Leveling the Playing Field: Women’s Baseball in Australia
It’s a Wednesday afternoon at the Springvale Baseball Club in Keysborough, Victoria, a suburb of Melbourne. Only a few players are active in the mid-day, midsummer heat. One is pitching in the cage, while a few are out on the diamond fielding ground balls. There’s been little rain this summer through much of Australia, and the dust is thick on the field. Other players have sought the shade of the club house, drinking Pepsis and bottled water, and talking over the loud rock music rattling from a boombox. Springvale is normally deserted on a Wednesday afternoon, but today is special because the Samurai team from Tokyo is visiting. The team has come to Melbourne with a dozen players, a coach, a trainer, and a couple of supporters. Some might consider the event special for another reason: all the players are women.
Women’s baseball is a mystery to most people. When a female baseball player anywhere in the world—Chicago, Melbourne, Toronto, Tokyo—tells an acquaintance that she plays baseball, the reaction is usually the same: “You mean you play softball.” Most women are patient with this response, carefully explaining that no, they haven’t misspoken or skipped a cerebral beat; they actually play hardball, just like the guys. Amateur women’s baseball is played on several continents, and there is even a women’s World Cup played bi-annually. The most recent World Cup was played in Taipei in 2006; the U.S. proudly brought home the gold. It’s ironic, however, that the U.S. has relatively few women’s teams and leagues, despite the size of our population, the depth of our knowledge about baseball, and the sport’s iconic status as the great American pastime. In Australia, a country of 20 million people where baseball is a minor sport, women’s hardball exists in most major cities, and national championships are played every year.
I traveled to Australia to find out more about how women’s baseball was played there, and why it was more common in Australia than in the U.S. I wanted to know if women’s baseball was a sideshow, an obscure hobby played by a few, or a game played seriously in a country crazy for sport. In other words, was women’s baseball actually NORMAL in Australia?
My journey took me to the Springvale Baseball Club in a working class suburb southeast of downtown Melbourne. The hosts for my stay in Melbourne were Rob Novotny, an American whose baseball history includes scouting for the Texas Rangers and directing youth camps for the Chicago White Sox, and his wife Kellie Manzie-Novotny, one of Australia’s top women players. Rob plays on a men’s team for Springvale and coaches one of the women’s teams, while Kellie plays on both men’s and women’s teams at the club. During the Australian summer, running roughly from October to April, Rob and Kellie spend most weeknights and every weekend either training or playing / coaching games at the Springvale club or at one of the 32 summer baseball clubs in the Melbourne area.
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On this Wednesday afternoon, players drift from the field and cages into the club house, ready to unwind before dinner at a local pub. Most of those present are Japanese; many of the Australian players are at work. One Aussie who is spending the afternoon at the club is Bill Reay, a wiry man in his early 70s, who coaches one of the two Springvale women’s teams. Bill has been involved in the Springvale club since it was founded in 1975. Bill’s son-in-law, Mick Wearne, pitches on the men’s second-grade (reserve) team and is a former president of the club. His 26-year-old granddaughter, Simone Wearne, pitches for the women’s first-grade team (firsts), as well as for the state and national women’s teams, and is the current club president. His 22-year-old grandson, Scott, a catcher, is one of the premiere male baseball players in Victoria. The field is named after Mick’s father, K.H. Wearne.
Bill Reay started playing baseball in 1953, when he was 19 years old, after he had seen the sport played at a local field. In those days, baseball was weak competition for cricket and Australian Rules Football, a uniquely Aussie sport that combines elements of soccer, rugby, and American football (without the padding). On this sultry afternoon, Bill tells me about his history with baseball, and his unlikely emergence as a women’s coach. I listen to his voice with its typical Australian lilt, each sentence rising in tone as it reaches its conclusion, almost like a question: “We used to play baseball in winter. In those days, it was controlled by cricket clubs. Baseball was an off-season sport for cricketers. We used the football fields. We never played nine innings because our games were jammed in between football games. We’d play until we saw the footy umpire come on the ground, then we’d grab the bases and leave.” It wasn’t until the early ‘70s that baseball was established as a summer sport and really took off. Even now, cricket and Australian Rules Football, played professionally in Australia, are far more popular sports than baseball, which is played only at the amateur level. Television coverage of baseball is sparse, and many Aussies have little or no knowledge of the game. As one young man I talked to—an Aussie Rules player—put it, “I think I saw a bit of baseball once on the tele.”
