making her pitch

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=50a79c78-3053-4493-bf8b-7291f43b62fe&amp;from=IV2_en-us_foxsports_articles" target="_new" title="Ladies first">Video: Ladies first</a>
The last throes of February are upon us, which can only mean one thing: Major League Baseball's spring training is officially in full swing. It's a time when fans of our national pastime can get up close and personal with the sport's biggest stars, hottest prospects, and the support staff who whip them into shape. It's a time when anything is possible; there are no winners or losers, only players and coaches with an eye toward Opening Day. But yesterday, at a training facility in Goodyear, Arizona, one individual shone above all the rest when she became the first woman to throw batting practice to an MLB team.

For most of her adult life, Justine Siegal has been an outspoken supporter of girls and women who want to be involved in the world of baseball. She is the founder of Baseball For All, which seeks to empower girls to play hardball. In case you're unaware, some of the earliest baseball players were women, but by the middle of the 20th century, the sport was mostly considered off-limits for girls. In 1973, a judge opened the way for girls to play Little League ball, but Little League organizers decided that while it could no longer deny them from participating, it would encourage them to play softball, a very different sport. Today, relatively few girls get into baseball, primarily because they think they can't. Justine Siegal is trying to change that.

Siegal grew up playing baseball in Cleveland, Ohio, and dreaming of one day donning the uniform of her hometown Indians. At 13, her coach told her he didn't think girls should play baseball and suggested she quit. He clearly didn't know who he was dealing with! Siegal ignored him and continued playing for another two decades. In the late 1990s, she started Baseball For All as a way to encourage others like her who wanted to enjoy the experience of participating in our national pastime. She eventually became a coach for the men's team at Springfield College in Massachusetts. And in 2008, filmmaker Max Tash released a documentary film about her attempts to bring an all-girls' team to the Cooperstown Dreams Park Tournament, a prestigious tournament for youngsters near the National Baseball Hall of Fame. A year later, Siegal became the first woman to coach in the pros when she spent part of her summer with the Brockton Rox (pictured) of the Can-Am League. Since then, she's been seeking out and gaining an increasing amount of national support for her girls-in-baseball projects.

A few weeks ago, I found out that Siegal had been invited to throw batting practice for both the Oakland A's and her hometown team, the Cleveland Indians, at their spring training facilities in Arizona. Justine has been a great inspiration to me, a former ballplayer who's long been frustrated with the marginalization of girls and women in the baseball world, from the majors all the way down to tee ball. When I attempted to start up a girls' baseball program in New York City last year, Justine served as a valuable mentor, and she even came down to host a clinic for a number of young girls who were eager for more than they were getting with their local teams. (My project eventually stalled, but I'm hopeful that girls in the NY area will soon have a new baseball outlet thanks to a new initiative, led by Justine, that partners players with various RBI Baseball teams in cities around the country.) So I was thrilled to hear the news about her Major League assignment, and I enjoyed reading about her preparation for the big event. I was also not surprised to learn that Justine would be dedicating her outing to the late Christina-Taylor Green, the youngest victim in last month's tragic Tucson shooting spree. Green had been a second-baseman on her Little League team, and, like Justine before her, had hoped to break the so-called "grass ceiling" by becoming the first woman to play in the majors.

If you'd like to know how it went, Glenn Swain in The New York Times and Tim Brown at Yahoo! Sports have good recaps of yesterday's historic session. And I highly recommend Justine's own stirring posts relating to the event on her new blog, Justine's Baseball Journey. Her writings are the kind of thing I wish I'd had available to me growing up, when coaches, players, and parents were telling me in ways both subtle and explicit that baseball is for boys. So if you know of a girl or woman who could use some baseball inspiration, please pass it on! You can also follow Justine on Twitter.

Anyway, congrats on your awesome accomplishment, Justine! Can't wait to see what's next. ∞

score one for the girls: sylvia pressler (1934 - 2010)

It was a bright afternoon in May of 1992, and I was two strikes down. Sixty feet away, the opposing pitcher, a scruffy kid of 14 or 15, stared intently into his catcher's mitt and tried to remember that I was just another batter before hurling a fastball in my direction. As soon as I caught the ball in my sights, I knew it was going places.

