Crying in Baseball with Julie Kliegman

Summary

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You're Wrong About: "Crying in Baseball with Julie Kliegman"

Host: Sarah Marshall
Guest: Julie Kliegman (author, "Finding Renee Richards")
Release Date: June 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this engaging and heartfelt episode, Sarah Marshall welcomes sports journalist and author Julie Kliegman to discuss the misunderstood and under-told history of women in baseball. Through personal stories, pop culture analysis (especially the film A League of Their Own), and a critical look at the gendered structures of American sports, the conversation explores how narratives around women's participation in baseball have been shaped, suppressed, and are now re-emerging with the advent of a new professional women’s baseball league. Julie also shares insights from her forthcoming biography, “Finding Renee Richards,” about the pioneering transgender tennis player, connecting historical battles over gender in sports to ongoing debates today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing Julie Kliegman and the Theme of Gender in Sports

• Julie’s Background: Lifelong baseball fan (specifically the Mets), author of a new biography on tennis pioneer Renee Richards.
• Julie revisits an earlier "You're Wrong About" episode on Renee Richards, noting:

  "She is a transgender tennis player who back in 1977, sued for her right to play professional tennis and won." (01:13, Julie)

2. Women in Baseball: A Forgotten History

• A League of Their Own as cultural touchstone:
  • Both Sarah and Julie reflect on how the film was their main (and sometimes only) window into women’s baseball, making the sport feel like a historical "novelty" rather than an ongoing opportunity.
  • Julie:

    "Being my only touch point for women in baseball led me to believe that women in baseball was kind of like a one off, cool novelty thing as opposed to a sport that girls and women could reasonably aspire to play." (08:55, Julie)

• The true beginnings: Women began formally playing at Vassar in the 1860s. The first league, All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), launched in 1943 during WWII to fill the absence of male players—a pivotal moment for women's professional baseball.

3. Baseball vs. Softball: Separate and Unequal

• Critical Differences: Pitch type (overhand in baseball, underhand in softball), ball size, field size, equipment, and rules.
• The common practice of "funneling" girls into softball after Little League, despite the games being fundamentally different.
• Julie likens this to telling a tennis player, "Hey, what about pickleball instead?" adding:

  "It's really just kind of sad…a lot of baseball players grow to love softball, don't get me wrong. But it's a totally different thing we're talking about." (11:54, Julie)

4. The AAGPBL and Gender Policing

• Strict expectations of femininity: mandatory skirts, charm school, and overt efforts to present female athletes as "proper"--“no pants wearing, tough talking, female softballer will play on any of our four teams.” (21:59, Julie quoting league president Max Carey)
• The league was all white; Black women were generally excluded.
• Large, closeted queer presence among players, but the league (and its pop culture depictions) erased queerness to be palatable to mainstream audiences.
  • Sarah:

    "It feels like there is this kind of…having to…make the inherent queerness of a story sort of farther below the surface and more palatable to bring it to a bigger audience." (24:10, Sarah)

5. Media Depictions and the Limits of Representation

• A League of Their Own (1992):
  • Celebrated for visibility but ultimately a Tom Hanks redemption arc with sanitized gender and sexual politics.
  • Sarah jokes, "If they hadn’t have gotten Tom Hanks, they would have been so screwed…Because who else could have played such an awful character and given him a redemption arc that you actually want to happen?" (32:10, Sarah)
  • Julie highlights how the movie frames women athletes mainly as role models for children, a burden rarely placed on men.
• Modern Shoots at Representation:
  • A League of Their Own (2022 TV series) attempts to correct earlier omissions by foregrounding race and queerness, but is swiftly cancelled—"even if they get canceled after one season." (42:12, Julie)

6. Barriers and Progress for Women in Baseball

• Other leagues often short-lived (Ladies League Baseball, 1997).
• The lingering financial, institutional, and cultural barriers to women's baseball—lack of pro opportunities, forced pivot to softball for college scholarships, persistent stereotypes.
• Notable figures:
  • Mo'ne Davis – first girl to pitch a shutout at the Little League World Series (2014), international media sensation but then forced to switch to softball for college, as there was nowhere else to go in baseball.

    "She thought the league was fake when she first saw news about it on her phone." (55:56, Julie)

7. The New Women's Pro Baseball League (2026)

• Launches August 2026 in Springfield, Illinois.
• Features stars like Mo'ne Davis and Kelsey Whitmore.
• Open tryouts reportedly drew 600+ women.
• Structural & financial concerns: teams face extremely low salary caps (~$6300 per player), some essential staff roles were initially unpaid, future of the league uncertain.
• Julie:

  "Whether or not this league is a long-standing success, it's only the beginning for girls and women in baseball... There's going to be a lot more to come if any of these people we've been talking about have anything to say about it." (75:54, Julie)

8. Broader Reflections: Gender, Community, and Progress

• The debate over trans inclusion in sports is rooted in a wider struggle for access and community.
• Sarah:

  "There's like, a human right to community. And playing sports with people is one of the ways that you have that." (14:42, Sarah)

• Both discuss the harm of gender segregation, the joy and motivation of seeing diverse people “do cool stuff,” and the fundamentally slow, looping, non-linear nature of progress.
• Extended metaphors: Sarah likens US cultural progress to a “crazy straw” (69:09) and baseball fandom to a collective, almost religious ritual of American life.
• The necessity of not waiting for "perfect conditions"—progress is incremental, back-and-forth, and worth fighting for.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• Sarah on the myth of progress:

  "We win something and then we lose it, and then if enough people fight hard enough for it, and if the timing is right, then we can get it back again...I think American progress in many ways can be accurately described as a crazy straw." (69:09, Sarah)

• Julie, on gender and sports:

  “Gender does not need to be the organizing principle of media or sports anyway.” (78:11, Julie)

• Sarah, summarizing the main takeaway:

  "At the end of the day, people like to watch people do cool stuff, and then it makes them think about doing stuff and then maybe they'll try it, maybe they'll watch more of it. But we just like...we like to see each other." (77:30, Sarah)

• Julie on AAGPBL policing women’s appearance:

  "You can't take, like, the butchness out of these people. Right. Like, you can't straight wash it. I mean, you can. And that's what they did." (22:13, Julie)

• Sarah on patriarchal sports gatekeeping:

  "Men will always find a way to not care about women doing something impressive, you know?" (13:47, Sarah)

• Sarah on wanting women's sports on TV:

  "What if that wasn't what was happening in every bar I ever went to?" (46:43, Sarah)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:59–02:18: Julie introduces herself and her new book, “Finding Renee Richards.”
• 03:10–06:34: Dissecting A League of Their Own, gender anxiety, and influencer fitness culture.
• 09:43–12:08: Softball vs. baseball, systemic funnelling of girls into softball.
• 20:17–23:44: History and rules of AAGPBL, its gender/racial politics.
• 31:14–34:55: Revisiting A League of Their Own film—its narrative and Tom Hanks’ character arc.
• 38:53–42:12: Modern depictions: 2022 TV show, race and sexuality in pop culture and sports.
• 50:59–55:44: Mo’ne Davis and the constraints on women in baseball.
• 61:32–75:01: The new women's pro league—details, hope, and structural obstacles.
• 76:22–80:12: Big-picture reflections: the inevitability of setbacks and persistence in social change.