Bill Reay played baseball at Springvale for 15 years, then served as a junior coach for 17 years, until he retired. He was cajoled out of retirement, however, in 2000, when Mick Wearne asked him to help with the struggling women’s team: “They were getting beaten really badly, 15-20 runs. So we recruited a couple of pitchers from another club. From there we developed a better defensive team, and in a short time we played in the finals.”
When women’s baseball in Melbourne began in 1994, the impetus was entrepreneurial. Baseball Victoria simply wanted to grow the sport, so it invested $10,000 in a women’s program. The pay-off was immediate. Within a couple of years, there were 37 teams, or over 500 new players. This pool of new players fell into a couple of categories: women who had played as young girls in the junior program, but who dropped out when they reached adolescence because they were uncomfortable playing with hard-throwing, hard-hitting 15-year-old boys; and softball players and other athletes who had harbored a desire to play hardball. Many of the players had fathers, brothers, and uncles who played baseball and supported their involvement in the sport, and many were inspired by the 1992 film, “A League of Their Own.” Although the number of teams in Melbourne has varied since 1994—there are currently 24, representing 12 clubs—women’s baseball as a sport has grown steadily across the continent. Hardball is played by women in all the Australian states except the island of Tasmania, and it’s estimated that there are over 75 teams in the country, including representative teams. In 1999, the Australian Baseball Federation started sponsoring a national women’s championship. The Victorian team, which always includes a handful of Springvale players, has dominated the national championships, only losing once to New South Wales.
Bill Reay is a committed coach, and he particularly enjoys coaching women. “I’ve coached a couple of state and provincial teams with success, but that’s not the main thing—it’s development. I like to see people develop. And that’s what happened recently with those girls. A majority of those who were being beaten so badly ended up on our first team.” He thinks the men have come to respect the women at Springvale because the women have worked hard developing their skills. “I can think of a guy here who thought the girls were pretty bad. Then he saw a double play. ‘Hey, that’s pretty good.’ He started to change.”
All the action has now moved to the club house, where Annie Wearne, daughter of Bill Reay, wife of Mick Wearne and mother of Simone Wearne, presides over plans for dinner. Annie acts as den mother for the club as a whole, but she devotes special time to the women’s team, for which she serves as manager, provider of water and lollies (candy), and bench player. As she directs traffic, I take in the interior of the club house. It’s a modest affair consisting of a main room with a few round tables, bathrooms with showers, and a kitchen with a bank of refrigerators filled with cold beer, water, and soda. The entire perimeter of the main room is decorated with black and red banners marking Springvale’s many teams that won premierships (championships) or earned finalist status. Among the banners is one that reads “Premieres, Women’s Firsts, 2005.” That’s the first year that Springvale won the women’s Victorian championship. One wall features photos of the starting line-ups for the men’s and women’s teams. Another wall features a list of Springvale’s sponsors. Club sponsorships are so robust that Springvale can keep its yearly fees to only $100, well below the $250-$300 of most clubs. In order to build up sponsorships, the club organizes a competition among the various teams for which team can bring in the most funding. This year, the women’s teams finished way ahead of the men’s teams in securing sponsorships.
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It’s now Thursday evening, and a game between the Springvale Lions—nicknamed the “Big Cats”—and the Japanese team is about to begin. The club house’s best feature—a veranda with a superb and blessedly shady view of the main playing field—is full of men, women and children who have come to support the home team and to see what Japanese baseball is all about. The canteen is open, and Annie Wearne is behind the counter, selling beer, soda and salad rolls. Some of the men are starting to fire up the grill, preparing for a sausage sizzle after the game. The Japanese have put up a large red banner that reads, “Trust Us Samurai, Since 2002.” They wear matching bright red jerseys with their names printed on the back in English, using a Japanese-style font. The players line up and bow before they step on the field.