Before long I was on second base, having knocked in the go-ahead run for my team. It would be one of two run-scoring hits I'd have that day, my best as a member of the local Babe Ruth Little League that I was the first girl to ever play in. My mother would later recall how she'd overheard several parents complaining that I was trying to show up their sons, that I was embarrassing them, that I didn't belong there. They wondered, a little too loudly for my mom's taste, what I was trying to prove.

Thing is, I wasn't trying to prove anything; I just wanted to play baseball. And I might never have had the opportunity to help my team that day had it not been for a woman named Sylvia Pressler, who died on Monday at the age of 75.

I was but a glimmer in my parents' eyes back in 1973, but that year a 12-year-old girl named Maria Pepe pitched three games for her Little League team in Hoboken, New Jersey. Unfortunately, while women had participated in our national pastime since the very birth of the game in the mid-1800s, and had even boasted their own professional baseball league during the 1940s and 50s, girls growing up in the 60s and 70s were generally not welcome in the game of baseball. So when the national Little League Baseball organization heard about Pepe, they threatened to revoke the charter of her local league. In response, the National Organization for Women stepped in and filed a lawsuit on Pepe's behalf.

The case was heard by New York City native Sylvia Pressler, who in 1973 was a lawyer for New Jersey's Division on Civil Rights, the state body set up to hear such cases at the time. A legal trailblazer, Pressler had earned a law degree from Rutgers School of Law thirteen years earlier at a time when female lawyers were virtually unheard of.

In her decision on the Little League case, Pressler ruled in favor of Pepe and the National Organization for Women, arguing that Little League's no-girls policy violated state and federal anti-discrimination laws. "The institution of Little League is as American as the hot dog and apple pie," she stated in her opinion. "There is no reason why that part of Americana should be withheld from girls."

After losing an appeal, Little League Baseball amended its rules the following year and in fact decided to create an entire program for girls. Sadly, though, the girls' program was not for baseball but for softball—which, as anyone who's ever played the two knows all too well, is a very different game. Today, although it's still illegal to disallow girls from playing on Little League baseball teams, the reality is that most girls don't even consider baseball as an option anymore. This has been a bitter twist of fate for someone who thought for sure progress would have spun in the other direction—more girls playing baseball—in the 18 years since her last season of Little League!

Pressler made national headlines following the Little League decision but would go on to hear much more challenging cases after she became a judge. Four years after her landmark ruling, she became only the second woman appointed to judge on the Appellate Division for the state of New Jersey. And in 1997, she was the first woman to be named as the division's presiding judge, a position she held until her retirement in 2004.

In case you were wondering, we won the game that spring afternoon in '92. And in his victory speech to the team, our coach presented me with the game ball for my achievements at the plate and in the field. It was one of my proudest baseball moments, and I still cherish that worn-out ball—as well as the shiny blue trophy I earned after our team went on to win the league championship that season. Baseball has always been in my blood, but thanks to Sylvia Pressler, I've known what it's like to play the most American of sports. I thank her for that. ∞

olympic dreams

While we're on the topic of women's baseball, I was floored this week to discover that the International Baseball Federation is going to add women's baseball to their bid to get the sport reinstated for the 2016 Olympic Games. Apparently the move comes after a deal could not be reached between the main baseball and women's softball organizations.

I'm personally thrilled at the prospect of seeing women playing baseball on the Olympic stage. If it's not already obvious, hardball is much different from softball in many ways. So it's great to see that women and girls may not always have to accept the softball option as a "comparable" sport. Despite the existence of plenty of independent leagues around the U.S., as well as an international-level tournament team, there isn't one cohesive program similar to the well-oiled machine that exists for boys and young men who aspire to play at a high level. Having the sport as an Olympic game would certainly help make women's baseball more popular and well-established.

It also makes financial and competitive sense for the International Olympic Committee to include women's baseball over women's softball. The United States women's softball program has absolutely dominated in Olympic play, which makes the sport a lot less interesting to watch. And if host cities have to build or procure the use of one baseball stadium instead of one baseball stadium and one softball stadium, it makes things a lot cheaper, too.

