Will women play professional baseball A growing group of girls is swinging for the majors

ABERDEEN, MARYLAND â€" When 12-year-old Mya Rodríguez of Phoenix, Arizona stepped up to the plate with runners in scoring position Wednesday, she wasn’t thinking about making strangers talk about her across the city of Aberdeen for the next few days. She was trying to make hard contact â€" her Arizona Peaches baseball team had a small lead in the late innings of a tight game that would determine playoff positioning in the biggest national tournament in girls’ baseball.

She took a swing and everyone nearby heard the sound of her bat. “I thought it was going to be a pop fly, because it went so high,” she said afterwards. But the ball stayed up as it travelled along the left field line, cleared the 212-foot marker on the home-run fence and disappeared into the forest beyond.

Parents of players on both teams jumped to their feet, applauding. It is not every day most of us see a 12-year-old girl who stands 4’8” hit an absolute no-doubt dinger like that. Maybe we should get used to it.

Although she normally plays with boys on a travel-league team in Arizona, Rodríguez had come to Aberdeen to join a team of girls to play against other teams of girls. The 6th Annual Baseball for All Nationals tournament held over the past week was billed as the largest girls’ baseball tournament in U.S. history, drawing nearly 600 players aged 8 to 19 on 50 teams from as far away as Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay, with players from British Columbia, Alaska, Hawaii and points in between. While some of the teams play together regularly, others are ad hoc for the tournament, and most of the players are like Rodríguez, playing on teams at home where they are the only girl.

Rodríguez expects to have to switch to girls’ softball to continue to play competitively when she gets to college â€" and hopes that by then there might be a professional league for women players. Like Major League Baseball for softball. “That’s my dream,” she said.

Generations of girls in the U.S. â€" and in Canada, and in much of the world â€" have grown up being told they should play softball instead of baseball, and that softball was the only place for them as they got older. At the tournament opening ceremonies on Monday night, Baseball for All founder Justine Siegal explained that she had founded the organization and these tournaments to try to stop that. She had become the first woman to ever coach for a Major League Baseball team, and wanted girls who wanted a life in baseball to have an easier time of it than she had.

I should admit that I wasn’t an objective outside observer at the tournament â€" my daughters Mary, 9, and Irene, 12, were playing on teams with the D.C. Force. Before we moved to the U.S., I coached an all-girls team in Toronto through T-ball and early competitive baseball, working with Dana Bookman, who founded Canadian Girls Baseball in 2016 with a similar mandate to allow girls a place to play. I’ve cheered from afar watching the Canadian organization grow from its single-playground roots in Toronto to cities in five provinces with more than 1,500 players. And I cheered seeing the American girls on the field together.

Beside Siegal at those opening ceremonies, and in front of the hundreds of players, were white-haired former professional players from the All American Girls Professional Baseball League â€" made famous in the film “A League of Their Own” â€" to throw out the opening pitches and pass on some words of encouragement to this new generation of players. “I’m hoping the day will come when we’ll see you making the national team, or maybe you’re even getting paid to play. Who can tell?” said Jeneane Lesko, who was a left-handed pitcher with the Grand Rapids Chicks in the early 1950s.

The idea of playing professionally, as Lesko once did, resonated with the young players on the field. When Siegal asked them to stand if they had ambitions to play in Major League Baseball, more than half of them jumped to their feet. Including every one of my daughter Irene’s teammates. “Didn’t you dream of playing in the big leagues?” she asked me afterwards. “Just because it might not seem as realistic doesn’t mean it’s not a dream.”

One Canadian player who played in the tournament is trying to will that dream into reality. Ten-year-old Ashlynn Jolicoeur of Whitby, Ont. became a bit of a sports-media sensation in 2019 when video of her at age 7, shagging fly balls across vast expanses of turf â€" accompanied by a story of her being told girls can’t play baseball â€" went viral and wound up on U.S. network television. When I first met Ashlynn at a Canadian tournament shortly before she became kind of famous, she told me she was already a switch hitter and she was working hard on becoming a switch pitcher.