The game quickly turns in the Samurai’s favor. These young Japanese women are technically proficient; they play quick, precise baseball, using speed and accuracy over power. In one play, an Australian player hits a weak grounder to the pitcher, who bobbles the ball, then scoops it up in her mitt, and shovels it from her glove to the first baseman just in time. It’s the type of play I’ve seen several times on MLB highlight reels. The Japanese also run aggressively on the base paths, stealing numerous bases but also getting doubled up a couple of times.
Despite an occasional base-running error, the Samurai pull way ahead of the Big Cats. In the sixth inning, Risa Nakashima, a Japanese pitcher who is spending the summer in Australia, steps on the mound for the Samurai. Risa is one of the best female pitchers in the world, throwing fastballs in the upper 70s. Last year she was named to the all-world team at the World Cup in Taipei. And once in Japan, while playing a highly competitive high school girls’ championship game, she pitched 10 innings, giving up one run on three hits.
Losing by eight runs, the Big Cats send Rhiannon Smith to the plate, a lanky 14-year-old whose parents drive her several hours each way to attend practices and games. Rhiannon didn’t speak until she was seven years old, and baseball has played a major role in helping her peel away layers of fear and low self-esteem. She hardly looks like a wallflower now, as she steps up the plate, unfazed by the formidable Risa, and quickly lines the ball into left field for a single. Although this doesn’t kick off a major Springvale rally, it is a highlight for Rhiannon and for the fans. After the game, Risa, only 20 herself, signs the ball that Rhiannon hit and everyone takes pictures of the Japanese star and the teenager from Moe, Australia.
The air is smoky with sizzling sausages when Mick Wearne, a key figure in the Wearne dynasty that has nurtured Springvale baseball through the last couple of decades, sits down to talk to me about the club. Mick is a tall, sturdy man of 49, a control pitcher who still starts games for the men’s reserve team. He notes that four generations of Wearnes have played, coached and coordinated baseball at Springvale. When the women’s teams were added eleven years ago, the whole club benefited. “We realized we could do more social events because women were more adept at catering. Once this started, then the men don’t mind—they come and do canteen for women’s games.” The Springvale Web site dedicates one page to “canteen duty.” Sure enough, Matty, Rowan, Rob and Tooly, are listed as covering concessions during the women’s games. There are also numerous social events. During my week at Springvale, there were a couple of routine post-game barbies and a special “Japanese Night,” featuring sushi, sausage rolls, Sapporo, and Victorian Bitter (VB). The cooperation of men and women extends beyond the kitchen. “Girls come down and watch the guys’ games, and the guys come down and watch the girls’ games,” says Mick. While most clubs in Melbourne run men’s and women’s practices on separate nights, Springvale runs its practices on separate fields on the same night. But inevitably, there’s cross-over from one field to another. If the guys need more players for drills, the women will help out on the other field. Same goes for the men.
In tonight’s tough game against the Japanese, one of the more effective pitchers for Springvale was Vic Brown, who threw a scoreless inning of relief. Vic, a dark-haired 24-year-old university student, is not a regular at Springvale; her home club is in a different part of Melbourne, but she occasionally practices at Springvale and so is considered an honorary member. Vic offers the valuable perspective of someone who knows Springvale, but who can also give an outsider’s view of it. She played softball for eleven years before trying baseball: “I never looked back. Baseball’s a thinking game, a strategic game. All games have their strategy, but baseball is so complex, there are so many different aspects to it. I learn new things every week. That’s what I love about Springvale—there’s so much knowledge here.” What impresses Vic most about Springvale is that the experienced players and coaches are all about teaching and development. In contrast, the players and coaches at her home club don’t take the time to teach the women skills because they assume the female players are there not to develop as serious baseballers, but simply to enjoy what the Aussies call “a hit and a giggle.”
