There's No Crying Foul in Baseball

I went home last weekend, and I was excited for a chance to snuggle my cat, cook with my mom, and engage in the endless after dinner conversations my family manages so frequently to have — you know, the kind where your butt gets sore from sitting still and you go for thirds and then fourths because you’ve just had that much time to digest, but you can’t quite bring yourself to say, “Okay, that’s enough dissecting of Dr. Who/Beatles’ rockband/the decline of rationality in modern political thought.”

This weekend our most constant topic was sports. More specifically, the Yankee-Rangers playoff series, although we also spent a fair bit of time on football as well, since we went to see the Colts play the Redskins (my first NFL game.)

Internet, I am ashamed to admit to you that before I arrived home, I did not remember that the Yankees were playing the Rangers this weekend. I did not remember that they were playing anyone this weekend. I did not remember that it was the playoffs. I did not remember that the baseball season was still going on.

Things have not always been this way.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with sports. I played them constantly - one spring I played on five different teams: two soccer, two softball, and one baseball - at all levels of competitiveness. (Our basketball team was known to go weeks at a time without scoring. Our basketball team. But my softball teams frequently won tournaments and my first trip to D.C. was to go to my league’s nationals.) As if that wasn’t enough, I watched sports constantly too. I fell in love with the 1996 New York Yankees. My family bought season tickets, and my sister and I pasted newspaper clippings all over our bedroom walls. In the off-season we distracted ourselves with college basketball and, when that wasn’t enough, worked our way through Ken Burns’ 9 part (now 10 part!) baseball documentary.

When I tell people about my former sports fanaticism, they sometimes seem surprised. After all, I am an unabashed nerd, and the stereotypes of the “nerd” and “jock” seem pretty exclusive. The latter stuffs the former into their locker until, one day, when they’re all grown up, the former hires the latter to drive their limo. That’s the way the world works, right? Then again, the stereotypes of “nerd” and “female” are pretty exclusive, too, so who cares about stereotypes?

At my first football game the other night, I was struck by how intricate the play was. I’d always thought of football as this mindless, violent game of grunting and concussions. Instead, I watched Peyton Manning, arguably the most cerebral quarterback the game has ever known, think his way past the opposing team. He would wait until the last second to call his plays, based on how the defense was lining up. When he was on the sidelines, he spent his time watching aerial replays from the game, trying to spot holes in the defense and generate probabilities of how they would try to defend him in the future.

Of course, if football is surprisingly intellectual, baseball is a nerd’s dream. Do you bring your shortstop in to defend against the infield hit? Do you go to the bullpen early in the game and tire them out for the next day? Do you try to get into a rundown at second so the guy at third can sneak home? Your inside-out switch-hitter bats better from the left but there’s a short porch in right but the wind’s blowing left but the pitcher throws low and away. This kind of analysis is the heart and soul of baseball, and classics like Bill James’ baseball history books and Michael Lewis’ Moneyball bring a delightful new meaning to the term “overthinking it”.

The obsessiveness of a fantasy baseball player rivals that of a World of Warcrafter. Endless hours on the computer looking up stats, constantly checking for new results, always full of regret - “I should have traded that guy! I knew he’d get injured, he hasn’t played a full season yet!”

As a nerd, I feel right at home in the sports community.

As a woman, I do not.

I don’t know when I started feeling alienated. It may have started, ironically, with the 1999 Women’s World Cup - the most attended women’s sporting event in history. Every girl on my soccer team had a favorite player - Mia Hamm, Briana Scurry, Michelle Akers, Brandi Chastain, Kristine Lilly. Chastain’s game-winning penalty kick, after a nerve-destroying double overtime, was as electrifying to me as any other win, before or since. And it was women playing. Women winning.

After that, looking around my beloved baseball and seeing not a single woman’s face was disheartening. In the U.S., no one watches soccer - men or women’s. But in baseball, men are national heroes, they are multi-millionaires. They are adults getting paid to play the game they love, and they are all men. The country’s best women players have to work part-time to support their love of the game.

The argument that women are not physically able to compete with men falls flat with me. Sure, there may never be a female Barry Bonds - but what about a female Ichiro Suzuki? At 5’10” and 125 lbs, he hardly towers over the average woman, but his smart, scrappy style made him a wild success - a millionaire, a probable Hall of Famer, and a household name. He’s not the only baseball player whose relied on brains and talent instead of brute strength: there’s Hall of Famer Phil Rizzuto and modern-day MVPs Dustin Pedroia and Jimmy Rollins, just to name a few.

I knew girls who would have played baseball professionally, if they could have. I don’t think I ever would have pursued that path - I don’t think I could have, I was never good enough - but I saw girls who could throw a bullet home from deep in the outfield, who could hit 70, 80 mph pitches at thirteen years old, who loved to play and hated to lose as much as any major leaguer. And it breaks my heart to know that not one of them ever had a chance to live that particular american dream. None of them even had hope that they could.

And so I don’t watch major league baseball anymore. It just makes me too sad. Sad, and a little angry.

Speaking of anger, the football game was an exercise in self-control. I was already primed to dislike the atmsophere, given the home team’s racist name and mascot. The addition of the Redskins’ cheerleaders — dressed in bikini-like outfits, dancing in unison, winking seductively over the jumbotron - made me accutely aware of my womanly role in this culture: to support others, to be sexually available, to push my body to incredible limits not in order to perform or compete but for the appreciate of others. As satisfying as the football game was on an intellectual level, I can’t imagine ever investing myself in this sport and community.

For all the advances made under Title IX, and the huge numbers of girls participating in youth sports leagues, professional sports remains almost exclusively male, with little cultural critique of that fact. There are, however, alternatives. Over the next year, I plan/promise to go to at least one WNBA game, one derby match, and one women’s baseball or soccer game each. Here are some links if you want to find a woman’s sports team near your city:

- WNBA (basketball) - WFTDA (roller derby) - WPS (soccer)

Right now, there doesn’t seem to be too much “geeky” enthusiasm for these teams - probably a corrolary of the lack of enthusiasm in general - but I’m hoping that as I explore these communities I’ll discover it - or at least, a place for it to grow. Women’s teams don’t just deserve stadiums full of fans, halls of fame, and money and prestige equivalent to their male counterparts - they also deserve geeking out over them. They deserve hours long after dinner discussions, armchair quarterbacking, books and blog posts and endless analysis.

Maybe some day they’ll get it.