Good Luck

            You can tell spring is in the air because all Clare can do is talk baseball and softball.  There’s the White Sox, college games on ESPN (Joe Girardi popped up at an NU softball game in Florida!), and a story that took us both back s good fifteen years or more.

 

            Again, with great minds thinking alike, the two of us had read this on-line piece independently of the other.  The one difference was that I hesitated to forward it to my daughter, who didn’t think twice about sending it to me.  The story concerns the Humboldt Park Gators, a recently-formed youth baseball team in Chicago, for girls ten to twelve years old.

 

            The point of the piece was girl power, which I truly hope they have in the middle of the lineup.  But the story needed more detail, as in what kind of league they play in; my guess is Pony, given that it was mentioned their season will end in mid-July just like it did for Clare, but maybe not.  In any case, I have my fingers crossed for a follow up.

 

            Many of the girl players mentioned the isolation they felt playing on boy-dominated teams.  Amen to that.  Clare was the only girl for five years of baseball.  The girl players said the boys were alright, in which case things must’ve changed for the better, however incrementally.

 

Clare was with the same group of boys for four years; they tolerated her presence.  The other year, for reasons I’ve never figured out, she was put on another team, where a teammate told her how “you suck” and an opposing player shook her hand after one game and said, “Nice game, bitch.”  That’s the kind of stuff you don’t want another generation of female baseball players to go through.

 

            I loved watching my daughter play baseball, hit for power, and hold her own in a homerun-hitting contest where many if not most of the participants were from travel ball.  A team like the Gators would’ve been nice.  I can only hope there’ll be more of them before too long.