Vic is particularly impressed with Simone Wearne, who has taken time to teach her pitching techniques. She tells an interesting story about Simone: “When our club played against Springvale two years ago, we didn’t know who Simone was, and she didn’t know who we were. At one point in the game she called time, and she started teaching our first baseman how to catch a ball.” Simone helps the opposing team, says Vic, because she’s acting for the good of women’s baseball as a whole. Vic also admires Simone’s coaching style: “She’s very blunt, and you don’t get that a lot with women’s sports. People think you have to treat women a certain way, you can’t tell them the truth, you have to cushion it. Simone will come right out and say, ‘That was shit.’ You don’t take offense, she’s not trying to insult you, she’s telling the truth.”
Vic’s home club lacks not only the training emphasis of Springvale, but also the cross-gender social interaction and support. Her club, she says, has “no social events. After the game everyone goes to the bar and gets smashed. During the game, guys hang out in the outfield. They sit on benches, barely watch the game, don’t cheer us, don’t support us. It’s not about baseball, it’s about alcohol.” Springvale and Vic’s home club represent end points of a continuum in terms of how women’s baseball is treated in Australian clubs. Most of the clubs I visited or heard about fell somewhere in between these two extremes.
It’s the end of a long night of baseball. Crickets hum, the Northern Cross winks in the sky. I meet another of Springvale’s star pitchers, Ella Holien, as she leaves with her fiancée, Adam Friend, a solid hitter on the men’s reserve team. Ella and Adam have a story of their own that speaks to the unique blend of baseball and community at Springvale. Before they became engaged, Adam courted Ella for quite some time, but Ella wasn’t biting. In 2004, when Springvale was playing in the Grand Final (the championship game for women’s baseball in Melbourne), Adam dressed up in a full-body lion’s suit, in honor of the Springvale Lions, and proceeded to dance and cheer from the sidelines. Adam’s antics as the first-ever Springvale mascot had the desired effect: they won Ella’s heart.
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It’s Saturday morning, and a group of coaches and lead players from Springvale has traveled to the Essenden Baseball Club, northwest of downtown Melbourne, to conduct a clinic for junior girls. The training team consists of Rob Novotny, Kellie Manzie-Novotny, Simone Wearne and Jeneane Lesko, a former player for the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), who is in Australia to help support and develop girls’ and women’s baseball. The event is sponsored by the Aussie Hearts, an organization founded by Rob, that leads groups of Australian girls and women to the U.S. to play baseball.
Junior clinics are a new phenomenon in Australia. They developed in response to the recurring pattern of girls dropping out of junior baseball when they reach the age of 12 or 13. Roz Balzer, one of the organizers of the program in Melbourne, observes that girls who drop out of baseball in early adolescence often drop out of sports altogether. The result can be decreased self-esteem and a decline in physical and emotional health. The virtual disappearance of girls from under-16 baseball in Australia also has ill effects on women’s hardball: there simply isn’t a robust pipeline of younger players feeding into the women’s game. The result has been a decline in the number of women’s teams in the Melbourne area. Baseball Victoria is concerned about the decline, and they’ve provided some financial and logistical support for the clinics and for all-girls competitions. Kellie, Simone, and other elite players do the hands-on work with junior girls because they want to see the sport grow.
Today’s clinic consists of throwing, catching, and fielding drills, as well as individual pitching instruction. There are 14 girls in attendance, with an age range of 8-15. Simone Wearne, stationed along the third base line, works with the girls on pitching. She is 5’5” tall and wiry like her grandfather, Bill Reay. Her curly brown hair spills from the sides of her red Springvale cap. “Remember to keep your hands together,” she says, as a young girl practices the rhythm of the wind-up. Simone squats to receive the ball as another girl unleashes a pitch way out of the zone. “The only thing you did there was take your eye off me.”