Despite border restrictions that mean she’ll have to quarantine for two weeks when she gets home â€" therefore missing three weeks of baseball with her regular team full of boys â€" she was determined not to miss this tournament, where she joined the 12-and-under Boston Slammers team.

“I love being here with a bunch of other girls,” Ashlynn told me. She says she loves playing on a team of boys back home, too, but that there’s something special about these opportunities to meet and play with girls who share her passion. “I know all these girls are gonna inspire other girls to be playing baseball.”

“My ultimate goal is to play in the MLB,” she said, and if you’ve seen her play you wouldn’t bet against her. She says opportunities are opening up to make it seem more possible. “I feel like baseball is changing a lot. There’s still some stuff to do. But I definitely think there will be way more girls in baseball, in MLB and everything like that, in a few years.”

Plenty of recent news items demonstrating those widening possibilities for women. Late last year, Kim Ng became the first woman general manager in MLB with the Florida Marlins. During the week of the tournament, the first Major League Baseball game to feature an all-woman broadcast team was aired. One young woman playing in the Nationals tournament, 17-year-old Alexia Jorge, recently committed to play Division III baseball at a U.S. university.

A coach with the D.C. Force â€" my daughters’ organization â€" who was steered into softball in her youth now earns her living in baseball. Jen Hammond, head coach of one of the two 12-and-under Force teams, works as an assistant coach of the varsity high school team at Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia, and also as an assistant coach with the Alexandria Aces of the wood bat Cal Ripken Collegiate summer league. “I used to be a starving artist,” she joked. “Now I’m a starving baseball coach.”

She didn’t grow up expecting to work in baseball. “My dad wouldn’t let me play baseball,” she said. “I was the youngest of four and the only girl, and he was a little protective.” Hammond played softball through college, but joined a women’s baseball league as a player after she graduated. Through the women she met there, she found her way into coaching, first softball and then baseball at the high school level, and diligently sought more opportunities. Most of the players she coaches are young men. Working with a group of preteen girls beginning earlier this year was an adjustment.

“I forgot how exhausting coaching 12(-year-olds) is,” she said. “It’s basically controlled chaos at times, but the girls are wonderful, their attitudes are phenomenal. What’s been fun about these girls is I think they’re so happy to have a coach that pays attention to them, and that coaches them up. And more importantly, they’re with other girls. There’s so much energy and enthusiasm and we try to reciprocate that.”

My daughter played on the other 12-and-under D.C. Force team at the Nationals, coached by Bonnie Hoffman. On Thursday, that team played in the championship game against the New York Wonders in what turned out to be one of the more exciting games I’ve seen at any level. There were two home runs in the first inning. New York came back from a 4-0 early deficit and the game went to two extra innings. Parents of both teams were reporting heart trouble from the stress as the game went on.

In what turned out to be the final inning, the Force was down 7-6 with the bases loaded, one out, and the bottom of the batting order coming up.

Symphony Petrin-Randolph, 11, of Northern Virginia, stood at the plate, drawing two early strikes. “I honestly thought I was gonna strike out, but I swung anyway, because I didn’t want to go out like that, watching the ball,” she said. “I thought I was going to miss, but I connected with the ball.”

The ball found a hole and got though to the outfield. The tying run scored from third base, then the winning run came around from second. Then, pandemonium: girls flooded out of the dugout to tackle Symphony as parents on the sidelines jumped up and down and hugged.

“I was like, what? What’s going on?” she said.

What was going on was she had hit a walk-off double, making her team the Nationals champions. “I felt delayed because I didn’t realize I’d actually hit it” she said later.

Symphony hadn’t expected to be her team’s hero, but she took a swing anyway. Which is part of the value of the whole tournament, it seems to me. A lot of girls getting an expanded sense of what they can expect from themselves. And what they can expect from this game they love to play.

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