American Girls Play Catch-up, by Jennifer Ring

American Girls Play Catch-up, by Jennifer Ring

Sixteen-year-old Japanese schoolgirl Eri Yoshida recently signed a professional baseball contract as a pitcher with a Japanese team. The same week, we learned that a fourteen-year-old American girl, Logan Young, will sue her Indiana school district and the Indiana High School Athletic Association for the right to play the game America claims as its own. She is not the first American girl to sue for the right to play the national sport. Her lawyers plan to use the Fourteenth Amendment and Title IX, the same laws that have been used since the 1970’s to enable girls to battle their way onto their local baseball fields. Logan and her attorneys must once again make the case that softball is a different game than baseball. In the country that claims baseball’s origin, softball is regarded as the girls’ form of the national sport.

Baseball and softball are not the same game. You know baseball: it’s the game the President of the United States opens each season with the first pitch, and the game before which the national anthem is played. It’s the game where the ball actually fits in your hand. The one where the sound of a hit is “Crack!” rather than “Plunk!” (Okay, maybe you have to work your way up to “Crack!” but at every level except professional, the sound is at least a nice, crisp “Schwack!”) It’s the game whose theme song is so associated with the nation that one recent applicant for American citizenship suggested it would be more useful for future citizens to be taught the words to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” than required to know the number of representatives in Congress.

Baseball is our national game. Softball is not. Baseball’s stepchild was conceived in the late nineteenth century by groups of baseball-loving men in Chicago and Minneapolis, waiting for spring and looking for a way to play indoors until they could resume “real” baseball. The first softball was a boxing glove rolled up and secured with its own lace. It was fun to hit it with a broom handle, and its softness served its intended purpose of not breaking windows and lights. The first players of the game called it “Indoor Baseball,” “Sissy Ball” and “Panty Waist” to make sure it wasn’t confused with the manly American sport of baseball.

Softball has come a long way since the early days, but it’s not the national pastime, it doesn’t carry the respect (or the paycheck) of baseball, and a hit still sounds like a thud, not a crack. The ball is still too big, and base paths are so short that runners can’t even steal.

On the same news page reporting Logan Young’s lawsuit, there is a reader poll: “Should Girls Be Allowed to Play High School Baseball?” Luckily for us all, the same American spirit of fair play that elected the first African American president last month is reflected in the 65% of respondents who answered “Yes.” But how can this even be an issue in 2008? Who thinks they have the right to forbid girls to play baseball? The answer is obviously the same 35% that has prevailed for more than a century. The same terrified juveniles who felt the need to scrawl “No Girls Allowed” on their clubhouses.

Logan Young is not the first girl to need to play with boys in order to continue to have access to baseball. Others have paid a big price for their tenacity. Last year in Florida, a pitcher who made her high school team was the object of insults and rocks hurled at her by the parents of her teammates. A handful of women have played college baseball, but most have been driven out prematurely. Members of the utterly unrecognized medal-winning Team USA Women’s National Baseball team are ignored by the American press, and must scrounge for teams to play on between the biennial tournaments. One Team USA player pitched a perfect game on her boys’ high school team and is now without a college team to play on; another endured four years of silence from her college teammates because it was worth it to be able to play baseball everyday; a third was the only returning player cut by her coach at her Seven Sisters’ college baseball team. Some of the other members of Team USA are young enough to benefit if Logan Young prevails.

Luckily, for the 65% of us who would like to see the entire nation “allowed” to enjoy the pleasures of playing the beloved national game, Logan Young, her lawyers, and her supportive parents are willing to make the same tired old arguments about American girls’ desire and ability, as well as right to play. Sooner or later, American girls will be able to achieve what Eri Yoshida and Japanese girls from youth to college already have. Play Ball, Logan!

Jennifer Ring is Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball to be published by the University of Illinois Press in Spring, 2009.