The Other Man: Equality For Women Has Been Shot With Silver Bullets

Twelve years ago this month, one of the world’s grand experiments ended in heartbreaking failure.

Even today, anyone studying gender inequality would do well to look at the vast gap in women’s earning potential and relative ability to succeed that has been created in the wake of this phenomenon’s disappearance.

I’m talking, of course, about the women’s baseball team, the Colorado Silver Bullets. After four fledgling seasons as the first female baseball organization since the 1950s, the team found itself without a sponsor and forced to fold before the 1998 season.

The four years had shown signs of improvement. Starting as a traveling team facing (obviously) all-male semipro, amateur and minor league squads, by 1997 the women had found both a hometown in Albany, Georgia, and their first winning record (23-22).

Now, I know what you’re thinking — there’s already a women’s basketball league. But I’m going to laugh at any argument that the NBA even wants to keep its red-headed female stepchildren on equal footing with the men.

Look at salaries alone: WNBA teams have a salary cap of $775,000 this year. That’s per team, and it’s a small fraction of the (M)NBA’s average salary per player. And don’t get me started on the equalizing power of the Lingerie Bowl.

I think there’s something fatalistic about expecting women’s basketball and football teams to reach parity with the far-more-entrenched men’s teams. At the risk of offending the second-wavers, there’s a size element in most aspects of these two sports that strongly favor men.

But baseball doesn’t have that problem, at least not to the same degree. Women’s fastpitch softball at the collegiate and Olympic levels is one of the toughest sports on Earth — a softball pitched at 70-75 mph, as some high-level players can do, requires the same miniscule reaction time as the fastest professional balls pitched in the men’s game.

And women’s baseball has a long history in America, culminating in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League from 1943-54. They wore skirts and took finishing-school lessons, but they competed directly with the men’s teams in their Midwestern sphere of influence and not just as a sideshow attraction.

You know them more as the inspiration for the film A League of Their Own, itself responsible for a couple of inane Madonna songs and the feminist manifesto, “There’s no crying in baseball.”

Some of these women were clearly talented enough to play baseball with the boys. In the five decades or so before the AAGPBL came around, women’s teams were common in most major cities. Sometimes a player from one of these teams would get signed to play with the boys.

The height, and the nadir, of this history came with Jackie Mitchell, a seventeen-year-old girl who caught the attention of Chattanooga Lookouts owner Joe Engel while playing for a women’s team in the same city. Taking the mound for the men’s pro team on April 2, 1931 for an exhibition game against the formidable New York Yankees, she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in succession.

The feat caused an unbelievable stir as observers wondered if Jackie would one day make her case to be promoted to the big game (remember, she was only 17 at the time, and had almost no experience on the field). The Lookouts were a AA minor league team, only a step or two from the majors.

But the commissioner of men’s baseball at the time, Kenesaw Mountain Landis — a rather unabashed sexist and racist, who ruled all of professional baseball with an iron fist — wouldn’t have women in his league. He almost immediately voided Jackie’s contract, declaring that professional ball was “too strenuous” for women.

The ban sat there entirely by decree until some women in the AAGPBL and elsewhere were once again knocking on the door of the men’s game in the early 1950s. So major league baseball decided to make the ban official in June 1952. The women’s teams died out quickly after that — and why wouldn’t they? Once the women’s game was entrenched firmly as a carnival attraction instead of a real, professional sport, most interested parties turned their attention to the game that mattered.

The ban was lifted in 1992 for a publicity stunt (the general manager of the White Sox drafted his daughter to the team, but she didn’t sign). Almost immediately, plans for the Silver Bullets were underway. We know how that ended. A pitcher named Ila Borders played in low-level men’s minor leagues for a few years in the late ’90s, not very well.

Just a few weeks ago, a Japanese pitcher named Eri Yoshida was signed to play for a low-level, independent minor league in North America, the Golden Baseball League. The five-foot, 114-pound eighteen year old pitched with some success in a Japanese league last year (and of course she’s only 18, meaning with careful training she could advance). She’s the first woman to test the waters since Borders retired.

Good luck. Three billion people are counting on you.

But it’s clear to me, as I hope it’s clear to you by now, that women would have been in the major leagues decades ago if the sexism hadn’t been so strong.

There are women with major league talent living right now around the world. Some may be playing softball or basketball, in all-female leagues, while others are working as doctors and lawyers and prostitutes because their playing options ended after high school (or maybe college).

One day there will almost definitely be a talented woman in the Show — and the men involved will look really stupid, unless they start encouraging women to try out for the pro game now.

On the other hand, women could try to corner the market on whackbat: