Pen-Elayne on the Web

Talkin’ Baseball, Part 1

While it may be difficult to trace the origin of sports, and theories abound in tons of sports history classes as to whether its initial purpose was sacred in nature, practical (as training for hunting or combat), or lay in a philosophical decision to give young and fit people (mostly men, of course, the legend of Atalanta’s race notwithstanding) something on which to expend energy and foster rivalries as an alternative to war and other destructive activities, sports is still often seen as a war metaphor. And while it’s become globally commodified and highly valued among many cultures and classes, to this day the world of big-money, big league sports is pretty gender-stratified. Even as the concept of gender equity (as for example in education, codified in the US as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, banning sex discrimination at any educational institution receiving federal funds) is under attack, gender integration is almost unheard of. Thanks to courageous girls like Maria Pepe and Carolyn King, NOW successfully sued in 1974 to gender-integrate baseball at the Little League level (sorry, the case isn’t yet available in digital format), and now there are about 50,000 girls now officially playing each season.

But few major sports are gender-integrated at the professional level (things like Canadian boxing are exceptions rather than the rule), and from Pam Postema to Ria Cortesio even women umpires still haven’t made it past the minor league level. Even when you talk about equity, the glory days of the AAGPBL are long past; the advancement of women’s baseball leagues, in the US, Canada and internationally, has been stymied by the emphasis on women’s softball, and support for women’s professional sports (particularly by women!) tends to be sporadic.

Even in the blogosphere, some good weblogs about baseball include Aaron Gleeman's Baseball Blog, David Pinto’s Baseball Musings, John Perricone’s Only Baseball Matters, Alex Belth’s Bronx Banter, Edward Cossette’s Bambino’s Curse, Diary of a Red Sox Fan, Travis Nelson’s Boy of Summer and Jay Jaffe’s Futility Infielder, to name a very few in a fast field, but not a lot of women seem to blog about baseball; when I did a Google search on “blogs by women” + “baseball” I found two entries of my own among the 23 pages of links, so that to me indicates a real dearth. And even though the average baseball stadium crowd is 46 percent female, women just don’t seem to be fanatic about baseball in the same way men are. I think it’s the emphasis on stats that turns off many women. Baseball fandom reminds me a lot of comics fandom, in that by and large women readers are likelier to have more interest in the stories and characterization than in the statistics and minutiae that make up a fictional universe’s continuity.

So what draws a pacifist feminist like me to this sport every spring like clockwork? Looks like we’ll all have to wait for Part 2 for the answers to that one.