Growing up in a baseball family, it was hard for Simone NOT to play the sport. “When the senior men were playing, me and my brother had to be at the ground. We’d say, ‘Mum, can we leave?’ She’d say, ‘No.’ So we’d throw a ball against the wall of the club. I think this is why my arm has held out as long as it has.” Her dad taught her proper pitching technique, which has served her well not only at Springvale, but also on the Victorian State Team (7 times), and the Australian national team (7 times). Simone became a control pitcher, like her father, at a young age: “It was an under-12 Grand Final game, and my dad was coaching. I was one of the best pitchers—I started the game. But I couldn’t throw strikes. I threw walk after walk after walk. And my grandma was there and everyone was there. My dad comes out in the first innings, ‘I’m going to have to drag you because you can’t throw a strike.’ I was crying, I was bawling. I said there and then to myself, ‘I’m never going to throw walks again.’ I’m going to throw strikes. It was like I couldn’t go through the pain any more. That’s why I’ve been successful. I can throw spots, I can throw with control.”
Some of Simone’s best memories as a baseball player are centered around the first ever women’s World Series in Toronto in 2001. Because of an unusual tie in the pre-tournament, Australia had to play an extra game at one o’clock in the morning in xxx stadium. Until this glitch occurred, Simone was slated to start the next game—in the Skydome, home of the Toronto Blue Jays. “This was going to be the best moment of my life. I was going to throw at a major league stadium. But then the coach says ‘No, you’re going to pitch tonight, not tomorrow.’ I’ve done all this work and now I’ve missed out? I’m not going to get to pitch in the Skydome? At the time I was devastated, but I wasn’t, because I had a job to do. We ended up winning the game 6-5. It was awesome.” Several days later, during a World Series game in the Skydome against Japan, Simone was in the bullpen. “The phone rings. Should I answer it? ‘Hello?’ ‘You’re in.’ So I got to run in from the bullpen. There was no one in the stands, but it felt like there were a million people.” [Simone “was” in the bullpen, but, below, “The girls gather.” In both cases, you are narrating. The past tense Simone uses in her statement understandably leads you to use past tense, but the tense shift on your part throws me some.]
The girls gather in front of the first-base dugout for a group picture and some final words from Jeneane Lesko. Jeneane pitched for the Grand Rapids Chicks in 1953 and 1954, and then went on an all-star barnstorming tour after the AAGPBL [you probably have spelled this out] ended in 1954. She has been a tireless advocate for women’s baseball in the U.S., starting a league in Washington State, and serving as secretary for the AAGPBL Board of Directors. All the Australian players have seen A League of Their Own, some many times over. Jeneane speaks in a quiet voice to the girls, who are flushed from their morning out on the diamond. “I’m thrilled to see all the young people that are interested in baseball here today. I urge you to stick with it, don’t let them talk you into playing softball. . . The thinking you do in baseball will carry you through your whole life. You’ll be a much better person after you’ve had an experience playing baseball. As a human being, as a mother, as a business person, it will carry over.”
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It is now Sunday afternoon, and the men’s first and reserve teams are playing against the Berwick Club. Today is a little different from the usual Sunday afternoon because it’s a fund-raiser for a club member who has been sick. There’s a raffle, and a P.A. has been plugged in so Rob and Jeneane can do play-by-play for the two games.
“Kellie Manzie-Novotny, number 52, leads off for the Lions. She takes the first pitch low, ball one. Now the Berwick pitcher winds up, here’s the pitch—ohh, she knocks it up the middle for a lead-off single.” Today both Kellie and Risa are playing on the men’s reserve team. Kellie is 5’3” and lean; she flies to first base. I snap a picture of her standing next to a Berwick player who’s about a foot taller and 100 pounds heavier. Kellie has played with the boys pretty much her whole life, where her quickness, strong arm and solid contact hitting have earned her a place on the team. As a small girl she played at a different baseball club, where she was captain of her under-12 team, despite being the only girl on the squad. She then tried to move up to under-14s, undaunted by her minority status. “The president of the club was the coach of that team, and he didn’t like female ballplayers at all,” she says. “I didn’t get to play. The coach didn’t want me, even though I would have been able to field better than a lot of boys. I ended up going to the under-16 team and playing there for four years.” Kellie finally left that club and moved over to Springvale. “It took me about 10 years to leave. I should have left ages ago. But no one else had a problem with a girl playing. I pretty much have had respect, have been treated like just one of the guys, throughout my whole time playing with men.”
