When I was a little girl, Sandy Koufax was considered the best pitcher on earth. I had not seen Sandy on TV; I had only heard the talk of her greatness. She inspired the first notion I'd ever had about what I wanted to be when I grew up. A Major League pitcher.
So, I sketched a square in chalk on the brick wall of the apartment building next to our house and started practice pitching in it with a rubber ball. It got so that I was a pretty good aim and could easily pitch the ball inside the box. All the while I would imagine I was Sandy. "Here comes the wind-up... and the pitch..." my announcer brain would say. I wasn't throwing curves or sliders or change-ups. I didn't know what it meant to put something on a ball. I just took aim and threw it.
I kept my secret that I was heading for Major League baseball to myself until one day I told my brother that I was going to grow up to be Sandy Koufax. He told me that would never happen because I was a girl, and girls could not play baseball. He told me Koufax was man. I couldn't believe it. I'd never heard of a boy named Sandy much less a man named Sandy. I looked for pictures of Koufax and found out my brother was right. I was devastated. Girls could never go to the Majors.
Throughout my young life I loved baseball anyway and kept my heartache to myself. There were no little leagues for girls back then, and no one to encourage me to play the game. There were no baseball coaches to teach me how to throw a cutter, though what was the point if I could never be world famous at it? Still, I was never offered to play the game and enjoy it. Instead I watched the Cubs on our black and white TV, when it was working, with my dad.
In fact, it was baseball that bonded me to my father. Sitting with my dad in silence and watching a game made me feel close to him and allowed us to root for something together. And while the game played he explained to me its finer features. My whole family watched the Cubs, and in Chicago baseball and football were what gave us an identity. Our teams represented the dreams we could not fulfill ourselves, and gave us a chance to live out our desires through the men who made it to the field as the best.
I didn't care that it was men either, because it was male athletes who gave me my first taste of what it meant to achieve something special. Then, much later, along came Billy Jean King, and Navratilova, and Evert, and Graff and the world of athletic achievement opened up for me and other girls. It gave us something real to dream about when it came to sports. Yes, we can play baseball and basketball and even football, but tennis is a female sport, in my view, and far more suited for women than it is to men who thrash at the ball, erasing the game's elegance. And tennis paid women big. It was King and Navratilova who spoke up about inequity in pay for women. The Williams sisters have since proven to girls that tennis is something to aspire to and make money at.
Sports are aggressive and good for us, as females, and we are embracing that now. We need to experience healthy competition that has nothing do with our looks or how fast we can shake our booties. Sports takes you out of the skinny girl mentality, out of the sexual object category, and allows you to embrace yourself without self-consciousness and own who you are. That does not make us less of a woman. It makes us more.
Baseball as my career choice was not feasible. The best female players can't compete against the best men and to that I take serious heed. But that does not mean there are no great female ball players, and if they can't make big bucks playing it, they should be umpires and announcers in big time pro sports. We are mercilessly discriminated against in that department. I'm tired of the models they hire to talk to the players on the sidelines. I'm not saying they aren't knowledgeable or that they are particularly unqualified, but they don't seem to speak from athletic experience. And none of them have crew cuts.
Finally, a woman is in the booth on ESPN who is an athlete, and who talks the talk better than most of the lackluster men that sit in the booths collecting huge paychecks. Could TBS had called a worse game than the Cubs against the Pirates? The tension of the game played out even on HD TV and yet the guys in the booth didn't know it. There is no excuse for not hiring female athletes who can bust a few chops up there. None other than fear on the part of the men who dominate the microphones is holding us back. It's a man's sport on the field, but it belongs to everybody who knows the game and loves it off the field. Maybe these announcers haven't seen how many women are in the stands or playing the game in smaller fields where they act as umpires and coaches.
I love baseball but stopped watching it a few years back when the Cubs broke my heart. When you love a team you have to accept the consequences and the consequences hurt. They hurt my family members, too. After my father died it became too painful to follow them anyway. The Cubs were called lovable losers and I wanted no part of that. My role models changed once I discovered Lily Tomlin. She made my dream of becoming a performer come alive the same way Sandy had done for me for baseball, only I saw no roadblocks ahead. Lily became my best-pitcher-on-the-planet and I credit her for inspiring me in a big-league way.
So for years I had only peeked in on the Cubs to see if they were sleeping. But this season I got wind from my brother Brian that we were something special this year. I didn't want to believe it but then I tuned it one night to see Jake Arrietta, the Cub's ace. His pitching dazzled me, along with young farm club hitters and defensive playmakers. The Cubs have beat the Pirates and took one game from the Cards so far and they have a chance to take it all.
Suddenly my dad has risen from the dead. And just as suddenly all of those feelings came flooding back to me: my disappointment that I couldn't play in the majors, and even my disappointment that I was a girl. But had I not gone on the to majors when I landed Saturday Night Live? That was pretty much a man's territory when I arrived there, but it has changed. So should baseball.
I've got baseball fever this year, and it's running high. I love it, but we need some women on the field as umpires; women in the booth as announcers. Girls are now playing baseball and soccer all of their young lives. We know the game up close and persona. No matter how beefy the beefiest woman is, she is not going to out-beef the beefiest man. I get that. She's not gonna hit the ball as far as Schwarber hit it in the game against Pittsburg, nor should she have to.
Women should should hired as legitimate announcers and umpires in the majors. And I am not talking about sideline eye candy. The women who know the sport and have played it and watched it all of their lives deserve a slice of the beef. Meanwhile, I will be watching post-season baseball. I would'a called that home run Schwarber hit off Cole a hell of a lot better than the guys in the booth did. They sounded like there were knitting as the called the hand. That home run was a show stopper. They missed that. It sucked all the air out of the ballpark as it sailed toward the river. It was four-hundred and forty-nine feet of pure passion from a team once dubbed lovable losers. And the guys in the booth missed the metaphor. Big time.
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