Of course, there's still a long way to go before either women's or men's baseball gets added to the current Olympic program; the decision will be made in October, and there are a number of other sports putting in bids to be added. (Honestly, if squash gets in, I will be almost as excited.) But I'm cautiously optimistic that this might actually happen sooner than pigs might fly, which, suffice it to say, is a departure from my previous assumptions. By the way, if you're on Facebook, you can join this group to voice your support. ∞

making the call

We are reaching a confluence of sorts, as the tail end of Women's History month meets with the start of the Major League baseball season. To that end, I wanted to take a moment to write about a topic not often covered in the blogosphere, and that is the place of female officials in major professional sports.

Today, there is a grand total of one woman who calls games at the highest level of her sport. That woman is Violet Palmer (pictured, below), who is a referee for both the NBA and the WNBA. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is it. Around the world, we have female prime ministers, secretaries of state, space shuttle commanders, and even women in major military positions, but women calling pro sports games? Of course not.

I'm not even going to get into the issue of parity for female athletes. That's a whole other ballgame, the discussion of which I'll save for another day (although I did notice, thanks to a tip from @TuckerCenter, that mascots got more play than women in this year's NCAA hoops SI cover...just sayin'). No, at issue in this post is why women officials have been categorically denied entry into the apex of professional sports in America. It is entirely flabbergasting to understand why we as a society hold someone like Jackie Robinson to almost godlike status, and yet we do nothing to promote the inclusion of other minorities—especially women—in the sports world. Of course, I'm talking mostly about sports in which women don't actually get to play; tennis has quite a few female umpires, as does the WNBA and other smaller market sports in which women get to both play and officiate (although salaries for the women who do participate in these are generally laughable). But even for the NBA, which finally let two women into the highest officiating level (in addition to Palmer, a woman named Dee Kantner saw some time on the sidelines), it's still just two. Ever. Why?

I've come to believe that the main answer is that men simply aren't cool with the idea of women being a part of the men's professional sporting world, no matter how talented a female official might be. I mean, let's face it, a lot of men are just uncomfortable with the idea of women invading their all-boys club. I'm guessing that part of it is that they simply don't want to admit that a woman can do as competent a job in officiating as a man. But more to the point, I think a lot of guys are still in cave-man mode, in that they feel like women shouldn't have access to positions of power that they have traditionally always enjoyed. But wait, what century are we in again?

Getting back to baseball, I wanted to draw your attention to the work of a friend of mine, an umpire who has been officiating in the lower levels of pro ball for quite a few years now. Perry Barber is one of the few women who has not taken no for an answer. She earned her stripes, and has gone on to call minor league games as well as spring training games for various major league teams (that's her in the picture up top). Anyway, as you can read for yourself in this pointed article about the release of minor league umpire Ria Cortesio a couple of years ago, Barber contends that the baseball establishment has been espousing an unwritten rule that a woman can only go so far in the umpiring ranks, despite the grand show that they may put on to suggest that the denial of promotion to female umpires is strictly merit-based. It's frankly pretty sickening to think about the lengths people will go to to deny women a shot at participating in the officiating of our national pastime at the sport's highest level. Guiltiest of all may be the officials themselves, who, in many cases, are loath to give up valuable positions within their ranks to a bunch of broads. Yet why is this form of job discrimination tolerated any more than in any other employment sector in this country?

Thankfully, some organizations, such as the Tucker Center out of the University of Minnesota, are helping to bring such issues of equality in the sports world to light. But for things to really change in the officiating realm, it's going to require that owners and executives of the the major sports leagues actually force officials to let women into their ranks—which isn't going to happen without a lot of noise from the us, the consumers of their highly lucrative products. So if you have the opportunity, go out and make your voice heard. Write letters, get your favorite teams on the phone. To be sure, I'm not suggesting we need to call for 50-50 parity right away; after all, there are relatively few women who even want to become pro officials right now. But women and girls who want to officiate need to see that they have a place in pro sports. Once that happens, I guarantee you that they'll take the ball and run with it, as they well should have the right to do. ∞