Mo’ne Davis, the 13-year-old Little League dynamo with a 70-mph pitch heard ’round the world — at least, until her team, the Taney Dragons, were eliminated from the finals on Thursday — was repeatedly asked what she wants to be when she grows up.
Her answer: point guard for the WNBA.
“Imagine a 13-year-old boy who’s as good as she is, who’s gotten the recognition that she has, saying he’s not interested in going into baseball,” says Jennifer Ring, author of “Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball,” who’s dismayed that the now nationally known teen athlete doesn’t see Major League Baseball as an option or even a dream.
Mo’ne Davis became the first girl to win a Little League World Series game, even scoring the cover of Sports Illustrated.Photo: Sports Illustrated
“That the first Little Leaguer on the cover of Sports Illustrated is an African-American girl is amazing. She’s breaking all kinds of barriers. And she still, in her head, is saying, ‘I can’t proceed with baseball.’ ”
Davis has no obligation to keep on pitching, obviously. But it’s worth asking: If not her, whom? Why has there never been a woman in the major leagues?
The boilerplate answers can be found in coverage of Davis’ remarkable feats this year, immediately following raves about how natural a ballplayer sheis.
Sure. But she’s playing against boys who haven’t hit puberty yet. She won’t be a match for them when they do. Women can’t throw long enough, run fast enough, hit hard enough to play alongside men. No woman could ever hope to compete on a pro level; it’s a male game, and always will be.
“It’s a really old argument. I’m surprised it’s still around,” says Julie Croteau, the first woman to play men’s NCAA baseball. “It seems like a really weak argument, too, with all the things women have accomplished in sports.”
Mo’ne DavisPhoto: AP
Croteau is all too familiar with those arguments; they were used against her in 1988, when she and her family sued her high school for her right to play on the boys’ varsity baseball team. She lost, but went on to play with the men at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and, eventually, for the women’s pro team the Colorado Silver Bullets and in the MLB-sanctioned Hawaiian Winter Baseball League. Her glove is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Player Julie Croteau squared off against the guys in college.
The path to a female major-league player, says Croteau, is making sure girls like Davis, and Croteau before her, have a lot more high-profile female company out on the field.
“We need critical mass,” she says. “That happened when you had a league where all African-American players could play in the major leagues. I don’t think we need a female baseball league, but we do need to have that many girls playing.”
Toni Stone shortstop for the Indianapolis Clowns of the National Negro Leagues works out in a photograph around 1950 in Indianapolis, Indiana.Photo: Getty Images
The Negro League had its own female trailblazer: Toni Stone, the first of three women to play in the league over its 40-year history.
“Baseball historians call her the female Jackie Robinson, the best baseball player you’ve never heard of,” says Martha Ackmann, author of “Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone.” “She played against all the greats: Willie Mays, Ernie Banks. At one time in 1953 she was batting fourth in the league.”
But her reception among both her teammates and the public was hardly reflective of her talent.
“She got everything from jeers from the crowd, to her own fellow players trying to intentionally sabotage her so she’d get injured,” Ackmann says. “When the tour bus would pull up at a boardinghouse for the night, the proprietor would take a look at this one woman getting off the bus and make the assumption that she was a prostitute. She was directed to the nearest bordello.”
Another female Negro League player, pitcher Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, first met Mo’ne Davis in 2012. At the time, the already-buzzworthy tween was playing for the Anderson Monarchs in Philadelphia.
“I predict that she’s going to be the first lady in the major league,” said the 78-year-old Johnson, sitting beside Davis in the Little League dugout. Johnson was in the stands earlier this month to delightedly watch Davis throw her history-making shutout game at the Little League World Series opener in Williamsport, Pa.
Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, the first woman to pitch in the Negro League, watches Mo’ne Davis pitch during a baseball game against TennesseePhoto: AP
Johnson’s adorable-sounding nickname is derived from the same naysaying that dogs girls in baseball today: “How do you expect to get anybody out? You’re not as big as a peanut.”