At one point in the Berwick game, Kellie appears to be caught in a run-down between first and second base. Somehow, a hefty Berwick player ends up in the dirt, and Kellie ends up on second base. The Berwick supporters are unhappy, yelling to the umpire that Kellie caused interference. The call stands, the game goes on, and the two teams draw to 10-10 tie. Afterwards, the players take a few minutes to tidy up the field, then the men’s firsts game begins. The pitcher today is Glenn Richards, who signed with the Atlanta Braves organization several years ago. Jeneane announces this game, because Rob is playing catcher.
I sit down on the grass behind home plate with Simone and Shae Lilywhite, the Springvale shortstop, who, like Simone and Kellie, has played in numerous national and international competitions. They want to talk about the problems they face as elite players. Simone begins by explaining that she’s spent more than $30,000 of her own money to participate in national and international play. Every year the Australian national women’s finals are played somewhere on the vast Australian continent: this year, they were at Perth, in Western Australia, 2100 miles from Melbourne and 2500 miles from Sydney. The finals occur over a 10-day period, and each year it costs players about $2,000 each, a fee which includes travel, uniforms, and coaches’ pay; players receive no state funding. Simone and Shae have also participated in international competition on an annual or bi-annual basis since 2001. Each international event costs players from $3,000 to $4,000 Of the teams that participated in the 2006 World Cup in Taiwan, Australia was the only country without a sponsor. “When we went to the world cup in Taiwan, they questioned our uniform. We were supposed to have two jerseys—home and away. To keep costs down, we only had one, and every other team had two.” During the years when there isn’t a World Cup, an Australian national team is selected to receive special training at the International Baseball Facility on Australia’s Gold Coast. That week-long clinic, however, costs an additional $1500. And all of these events mean time off work.
For Simone and Shae, their experience with international tournaments creates an additional inequity with respect to the Australian baseball establishment. When boys and men go to national finals, the cost of travel and coaches’ pay is covered by Baseball Victoria; they even get a per diem. Not so for the women. Simone uses Shae as an example to graphically illustrate the problem: “Say you’re a 22-year old veteran of the Australian team who’s been playing every year since it [the World Cup] started in 2001. You won the hitting title at Edmonton in 2004, and made the all-world team, but you’re still paying $2,000 for a trip to the Australian finals. Whereas men who have reached no great heights as elite baseball players—they’ve only made the Victorian team for nationals—they get fully funded trips. What really bothers me is if the boys were told they had to pay, they wouldn’t play. Because they don’t care. And we love the sport so much. We’re willing to work overtime, and work weekends, and miss training, so we can pay to go away.”
Simone and Shae have to leave; they are accompanying the Japanese team on a trip to the beach. The sausage sizzle is in full swing, and the guys are lined up by the shed drinking VB and chewing on the Australian version of the hot dog. I watch Glenn Richards hurl a few more nasty pitches at the stymied Berwick hitters.
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I traveled to Australia with a simple question. Is baseball for women normal there? The answer, of course, was not so simple. “Normal,” to begin with, is a relative term, and I was measuring what I saw in Australia against what I saw in the U.S. Women’s baseball is not an outright taboo in the States, but it’s pretty close. There are a few leagues, mainly on the coasts and in the Chicago area. Whereas in Australia, women’s teams are easily integrated into the club structure, in the U.S., women’s baseball only happens when a group of extremely motivated people decide to invent a team or league, find players and coaches, fight for field time, raise money, negotiate substantially diverse skill levels among players, and struggle to maintain the interest of players who come with an infinite number of other commitments and recreational opportunities. Add to that the fact that girls historically have had to go to court to play on Little League and high school teams, and that the divide between softball and baseball in the U.S. is about as rigid as the Green Monster in Fenway Park [can you give me a little help on picturing the GM? I am ignorant of it.]. Fast-pitch softball is a wonderful sport that attracts top-flight athletes. But it is different from regulation baseball, and some girls and women prefer baseball over softball. In the U.S., it’s extremely difficult to act on that preference.
Australian women, on the other hand—at least those who live in major cities—have the opportunity to play hardball. It may take them a while to locate a club team, but once they do, they can sign up, pay the fee, and show up for regular practices and scheduled competition. In Melbourne and Sydney, teams are divided into two or more levels of play, so the problem of uneven skill levels is largely avoided. The women play on decent fields, and they have the opportunity to try out for elite teams.
Women’s baseball, merely in terms of structure and access, then, is more “normal” in Australia than it is in the U.S. That doesn’t mean that women baseballers in Australia feel that their sport receives equal treatment. Vic Brown, the sometime Springvale pitcher, made it clear to me that her home baseball club was a haven of traditional male chauvinism, a place where a bloke simply had to have a pulse to get a job coaching women’s teams. Kelly Manzie-Novotny’s experience of being banned from the under-14 team at her childhood club is not unique among the women I talked to. Simone Wearne and Shae Lilywhite, highly skilled elite players with extensive national and international baseball experience, have, perhaps, the most troubling grievance: women’s elite baseball is not afforded the same respect and material support as men’s elite baseball in Australia. Clearly women’s baseball is not entirely normalized in Australian society. That is partly a function of unequal treatment of women, but also a function of baseball’s relative obscurity Down Under. Male and female advocates are fighting not only for recognition of women’s baseball, but for recognition of baseball itself.
So the playing field is not entirely level, although a woman who wants to play ball in Australia is less likely to trip on a hidden pothole as a woman who wants to play in the U.S. The rough spots are there, but my days and nights at Springvale brought images and moments when one could quite reasonably dream of a world where women’s baseball is as normal as a sausage roll at an Australian picnic. Take for example, the walls of the Springvale clubhouse, which celebrate women’s ball at least as much as men’s ball; or the support of men like Mick Wearne, Bill Reay, and Rob Novotny, who champion women’s baseball at every turn; or even Kellie Manzie-Novotny’s skillful base running, which is treated with exactly the same enthusiasm or disdain—depending on who you’re cheering for—as you’d find for Jose Reyes’ antics on the bases at Shea Stadium.
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As the last men’s game winds down, I exchange gifts with the Wearnes. For me, a Springvale Big Cats t-shirt; for them, a Minnesota Twins deck of cards for the clubhouse. [above, it’s club house; I like it as one word, but haven’t checked a dictionary]
I stroll out on the veranda for a few more minutes at Springvale before I head for Sydney the next day. I sit down next to Ron and Anne Gardiner, a couple in their 70s. Ron’s thin, tattoo-decorated arms emerge from a worn white t-shirt that perfectly matches the mound of hair on top of his head. Anne wears a blue workshirt, her thick gray eyebrows presiding over a face that flashes from frown to wry smile when she speaks. The couple started coming down to Springvale for games 16 years ago, when their grandson played here. The grandson has moved on, but Ron and Anne still spend Sunday afternoon watching the Big Cats: “It’s free entertainment,” says Anne. We chat about George W. Bush and John Howard (the prime minister of Australia), and Ron tells me that he started playing baseball in 1948. The couple lives close to the field, and Anne mentions that there really was a spring that ran five meters underground nearby. Her face then softens as she looks out at the game, “Sometimes in the morning, when it’s foggy, it looks like a field of dreams here.” I suppose she’s using a cliché, but I’ve come to believe that Springvale does indeed nourish our dreams, whether it’s a longing for community, for gender fairness, for international understanding, or simply for carefree summer days enjoying a game of hardball, played in its purest form.
Anne Aronson
Professor
Metropolitan State University
St. Paul, MN
Anne.aronson@metrostate.edu
