and women are largely ignored and siphoned off to softball, as American sporting culture continues to sell softball as the appropriate female equivalent to baseball. Girls are thus deprived “the choice to play the national pastime” (Ring, 2013, p. 60) even if they desire to, and pursuing the game requires a fight against not only cultural biases but a lack of supportive infrastructure as well.…”

“…The event did receive some attention on MLB.com in the United States but very little coverage elsewhere. As Ring (2013) notes, the Japanese currently dominate women’s baseball “because they have access to year-round baseball, from grade school to college, and the cultural backing of their nation” (p. 64). It is this cultural backing, the growing belief that women should and can play baseball, that accounts for the shift of power away from the United States to East Asia.…”

“…In 2018, the team finished in fourth place and is currently ranked fourth in the world by the WBSC behind Japan, Canada, and Taiwan. Quite simply, as Ring (2013) states bluntly, “the United States must get over its belief that softball is an acceptable alternative to baseball for girls” (p. 74) before women’s baseball can truly be taken seriously and find its place in American sporting culture.…”

“…Yet, Howell fails to mention that Canada has medaled in six of the eight Women’s Baseball World Cup tournaments held since 2004, that there has been a national championship for girls’ baseball since 1998, and that Baseball Canada, the national governing body, estimates that more than 12,000 girls and women currently play the game (Hall, 2016). There are two chapters in the book dedicated to baseball in Japan, yet no mention that Japan is the six-time reigning world champion in women’s baseball, that the Japanese Women’s Baseball League is currently the only professional league for women in the world, or that the country has created a well-developed infrastructure that supports baseball for girls and women at the youth, high school, collegiate, and recreational levels (Krieger, 2012; Ring, 2013). There is a chapter about baseball in Australia, but no mention of the history of women’s baseball in the country, which saw the formation of the Australian Women’s Baseball Association in 1933 (Stell, 1991), nor of recent efforts by the women’s national team to launch baseball programming for girls in Indonesia through the Diamonds in the Rough project (Zimmerman & Gostray, 2016).…”

Thinking the Unthinkable

“…My passion for the game of baseball is tempered by anger and resentment, however: I felt the sting of sexism and misogyny as a child during the 1960s and early 1970s and such discrimination continues to be mirrored by the male-only character of professional baseball and most elite professional sports in North America. There have been many great women baseball players, as Ring (2008, 2012) ably documents, but none have ever been eligible to compete for a job at the Major League level. I am also offended by MLB’s obvious and over-the-top role in normalizing dominant codes of wealth, whiteness and heterosexual masculinity coupled with its ongoing neocolonial practice of “mining” and then mostly discarding cheap baseball talent from several poor Latin American countries (Alexander, 2006; Klein, 1991).…”