Does size matter? Sure, says baseball and softball coach Mark Gola, author of “The Five-Tool Player: Become the Total Package that Pro and College Baseball Scouts Want.”
“It can become difficult once you get to teen years and adulthood, where women tend to stop growing and men continue,” he says. “Size is an advantage in any sport. If she continues growing, it’s possible — but she may flatline. She may not grow anymore. She may always throw 70 mph.”
Which is great for a 13-year-old; not so much for a college or pro player.
“If you take the distance back to 50 feet, which is where college players throw from, 70 becomes well below average. Major-league players are throwing 90 mph; college players, 85. So that 70 is not going to be as fearsome.”
Philadelphia’s Mo’ne Davis delivers in the first inning against Nashville’s Robert Hassell III during a baseball game in United U.S. pool play at the Little League World Series tournament in South Williamsport, Pa.Photo: AP
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be women who don’t fit into their gender’s size and strength averages (four words: Serena and Venus Williams). Besides, says Ring, “baseball is not the sort of sport where size is definitive. It’s not like football. I think it’s not out of the question that women can play with men, and that athletic women, if you let them be athletes, could actually hold their own with men in high school, college and professional baseball. But nobody wants to believe that.”
A young fan shows her support of Philadelphia’s Mo’ne Davis after the team’s 4-0 win over Nashville.Photo: AP
For all the talk of why women probably can’t hack it in the majors, a simple question remains: Why not let them try? There is no rule that says women cannot play in the major leagues.
Nevertheless, girls begin to be pressured to move out of baseball right after Little League; softball is where the opportunities, the cultural acceptance and most importantly the scholarships are.
Philadelphia fan Jake Russo holds a sign in support of Mo’ne Davis.Photo: AP
It’s a schism that dates back to baseball’s beginnings and has its origins more in cultural identity than athleticism, says Ring.
“There’s an American phobia of mixing the sexes in sports, and in baseball in particular,” the author says. “Because baseball is so associated with American identity; at the turn of the century it was claimed as a manly sport. Softball came along soon after, invented by men who wanted to play baseball indoors in winter — but because it was a softer ball, and more contained than baseball, it got given to girls as a substitute for baseball.”
Still, there have always been celebrated female baseball players; 1930s minor league pitcher Jackie Mitchell is famous for striking out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in succession, evoking this familiar-sounding rant from Ruth post-game:
“I don’t know what’s going to happen if they begin to let women in baseball. Of course, they will never make good. Why? Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play ball every day.”
But that sentiment wasn’t just coming from Ruth.
“Everyone put her down, or said it was a publicity stunt,” says Ring. “It actually caused the commissioner of baseball to ban women from Major League Baseball.”
The ban was nullified in 1992, yet Major League Baseball still hasn’t seen a woman in its ranks. What’s more, women who move into softball have for years been retrained to hit like, well, girls — which irks coaches like Gola.
“Coaches from a previous era would say, ‘Swing more like a softball player,’ and it would drive me crazy — you want to explain to me why you wouldn’t want to swing with optimal bat speed and strength, if you have the athletic wherewithal to do it?
“But they’re starting to coach the same mechanics and approach as male teenagers, and I think that’s progress. You can’t tell me they don’t have the same athleticism or potential as boys.”
To pre-emptively tell all women they’ll never be able to break into the major leagues is B.S., Ring says. “To make that proclamation, when you’ve systematically kept girls and women out of the sport, is a political statement, or maybe a wish. It’s not a statement of fact.
“There is no evidence that they can’t. Take Tamara Holmes, for example — she plays on the USA national team, and she’s played on the Colorado Silver Bullets. She’s a 40-year-old firefighter, and she hits 360-foot home runs. She hits from the right and left side. Her teammates say she’s got as much ‘pop’ as any man.”
Mo’ne Davis, as talented as she is, is not the only one out there striking out the boys.
“There’s always the temptation to make a player an exception, when in fact there are a lot of girls playing baseball,” Croteau says. “I truly believe that the woman who will play in the major leagues is alive today. I think we’re going to see her in my lifetime.”