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Closing Thoughts

This episode blends sharp social analysis, deep historical research, and the warm, self-effacing humor iconic to “You’re Wrong About.” By tracing the zig-zagging story of women in baseball—from Civil War-era teams and WWII charm schools, through pop culture mythmaking, to the incremental steps forward made by new leagues and generations—the conversation insists that sports’ barriers are always artificial and always worth tearing down.

To Preorder Julie Kliegman’s Book:
“Finding Renee Richards” is available on August 18, 2026. Signed copies can be preordered from Astoria Bookshop in Queens.

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For listeners: If you ever believed “there’s no crying in baseball” or that baseball was always for boys, this episode will give you new heroes, new history, and several reasons to cheer for women of all ages, on any field.

Transcript

[A]

A thousand boyfriends just dropped their sandwiches hearing me say that. So sorry. To those sandwiches. Welcome to Yorongabout, where sometimes we are all about sports. And it is. Is I said that weird. And it is baseball night in America. Am I revealing myself as someone who's never watched a sport aside from figure skating? Good, because I am. And we are talking with Julie Kliegman, author of Finding Renee Richards, about a topic that I am calling crying in baseball. Julie, you are talking to us about some exciting news in sports today. And also you are some exciting news in sports because you have a new book coming out. Tell us about that.

[B]

I would love to. My new book is a biography called Finding Renee Richards, about Renee Richards, subject of a previous episode on this very show.

[A]

This very show, you say?

[B]

Yeah. A couple years back, we had a delightful conversation about my pal Renee, who is a transgender tennis player who back in 1977, sued for her right to play professional tennis and won.

[A]

Back when a lot of, well, at least two American proxy wars about gender were being fought on tennis courts, interestingly.

[B]

Right. Which we also talked about the other one in an episode of the show. So we've really got our tennis bases covered, but that was weird. There's no bases in tennis, to be clear, but there are bases in baseball.

[A]

You're like, don't get confused, Sarah. There are. And we're exploring a very exciting topic today, and I would love for you to tell us about that, too.

[B]

Yeah. So I'm really excited to talk to you about the history of women in baseball. I think way fewer people know about the history, aside from obviously a league of their own. And that there's no crying in baseball. Allegedly.

[A]

Allegedly. Well, exactly. But there is getting drunk and falling out of a hotel window due to a fire you started. I also, I'm just going to get right out of the way as opposed to be sitting on this question the whole time. My overriding thought about A League of Their Own every time I watch it. I love that movie. I've seen it like 20 times, as you know. I'm sure it used to be on TNT continually during the, I don't know, first Bush administration. And does Dottie love playing baseball? She says she doesn't. But doesn't that mean she's afraid of how much she does love it? That's my theory, but I don't know.

[B]

It's a little hard to read, for sure.

[A]

Hina Davis, if you're out there, does Dottie secretly love baseball or not?

[B]

I would tend to agree with you.

[A]

Yeah. She plays like she loves it, which I think is an observation Tom Hanks makes, you know, And I feel like there's something in there about, like, the need to be perceived as a woman and femininity being something that involves not wanting anything too much.

[B]

Right. And her sister is just in general, like, less afraid of that.

[A]

Yeah, she's Tank Girl. She's a big ball of wanting stuff.

[B]

Right, Exactly. But, yeah, I think. I think there is something to this idea that it's, like, not uncool. I don't think that's what she was afraid of, but, like, scared to put her all into something that defied gender roles.

[A]

Right, right. And that, like, people, especially men, have always talked very overtly about gender when women in sports have come up. And I was thinking just the other day about, like, don't you think it's. This is like a whole other conversation. But I feel like there's been this interesting TikTok ification of marathons where it's now this thing where influencers are doing, like, seven marathons a year, and you're like, jesus Christ. That seems like too many.

[B]

It seems seven too many. Yeah.

[A]

Or at least six too many, you know, but this thing where it's like, it's almost become, through a certain lens, like this sort of weird influencer hobby, which I think diminishes the absurd difficulty of it, you know, because influencers do a lot of really difficult things when you think about it, and I guess that's one of them. And also they get sent too many appliances.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Stop making all these little appliances. We already made enough. It's fine.

[B]

That is the good take. Yeah, for sure.

[A]

Yeah. But I don't know that it feels like if you look at life through a social media lens, almost anything seems to become mundane and every day and you begin to think that everyone is achieving highly in sort of whatever thing you're interested in without you.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so I think that it's worth stepping back and thinking, oh, my God, a marathon is not only an incredibly impressive thing for any human being to do. And so it was a 5K, in my opinion. I could never run a 5K. Or I could at some point, but I would have to fundamentally change my level of fitness and approach to life and so on, because running terrifies me.

[B]

Fair.

[A]

But also it was something that, like, it was genuinely believed by doctors, or at least they claim to genuinely believe that women were physically incapable of running, running long distances, like, until. Until the 70s, which I think was the excuse he used to, like, Try and drag Catherine Switzer out of the Boston Marathon. And just this thing that, like, marathons were something women literally weren't allowed to do within the lifespan of, like, Gwen Stefani, you know.

[B]

Right. And I mean, I think that it takes extraordinary circumstances for people to be proven wrong on something like this, which comes up in baseball because literally, a world war.

[A]

I can't wait.

[B]

As you know from A League of Their Own, a world war is what it took to get women playing in baseball professionally. So.

[A]

Yeah. A literal supply chain breakdown and shortage of. Of human men.

[B]

Right, Exactly. So, yeah, I wanted to talk to you about women in baseball for a couple of reasons, I guess.

[A]

Yeah. Tell me.

[B]

One is that I'm a lifelong baseball fan. I grew up in a family that all loved the Mets.

[A]

Unfortunately, I don't even understand why it's unfortunate. That's how I mean, I look. I'm from Portland, Oregon. We've never had a baseball team. We have, famously, a terrible, terrible basketball team. And we love them so much. And that's what we do.

[B]

You also have a women's basketball team now, which is fun.

[A]

We do. And I bet they're not that terrible, which is really against our brand.

[B]

Yeah. You'll have to kick them out.

[A]

We'll have to adjust to that.

[B]

Yeah. Or adjust to it. That's the kinder option. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. I would like to do that.

[B]

Yeah. But so the Mets. I feel like everyone who likes the Mets is long suffering. They're always disappointing us. And, you know, we love to be disappointed by it to a certain extent.

[A]

Right.

[B]

The misery is part of it. Yeah.

[A]

And that's the Portland basketball thing, too, as far as I can tell. Yeah. And I will say also that I would not call myself a fan of baseball because I don't understand it and always fall asleep in the middle of the game. But also I'm a fan of baseball fans because I admire people who do something that seems to be something that takes a long time and involves a lot of statistics. I think that's cool.

[B]

Yeah. And, you know, I do want to be clear that you can be a baseball fan even if you fall asleep in the middle of the game. Like, my dad is a great example.

[A]

Right. And I also feel like I like to be able to be sitting somewhere for a long time on a nice day and to read the New Yorker while people have a good time around me.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

So that's why I want to go to a baseball game.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, the vibes are pretty immaculate whether you're watching the Game or not. So. Yeah, so I saw A League of Their Own at a pretty young age. I can't remember exactly when, but I think that being my only touch point for women in baseball led me to believe that women in baseball was kind of like a one off, cool novelty thing as opposed to a sport that girls and women could reasonably aspire to play.

[A]

Yeah. It made it seem like horse diving in Atlantic City.

[B]

Sure. Yeah, exactly. And so I think the background and history here is a cool thing for us to talk about and understand so that people growing up today, like, know they have choices and opportunities in sports, like regardless of gender. And a cool thing. Starting August 1st, there's a women's pro baseball league coming to a city near us. Um, well, in. Not really near either of us, personally.

[A]

Oh.

[B]

But not in Portland and not in New York.

[A]

They're sitting near somebody. But who, where, where is it coming to?

[B]

It is coming to Illinois, so.

[A]

Great.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Well, not dead metal. Closer to you, but still. We can, we can meet there.

[B]

We can. Yeah, that would be lovely. So I thought a good starting point would be like. Do you know the differences between baseball and softball?

[A]

No, I know. I think I know one of them, which I only know because my mom pointed it out to me as a joke that was being made in the tryout scene in A League of Their Own. All of my baseball knowledge comes back in some way to A League of Their Own and a tiny little bit Field of Dreams. But where I think in softball you throw underhand and in baseball you throw overhand and I presume that the ball is also larger and softer and that's it.

[B]

No, those are. Those were like the first two things on my list. Yeah.

[A]

Great.

[B]

Softball, you did a great job. Yeah, thank you. Softballs are bigger. Softball fast pitch is underhand pitching with that like windmill windup motion that you see.

[A]

Oh, yeah. Huh.

[B]

And yeah, baseball is typically overhand. The softball mound is closer to home plate than in baseball. Softball has a smaller field overall. There's some different base running rules, and softball bats are longer and weigh less than baseball bats. So there are quite a few obvious differences. And I say that to say that not every athlete who loves baseball is going to love softball and vice versa. Right. They're entirely different sports with different techniques.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So historically we have funneled girls who play co ed baseball growing up like Little League or something like that into softball leagues as they get older, especially as they want to pursue college scholarships, for example. But that's like a really imperfect and unsatisfying Practice. It's like if I. You grew up playing tennis, for example. And I was like, hey, what about soccer instead? It's kind of like that, right?

[A]

Or if you're like, hey, what about pickleball? And I was like, no, I really like tennis. And I really spent a lot of time on a court exactly this size, and all of them are like this.

[B]

Right. That's a much better comp. Yeah. Tennis and pickleball. So it's really just kind of sad. I mean, a lot of baseball players grow to love softball, don't get me wrong. But it's a totally different thing we're talking about.

[A]

Right? And it always. I. And I remember as a kid seeing A League of Their Own, and the sort of. The way that, you know, that kind of uplifting history movie usually works is like, wow, someone did this thing and changed the world forever. Because that is kind of how American Histories at least, was taught to. I think us as kids in the 90s as progress being sort of very unidirectional, and us at the time in history, I think, feeling like, wow, we basically almost licked this whole thing, you know, all these systemic injustices and prejudices and such.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And then it's like. I think that the 20 teens were like, you know, opening a closet door and everything in the closet falling out and engulfing the entire house. It's like the scene in Real Genius with the popcorn. We're just engulfed in popcorn in this house that we felt really smug about having basically cleaned in the 90s.

[B]

Yeah. Although I have to say, I love popcorn. I would like to be engulfed in popcorn, but, yeah, I would like to

[A]

be engulfed in popcorn, too. So I. That's a kind of a cheerful metaphor of being engulfed in something.

[B]

But you're absolutely right. It's not like. It's not like we had this World War II baseball league, and now all of a sudden, great. Everyone accepts that women play baseball. Like, that's not what happened.

[A]

Right. It's like they accepted it for a while, it turns out. But I. When I was younger, you know, it's like you see bits of the movie on tv, you don't get as far as the postscript. So I feel like at some point I was like, mom, where's can we see women play baseball? And she was like, no, of course not. We can watch them play softball, but only on ESPN4, probably, you know.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

And like, nothing against softball, but men will always find a way to not care about women doing something impressive, you know?

[B]

That is correct. So Billie Jean King has said, like, look, I couldn't grow up to be a baseball player. It crushed her, she said. And she said that every girl deserves the dream to play professional baseball, which I would agree with. Yeah, it feels like a fairly uncontroversial thing to say.

[A]

I mean, I at least wanted to be on the bus reading erotica with Madonna and so forth.

[B]

Right. That is a key part.

[A]

Yeah. Which also I think is an underrated part of the whole team sports conversation. Right. And of course, your book gets into this from, you know, in. In many different ways, the debate currently happening and being sort of pushed by bad actors on the right on this alleged crisis we're having about trans kids wanting to play team sports in America. And it feels like what. You know, one of the things that people using that idea as a scare tactic and also this idea that trans kids are coming for your scholarships ignores is that I think there's like a human right to community. And playing sports with people is one of the ways that you have that.

[B]

Absolutely. I think that's a huge part of it, is that. And like something that people either don't understand or refuse to understand is that trans kids are really just trying to play sports with their friends. And, you know, women are trying to play sports with their friends.

[A]

And if they insist on being excellent, then like, I don't know, I feel like we can endure that.

[B]

It seems like not a real problem. Correct.

[A]

But how many kids are really great at soccer? Do you know what I mean? They kind of. I think a lot of them just want to run back and forth and eat oranges.

[B]

Right. Or like sit down on the grass and like pull it out blade by blade while the game is going on.

[A]

Well, that was what I was always into. Yeah. The fiber arts aspect of, of right field and so on.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, like, I think this isn't really a complicated story in that sense is that like people just want to hang out. They want to hang out with Madonna on the bus. Right. Like, if your team happens to have Madonna on it or what?

[A]

Or your Madonna equivalent. Yeah, exactly. I think when I was, when I was a kid, I failed to understand the roles of softball in like second grade. And then, since then, have always decided that the bass related sports are just too technical for me to grasp. But can wait, can you give just like for anyone who's insecure about their baseball knowledge to start? Because I feel like this will be helpful. Like, what is baseball? It involves bases and a ball for sure.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But what else?

[B]

So it consists of nine innings, and each team in each inning gets a turn at bat and a turn playing defense in the field.

[A]

Cool.

[B]

And your goal is to have as many people cross home plate as possible. That's how you score runs, is by touching home plate after you have already touched first, second, and third base. So you have someone pitching at you, and your goal is to hit the ball. Right. So there are a lot of rules, a lot of statistics. But, you know, I don't think the basic goal is beyond anyone's comprehension, which is.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which is nice. And I don't think you need, like, extensive baseball knowledge to enjoy a league of their own or to appreciate the gender dynamics at play here. Right.

[A]

Okay. So is the goal of baseball, essentially, you hit the ball with the bat and then you want to run around all of the innings on the diamond, Which I love that it's called that. I know that that's the shape that it is, but I like that everyone gets to say diamond all those times. And then you run around all the innings before the opposing team can get the baseball back to whoever receives the baseball. Is that the whole thing?

[B]

So you, you run around the bases. The innings are like the way of measuring.

[A]

Oh, my God. Okay. Yeah. A thousand boyfriends just dropped their sandwiches hearing me say that. So sorry. To those sandwiches.

[B]

They'll make new ones. It's okay.

[A]

You can put them back together. Yeah.

[B]

It's five second rule.

[A]

Okay. You read it. Yeah. I knew that. I just couldn't know it at. Okay. Yes. You run around the bases before the opposing team can get the baseball back to whoever's at home plate or whoever gets it. Is that basically it?

[B]

Or whoever's at what base? Like. Yeah, yeah. You don't want to get tagged out by an opposing player with a baseball.

[A]

Okay. Yeah. All right. I like that. It's just, like, extremely simple and something that can be mastered by small children. Not me, but other ones. And yet it's something that, like, I don't know, trillions of dollars have been made and lost by, like. Isn't that kind of an incredibly charming and weird thing about humans?

[B]

We just invent these little games and then pour millions of dollars into them every year. Yeah.

[A]

And yet there aren't any massive stadiums dedicated to jump roping, which I think there could be.

[B]

There should be.

[A]

Yeah. Jump roping can get really technical. Okay. So, yeah. Thank you for that. And baseball, famously can get kind of long. And I know that there was a World Series game this past year or last year that went into 8 billion extra innings or something like that.

[B]

Yeah, they can get really, really long because they can't end in a tie.

[A]

And.

[B]

Yeah, the way. The way they solve that is by playing extra innings. So they can get hours and hours and hours long. Major League Baseball has taken a few steps to, like, kind of curtail the time of the. Or the time of each game, make them a little bit shorter. They're trying to get, like, younger generations more interested in baseball.

[A]

You know what? Young people need long, boring things in their lives. We should make baseball longer, if anything. That's what I think.

[B]

Yeah. And more boring. Let's do it.

[A]

Okay. So. And when I. When did baseball come into existence? It was like a little like, post Civil War, something like that.

[B]

I think it had actually been around even longer. But you first see women fielding a baseball team in the 1860s, Vassar fielded a team, so.

[A]

Oh, my God, baseball.

[B]

Yeah. But the reality is that, like, whenever sport was invented, women were probably playing it as long as it existed in some form or fashion.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But yeah, the first formal team is thought to be vassar in the 1860s. But the first formal league is what we'll get into now, which was the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. And that is the league depicted in A League of Their Own.

[A]

And that was. Was founded after the start of World War II or after America entered.

[B]

It was founded in 1943. Yeah. By the chewing gum guy, Philip K. Wrigley.

[A]

Perfect. Which they changed to Harvey Bars in the movie to avoid legal issues, we presume.

[B]

That's right. So, yeah, it's. You have the situation where men are off serving in World War II and having women play baseball was apparently more appealing than having, like, no one play baseball. The people need their baseball.

[A]

That's like, well, let a woman do it if the other option is nobody, basically. But now we can do robots. So we found a way to get to let nobody do it.

[B]

Right. So there were, like, a few key points of the league. One of them being that, like, everyone had to be super feminine. The president, Max Carey, once said, femininity is the keynote of our league. No pants wearing, tough talking, female softballer will play on any of our four teams.

[A]

It's amazing. Rosie o' Donnell made it on.

[B]

Right. And so Wrigley literally sent the women to charm school after practice and he made them wear skirts.

[A]

What do you think about that?

[B]

I think it's ridiculous. Like, you can't take, like, the butchness out of these people. Right. Like, you can't straight wash it. I mean, you can. And that's what they did.

[A]

You can try to anyway.

[B]

You can try to. Yeah, There. There were a lot of queer players in this league, though the players were closeted, as you might imagine. It was a legit, popular league. Like, it peaked at about 1 million fans attending in 1948.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

We do need to mention that the league was all white, and it lasted until 1954.

[A]

And there was never any kind of a league for. For black women. Right. The way that they're actually, you know, were for black men.

[B]

Right. There were a few women who played in the Negro Leagues, which was, you know, the Negro Leagues were kind of, like, folded after Major League Baseball accepts Jackie Robinson, and. Well, accept is a strong word, but after Jackie Robinson integrates Major League Baseball in 1947. So, yeah, I mean, there are very few opportunities for black women in baseball. It's true. And. Well, we can get more into that as well. But A League of Their. A League of Their Own is like. We'll get more into that, too. But for now, I'll just say that, like, the movie doesn't really depict queerness. Right. Despite Rosie o' Donnell being in it. There's no.

[A]

Yeah, no, it really doesn't.

[B]

There's no explicitly gay character or even, like, implicitly gay characters, except that, like, you can make whatever character you want gay. Sure. But, like, it's not like a spoken or even unspoken, like, subtext of the movie.

[A]

Right. And it's not. It's not even, I would say, implied. Right. You know, not. Not even with Rosie o', Donnell, who is depicted explicitly as having a boyfriend and learning she deserves men who actually are interested. You know, it's like we specifically orient her towards men and. Yeah. And it feels like there is this kind of, you know, these many layers of just kind of having to, I don't know, make the inherent queerness of a story sort of farther below the surface and more palatable to bring it to a bigger audience. Something like that. I was also thinking about, I guess, reread Fried Green Tomato, and I think people have talked a lot about how the explicit lesbian ness was kind of taken out of the movie. And it's sort of, I think, possible to read those characters as friends, Iggy and Ruth, but in the book as well, it's like, it's always just under the surface, which I think was a big part of why it was such a huge bestseller, where it's like, they're explicitly named as the parents of a child, and yet no one is. No one ever Uses the word gay or lesbian or any like that. It's just said that they loved each other, so it's more heavily implied. And it's like, if you're aware of what's going on, then it's crystal clear. But if you choose to not be aware of it, you're allowed to remain unaware of it. Which I don't know, is very Southern book from 1987, really.

[B]

Yeah. And so there's no queerness in the film. There is a ton of closeted queerness in the league itself. And this is something that the writer Frank Frankie de la Creta kind of corrected the record on in 2018. All the way in 2018. They wrote an article for, narratively, about the queerness in the league. Like, they interviewed these players. A lot of them came out, like, much, much, much later in life. Like, we're talking decades and decades after the league. But the reality of the league was that you could be cut from a team just for having a masculine haircut or masculine shoes, because God forbid you have masculine shoes. Right. I mean, that's just gonna.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Tear the whole league up.

[A]

That's gonna tank morale when we're at war.

[B]

Yeah, right, exactly.

[A]

For one of a nail, you know, etc.

[B]

So in 1953. So as the All American Girls Baseball League is winding down, you have in the Negro Leagues this kind of panic, because, as we said, Jackie Robinson and others have integrated Major League Baseball a few years before. So it's like they kind of need, like, a draw to. To these Negro leagues. So the Indianapolis Clowns sign a few women to play alongside the men. Toni Stone, Connie Morgan and Mamie Johnson.

[A]

The Indianapolis Clowns is an amazing team name. And also I love that in the middle of this kind of. Of exciting story of women getting an opportunity, it's like the Indianapolis Clowns.

[B]

Absolutely. And, you know, overall, by all accounts, the women played well, but they, as you can imagine, struggle to gain acceptance on and off the field. One of the women, Tony, would apparently stay at brothels when traveling with a team, so that doesn't necessarily seem ideal.

[A]

Well, and why was that?

[B]

Propriety, presumably.

[A]

So that's. It's, like, better for her to stay in a house full of women than in a house full of men.

[B]

I think that was the idea. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. Or for her own comfort and safety

[B]

and potentially presumably also for the men's comfort and safety, unfortunately. Right.

[A]

Like, right.

[B]

I don't know that they were, like, jonesing to stay with women.

[A]

Yeah. And. Well, and I realize that there's, like, you Know, it's very, probably very different brothel to brothel, but what? Give me a whole movie about that, probably, you know.

[B]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I would take a movie on that in a heartbeat, but, yeah. So, you know, these women in the Negro Leagues weren't appreciated enough in their time, much like with the women of the All American League. Right. But the women in the Negro Leagues did wear pants, so at least we have that tiny victory.

[A]

Yeah, the pants victory.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which is something. Well, and just. I, I. For people like me who might not understand the nuances of this enough, like, what are the disadvantages of having to play baseball in a skirt?

[B]

Sure. I mean, like, if you are someone who wears skirts or dresses, you've tried to run on them, probably, and that's less than ideal. And it's also about being taken seriously as an athlete. Right. There are some sports in which women do wear skirts, like, to this day. Like, think about tennis, for example. But tennis also has, like, an elitist history of, like, making women seem proper and stuff. So, you know, ideally, women should be allowed to play in whatever they want to wear, whether they choose to wear a skirt or not. It should be their choice, though.

[A]

Right, Right.

[B]

I think that's the key thing here.

[A]

Well, it's like how Debbie Thomas, I think, was given an extremely hard time at the Calgary Olympics for skating and basically a unitard because God forbid a woman wear effectively pants on the ice. Again, this idea that. It really is fascinating to me how consistently it recurs in the history of women in sports where this idea that if women are going to be strong and competent and clearly have a strong physical ability to do something arguably better than men in many ways, or in a lot of cases, or at least in a way that kind of shows that something that men pride themselves in and maybe take a lot of comfort and gender identity from is maybe something women can do too. Oh, no, that. One of the things that seems to come up so consistently is this idea that if women are making some kind of a physical spectacle of themselves, that this sort of policing body, which generally is run by men, ultimately have to get really particular about what they're allowed to wear, you know?

[B]

Yes. I mean, this comes up in, like, the history of women swimming a lot and what women are allowed to swim in.

[A]

Great.

[B]

Yeah. This is all to say, like, you know, I don't think any sport is, like, totally immune from this problem of how do we make men feel comfortable.

[A]

No, not at. I, I think. I think any sport this could show up in. In one way or Another. It's hard to think of. Of ones where it doesn't.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And also that it's also interesting that so often there seem to be random bylaws saying that women can't wear something that is less revealing and. Or more functional, which I think is very annoying.

[B]

It is very annoying, Sarah. Yeah.

[A]

All right, let's continue. Yes.

[B]

So would you like to take a little bit of a detour away from real life baseball and talk about fictionalized women's baseball and, you know, really dive more into a league of their own, which I know is obviously a main area of your interests.

[A]

I would love to. Yeah. I. That's. This is where I have my best footing for. Sure.

[B]

Great. So, you know, it was released in 1992, many, many decades after the league it's, you know, portraying on screen. I hadn't watched it since I was a kid until very recently in preparation for this episode, basically. So I was, like, almost coming at it fresh as an adult, at least. And one of my main takeaways was, unfortunately, in a certain sense, it's kind of like a movie about Tom Hanks, like, learning that women are people.

[A]

Yeah, very much so.

[B]

Which, like, don't get me wrong, they do that in the most, like, charming way possible.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I. When I watch it, whenever I watch it lately, I think to myself, if they hadn't have gotten Tom Hanks, they would have been so screwed, you know?

[B]

Oh.

[A]

Because who else could have played such an awful character and given him an actually, like, a redemption arc that you actually want to happen?

[B]

Right. Yeah. I mean, it's like this guy, the coach of the team is like, this, like, raging alcoholic. Right. And he treats the woman like garbage for a significant portion of the movie.

[A]

Yeah. And he finds it specifically very demeaning that he has been assigned to work with women because to him, it is, like, counter to the fact that he used to be a real. A real ball player before alcoholism destroyed his career.

[B]

Right. I think he sees this as, like, a punishment for the way his career

[A]

went and, like, fundamentally extremely demeaning. Yeah. And, you know, and he has great lines like, I haven't got ball players. I've got girls.

[B]

Yep. But I think, like, that character does stand in for, like, a lot of the attitudes that people had about. About women playing baseball and probably to some, like, lesser comedic extent, still have about women playing baseball.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. So, like, I would say to listeners, like, if you haven't seen this movie in a while, as cheesy as you remember it being it's at least like 50% cheesier, which is not a criticism.

[A]

I respond very well to American Cheese. Right. Yeah. And also, it's like, I don't know that we're ever gonna have a time when like sort of middle budget family movies had beautiful orchestral scores like that.

[B]

Oh my God.

[A]

You know, like there's. Yeah. Something really lovely about it all. And the worst Madonna song I've ever heard in my life on the credits.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, shout out to Madonna. Shout out to Hans Zimmer scoring it for sure. And so another. I want to talk about another scene near the end of the movie actually, where the women are signing autographs after the championship for young kids. And I think we need to talk about that because it kind of furthers this idea that a lot of people still have about women's sports today and female athletes today, where women in sports are expected to be role models and like, are specifically there to be role models and to like inspire young girls, which isn't a bad thing on its own. But it, it is a standard that we've never held men in sports to. So I just think like, like we can acknowledge and celebrate women playing sports for their own goals and their own satisfaction and their own motivations.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Without having to make it like women are so nurturing and they're inspiring children kind of thing.

[A]

Yeah. Right. Or without making it like fundamentally child oriented, like by necessity where like, it's great if people want to do that, but like one nice thing that we don't have to worry about is those overpaid female athletes.

[B]

Huh.

[A]

Well, maybe one day we'll get there, but hard to say.

[B]

So you have this kind of like picture book sort of movie. It's very cheesy, it's very light, it's very delightful, it's very wholesome. Obviously, like making a movie about queer woman in the early 90s probably would have been a non starter, especially in like a Tom Hanks kind of vehicle. I don't think they would have had this like 40 million dollar budget had they been trying to make a movie about queerness.

[A]

I mean, Tom Hanks was in Philadelphia at about that time. But that is true. The period when like you could make a movie about gay people if someone was dying of aids, I think. Right. Was kind of the caveat at the time.

[B]

It had to be like a very serious movie.

[A]

And they had already done that one movie for that year. Right. And also it's just like. Yeah. In the 90s that, you know, there were a lot of of kind of inroads being made. But it would be hard to find a mainstream movie depicting an explicitly queer character who was having fun.

[B]

Yeah. Let alone, like, groups of queer women having fun.

[A]

Right, right.

[B]

So, yeah, the women are all capital S. Straight. Most of them are married or dating someone and talking very earnestly about their male partners. Many of them have partners, obviously, who are at war. One of them, poor Betty Spaghetti. Her husband died. Guys at war in the film Poor Betty. Yeah, I know.

[A]

And we have. I also love the kind of Hollywood age thing where we have Geena Davis, who's, like, 30 something in real life, playing a character who's, like, living back with her parents on the farm in Oregon. Which is another reason why this movie is close to my heart. Is that part of it is set in Oregon and they say Oregon correctly, which is important.

[B]

That is no small feat.

[A]

It's surprisingly rare.

[B]

As someone from New Jersey, I said Oregon wrong. Like most of my life until I, you know, went to college and learned the error of my ways.

[A]

It happens. We all say place names wrong. There are, like, 25 place names in New Jersey that I would make you laugh if I took a crack at, probably.

[B]

Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. It works both ways.

[A]

But, yeah, I love that. We have Geena Davis playing like she's back on the farm with her little sister, and you're like, okay, maybe she's supposed to be 22 or something, and then her husband is Bill Pullman, and you're like, well, how old is Bill Pullman supposed to be? Is he just, like an old man who married little Keena Davis? Or is he like, hello, sir and ma'. Am. It's me, Bill Pullman. I'm 22 years old, and I'd like to marry your daughter if she'll have me.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I don't know. It's just. But right. They're all, like, very oriented towards men, which I'm sure there are plenty of horny baseball players roving around the country back then, just like in the movie. But also. Yeah, it's like they're, you know, they're. They're. They're on a team. They're roommates, for God's sake.

[B]

Yeah, it's, like, actively hard for me to watch that movie and not think about, like. Like, who might be into who in that cast. Right. Like, of characters. But, yeah. This is not something that gets addressed at all. There is. I'm curious, Sarah, have you seen the 2022 TV show by the same name?

[A]

No, I haven't. Have You.

[B]

I have seen parts of it.

[A]

How is it?

[B]

It's interesting. So it was like eight episodes or something on Amazon prime and I feel like it was very much trying to find its footing.

[A]

Yeah, they don't give anyone enough time these days.

[B]

Right. You know, but they do. The thing they do differently is they do try to correct the record on like having a ton of queer characters. And, you know, there is like a racial dynamic to this as well. Like, one of the main characters is black and is turned away from the A League of Their Own All American situation. And she's left to kind of like try to find acceptance among men in baseball and, you know, black specifically. And there are, yeah, all these white ladies meanwhile, trying out for this league. And so it really does a better job at like queerness and race than the original movie does.

[A]

Yeah, it has like a little bit of time to work on it. I also, I, I mean, I. It's better to do it than to not. But there's something so kind of sadly funny to me about the scene in A League of Their Own where like, for 30 seconds, you know, the ball rolls or like, ends up out of bounds or whatever you say, and a black woman who's like, well dressed, like, picks it up and like whips it back to Geena Davis and she's like, wow, that black lady has an arm. And then it's over. And it's like back to the other stuff. We acknowledge that some, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes a black woman has a really good arm, you know, and you're just like, well, I. I don't know, you know, but that, I guess that to me is like. So the sort of like the tone of that era in Hollywood and it's sort of like attempt to do the right thing historically is that like, when you do get something like that, it's like, okay, because really, really, really quick we're gonna make. We only have time for a really short stop. Okay. And now we gott to keep going. We have no time. And you know, I. I think there was more time than people acted like there was. But it's also, I don't know, it's been interesting to see this evolution in media from the no time era to having like tons of time to now I don't even know how TV works anymore. I feel like another thing is starting. But we guess this is why it's good to go to actual history. Because when you read a book, it can't be shaped quite as much by the needs of the marketplace preemptively which is nice.

[B]

Yeah. But, yeah, so the. The new the 2022 show, rather, like, it does riff on that moment that you just described of, like, the black woman throwing the ball and Gina Davis going, like, wow. In the. In the pilot episode, there's, like, with the main black character I mentioned, she is trying to, you know, join the tryout for the All American League, and she just, like, whips the ball all the way from the outfield and it hits, like, the stands behind home plate, and everyone just, like, stares and, like, is like, whoa. But of course, it doesn't change the mind of these, like, white men running the tryout. But so that's like an. It serves as, like, an entry point

[A]

instead of being, like, the one little moment.

[B]

Exactly, exactly. So, you know, we do have depictions like that in this day and age, even if they get canceled after one season.

[A]

Yeah. And, like, I feel like there is this, like, what. What do you think is men's problem to cut to the heart of the matter for a moment here, because it just feels like there's this, like, this fear of being forced to watch a woman be excellent at something.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Why don't they like that?

[B]

Doesn't it just, like. I mean, men call in, but I feel like it just don't call in, actually. But I think it just, like, threatens their masculine masculinity. Right. On a basic level, to see, like, something that they had encoded deep in their brain as being, like, a men's activity, like cooking steak or something. Right.

[A]

Like, but you know what's interesting is that, like, men, like, most men who are watching baseball have never been good at baseball. I know that some of them have. Right. But like, most. Most of it, like, statistically, most of us watching a sport court have never been that good at it objectively.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so why would we be threatened by anyone being good at it if we've never been good at it?

[B]

That is such a good point, but I think it's too logical.

[A]

I know, right?

[B]

It's definitely too logical. And I don't know if you've ever seen, like, these polls that, like, someone will, like, poll men about whether they could, like, win a point in tennis off Serena Williams.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

And a very large proportion of men think they can.

[A]

No.

[B]

Right. So it's almost irrelevant to them if they're not personally good at a sport. They still think they have the potential to be, and it's still threatening if you, as a woman, are better.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's just. It's. Yeah, it's so Interesting the way that causes a feeling of psychological harm or, like, threat to some men, it seems. And. And that it just feels like women do so many athletically, like, shockingly impressive things that I would like to be able to watch on TV in a bar, like, once in my life.

[B]

Yeah. Well, the beautiful thing is, like, we do have these women's sports bars cropping up.

[A]

That's true. Yeah. But I'd like to be in a terrible bar. I want to be in. I want to be in, like, a Jimmy John's in an airport, you know, and they've got the All American Girls World Series. We wouldn't call it that now. That would be a bit much. Right. But you know, or something. Competitive cheerleading. Anything.

[B]

Yeah. You. You want to be in a Jimmy John's, which is an interesting thing to unpack, but. Yeah. Maybe that's for another episode, though.

[A]

I want to be at an All American unplace with, like, a mounted tv.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Where I'm waiting for an order that should have been ready, and yet it's not, because something terrible seems to have happened behind the scenes.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And I get to watch people analyze competitive cheerleading, and that's what's on. I miss the concept of something being on because in. In America or anywhere where TV was, you just turn on the TV and something would be on, and that was what you watched. And I think everyone is so tired now because nothing is ever on anymore. We all have to pick what we watch. And we're so tired because we. We're always picking things because nothing is ever on. Because we now have the job that the TV programmers used to have, and we're not qualified. That's what I think.

[B]

There's a lot more active decision making needed to just, like, unwind now. It's very true.

[A]

Yeah. If you're consuming media, you're making potentially hundreds of decisions a day. And the decision used to be TV on, TV off, channel up, channel down, you know? Yeah.

[B]

There was something beautiful about that. Yeah.

[A]

And that was how you would end up watching the House of yes on Portland's ABC affiliate at 4pm on a Sunday, because that was what they were showing inexplicably.

[B]

There you go. Yeah.

[A]

Anyway, I guess that's my complaint, is that I feel like I love getting to watch men play basketball when I'm in a bar eating a cheeseburger. But what if that wasn't what was happening in every bar I ever went to do?

[B]

Right. I think that's such a fair desire.

[A]

Let it be on.

[B]

This is reminding Me of the time where I was at a sports bar in Philadelphia several years ago and I had asked for the WNBA game to be put on. But like every other TV was on. I think it was like the Kentucky Derby and they just needed this like umpteenth TV on the Kentucky Derby. So they, they kept switching it back to the horses. And I'm like, we can't have. Have one TV for women amongst all the TVs for horses. It was a little comical.

[A]

Yeah. And. Right. I feel like there's enough angles for the horse TVs that everyone could probably have been perfectly happy.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Yeah. That's like a very like 1800s kind of like woman v. Horse. Who is the fairer creature?

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Woman versus Horse. Okay. It's a Supreme Court case. It's been going on for many years now.

[B]

Oh man. I think we know how that Supreme Court will rule, unfortunately.

[A]

Yeah. Horse. It's always horse. Nothing against. Nothing against horses. Sorry to this horse. But okay, so we. So we have a league. Is that where we are? And the girls. And the girls are gay. They're roommates, you know. And so we have briefly a professional women's baseball league. And the girls are traveling together and many of them are gay. And we love that for them.

[B]

Yeah. And the league lasts what I think is a surprisingly long time. Like into the 50s, into 54.

[A]

That is surprising to me too because it was past the point where they had the war effort excuse.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Then they were just treasonously watching women run around. And yet they tolerated it. It.

[B]

Exactly. But yeah. So I mean there isn't. I don't know if this is going to be surprising or like the least surprising thing you've ever heard, but there isn't really a formal attempt at another women's league until 1997.

[A]

It is both surprising and unsurprising where it's like, but why? And also. And so does it. How does the original league end? Is it just kind of like a slow dwindling and they eventually decide that they're not making enough money? Something like that. That.

[B]

Yeah. That's my understanding of it. These things just kind of peter out. Right. Eventually it's a fad.

[A]

Like the Lombada.

[B]

Uh huh. And so I think A League of Their Own renews some interest in women's playing baseball when it comes out. Which makes sense. Right. You have this really high profile movie. It does very well at the box office.

[A]

It certainly did for me personally. It also makes a good choice in depicting baseball mostly in a series of montages where exciting things happen.

[B]

Yes. I did note that when I was watching, I was like, wow, everything's a montage.

[A]

Yeah. Such a big band music.

[B]

Yes. And the thing about me is I do love a montage, but I also feel like we kind of like skipped over some of the fun parts. Like tryouts didn't need to be a montage. It could have just been like I could have watched like 20 minutes of them trying out. To be honest with you, you and

[A]

I just want like a Dazbot length cut of a League of Their Own where we can see all the specific stuff.

[B]

Stuff, yes. Yeah, definitely. So you get this league in 1997, ladies league baseball. It was extremely short lived. It's often not even mentioned in like articles about the history of women's baseball.

[A]

Yeah, I sure missed it.

[B]

Yeah, it was, it only lasted like a season and a half. It had really bad attendance. It was losing money. But I do want to note that like all new leagues in their early years, men's leagues and women, women's leagues, lose money. Like you can't expect. Right. Anything like this is going to succeed right away. So we're sort of getting. Working our way slowly to the present moment after taking that like big leap in time. Right. And I think we should talk about Little League and Monet Davis. Have you heard the name Monet Davis?

[A]

I don't, I don't think so. Who's Monet Davis?

[B]

So she is the name of the woman in baseball that I think is. If our listeners have heard of any woman in baseball, they're most likely to have heard at least in passing of Monet Davis. She was a Little Leaguer and she became the first girl to pitch a shutout at the Little League World Series in 2014. So she wasn't the first girl to play in the Little League World Series. That's been happening since the 80s. But she really like achieved this level of like 15 minutes of fame that these other women, women, these other girls before her did not. I will send you a cover of Sports Illustrated, which she graced. So look at that. It says like Monet, remember her name. As if we could ever forget. And you know, I think sadly, like people kind of did forget, but she achieves this level of fame where she's on Jimmy Fallon. She published a memoir. Spike Lee made a documentary about her.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Hold on, I just pulled. Oh, wow.

[B]

Oh, yeah. You got the COVID up.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. It's a really great shot. I think she's just like totally in motion, like about to Pitch, I guess, or at the very start of pitching.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And what. What is a shutout? And brief. Why is that especially impressive? I know that it is from the way people talk about it, but I know. I understand what it is the way a little kid does.

[B]

Yeah. So it's. You haven't allowed the other team to score any run runs, and that is pretty remarkable. Even the best pitchers give up hits. Even the best pitchers give up home runs. So it's like a step on the way to, like, a perfect game, which was not this game, but, like, a perfect game is like you don't have any base runners, which is like this heralded thing in baseball. But a shutout is a really cool achievement. Especially, like, think about it. You're playing one of the best kids baseball teams in the world. Right, Right. And you're not allowing them to score. There's something super powerful about that.

[A]

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And is a shutout also. Is pitching a shutout something that you could be really great at baseball for your whole life and just never do?

[B]

Yeah, I think that's a fair thing to say. And a shutout requires a lot of stamina, too, because you're pitching. A lot of pitchers get pulled. It's uncommon to pitch an entire game to begin with. We should say that.

[A]

Hmm.

[B]

So you're showing a level of, like, durability and stamina, and you're seeing the same batters over and over again. Right. Over the course of a game. And so they have opportunities to learn your secrets and try to, like, crack you as a pitcher. Right. But not allowing any runs to score means no one really cracked her and the defense. So it's a really cool achievement. And I think a Sports Illustrated cover, even in 2014, was still, like, a sign that, like, you've made it. And sports. Sports.

[A]

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think. I don't know. I know that everything is different around magazines and everything, but I feel like that's still understandable today. It would be nice if there was, like, more of those landmarks for people now, you know, like, the way that it. You know, it was like this historic thing when Bruce Springsteen was on the COVID of both Time and Newsweek.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The same week, you know, but yeah, and also that it's. She looks about like, 13. Like, what. What age is she?

[B]

So, I mean, Little League is like a Sport for, like, 10 to 12 year olds, so she's very young. How young? Let's. She was born in 2001, which is wild.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So she would have been about like 12. 12. About.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So it's really quite a young age to have, like, this national spotlight on you.

[A]

Yeah. But. But also, I think just, I don't know, to be. Be celebrated for something that involves, like, not just physical ability, but I think a lot of mental toughness as well. I don't know. There's something really rare and cool about that, especially for. For an adolescent girl, you know.

[B]

Yeah. And you would think, like, seeing this SI cover, you know, she got a book deal, all this stuff. Like, in most sports, you'd be like, oh, this. This girl is like, on her way to something.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Some illustrious career. Right.

[A]

In her chosen profession, like LeBron James or something.

[B]

Right. But like, so many people are. She was, you know, basically forced to pivot to softball in college, man. Yeah. And so I think she thought she'd never play baseball again. And she's in her mid-20s now, and she's going to be part of this new baseball league that I mentioned is starting up in August.

[A]

August Keely. This is. This is a very good pivot.

[B]

Yeah. It's. It's perhaps telling, though, that she thought the league was fake when she first saw news about it on her phone.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Just because I think that says a lot about the state of women playing baseball that, like, she can't even trust her eyes when it's, like, right in front of her that this league is starting. So Monet Davis, one of many Little Leaguers, Little League girls, to play in the World Series. And to play obviously, like, on a random Little league team. Like, you know, it's not a given that there will be a girl, but it's probably more common than people think, especially in recent years. We're gonna take another detour, though, if that's all right with you.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

So in 2016, there is a TV show on Fox called Pitch, which features a Monet Davis type of woman pitching in Major League Baseball. This show also only lasts one season. And it's like, sneakily, the whole reason that I wanted to do this episode, because I've seen it and loved it dearly. And no one else has seen this.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have talked to me about this show.

[A]

What's your. What's your sales pitch for Pitch?

[B]

Yeah. So there's like, a steamy romance brewing, of course. Like, she appears to be straight in the show, but there's like, this really great, like, grumpy older catcher who's, like, near retirement. And, you know, that's the catcher she's assigned to work with. And it's kind of like a little bit of like an enemies to lovers thing. So I think that's really just, frankly, really fun. And also I think the production value is really high. Like, MLB cooperated in producing the show, which is why they're allowed to say she plays for the Padres. They filmed in a stadium. It's a bit soapy. More than a bit soapy, actually. But it's. It's very fun. So, of course, it only lasted for one season. We can't have nice things. I wrote this was fall of 2016, so at a very particular time in our history. And I wrote a ringer article about the show, and it was given the headline where with her. If that tells you anything about where we were in terms of, like, a long time ago, you know, national politics. A very long time ago. So it was a simpler time then.

[A]

Something like that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

All the popcorn hadn't popped yet or something.

[B]

Exactly, exactly. It was still. It was still, you know, just in the microwave or whatever was still being lazed. Yes. So while this is happening, there were two women in an independent baseball league on a team called the Sonoma Stompers. I want to highlight Kelsey Whitmore, who is one of them. She's kind of the face of women's baseball today, or one of the faces of women's baseball today alongside Monet Davis. And so she plays in this independent league for the stompers, and in 2022, she plays for the Staten Island Fairy Hawks, which is in the Atlantic League, which is an MLB affiliated league. So that's a very cool milestone. So we have in the background of these fictionalized depictions. I wouldn't say there's momentum, because I think that's like a strong word for something like this. But you do see, like, some progress happening behind the scenes. Kelsey Whitmore has opportunities on an international level. So there is a women's baseball World cup that's held every other year. And so you see women like Kelsey have this opportunity to play baseball internationally, but domestically. Right. The opportunities just really aren't there. She's like, shoehorning herself into men's teams when she can.

[A]

And what countries are there opportunities in for women?

[B]

Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's, like, typically, like Australia, Canada, China, Japan. Japan's a big baseball country in general. Mexico. Like, these are the kinds of teams we see in the World Cups.

[A]

Yeah. We gotta get with it.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, so what's really nice is that the Women's baseball World cup has its group stage this summer in Rockford, Illinois, which you will know beginning, because Rockford is the home of the Peaches, a team featured in A League of Their Own.

[A]

Of course. Love it.

[B]

So, yeah, you have like these incremental, like kind of start and stop bits of progress both in real life and in fictional depictions which, like, I'm a big believer in like representation. As corny as that sounds like, I do think when you can see people,

[A]

we like corn here. Here.

[B]

Yeah, we do. That reminds me that in A League of Their Own, the TV show, the black woman is from Rockford, actually. And she's like, you know, she's telling the guys like, there's no peaches there. You should call the team the Corn. And. And the men she's talking to are just very unamused by that.

[A]

I am very amused. The Cobs would also be good.

[B]

That would be an elite name. Yes. So, you know, we've started seeing more girls and women playing baseball in real life and fiction. And we've also, I do want to note, we've seen women slowly trickle into non playing roles as umpires, as coaches. We've even seen a general manager in Major League Baseball. So we are seeing these little bits of these reasons for hope. And that's what all leads us to this current moment of this baseball league starting in August. August. It's called the Women's Pro Baseball League and it is starring our pals Monet, Davis and Kelsey Whitmore, which is really cool.

[A]

Yeah, that's amazing.

[B]

Better late than never to get these opportunities.

[A]

Everyone start doing research for the biopics right now. These are exciting times.

[B]

Absolutely. And you might be delighted to know that this new league held an open tryout last year. So a league of their own style. Yeah, but what if.

[A]

What if one of the girls can't read?

[B]

So this tryout drew more than 600 people. So there is an appetite for this, right? You can tell.

[A]

Yeah. Well, I mean, I. I just think that people like watching other people do cool stuff and that one of the things that's always held us back is, you know, networks and conglomerates and leagues and whoever the people whose job it is to. To guess what the American people want. Because I think that people in those positions consistently underestimate the level of interest that people have for things that are new or feel a little bit unprecedented because maybe the desire has been there, but the people who get to make the important decisions don't believe that the desire is there because they're all men.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, imagine that people have like, like an appetite and a tolerance and a enthusiasm, even for things that don't seem familiar.

[A]

And people like to try new things. I mean, an example that pops into my head is when. Do you remember when, like, Food Network in like the late 90s was like, we're going to start playing Iron Chef.

[B]

Uhhuh.

[A]

And we're just going to see if people watch it because presumably we kind of only have. Have like so much original programming. We need to bulk out our schedule. And then people, including me and my mom, got obsessed with Iron Chef, you know, and that was something that I'm sure plenty of people would have been like, the American people aren't capable of enjoying Iron Chef. It's too subtle. But, you know, but that was a huge hit in my household and I think pretty objectively too, as an import. And there's just something about, about, like, I just think it's important to let people try stuff out and see what they like rather than deciding what people are capable of liking and not offering them things that you've decided you don't want to bother with, you know, because.

[B]

Right.

[A]

This is like an objectively cool thing.

[B]

It's so cool. And. Yeah. And I want to send you a cool picture that it would be great if you could describe to people what you were seeing and then I'll tell you more about it.

[A]

Oh, okay. I see a younger looking femme presenting person with long hair, tall baseball cap, looking very smiley and, I don't know, nice tan, young and healthy and very happy in front of some screens that say women's pro baseball league and is hugging like a very Florida grandma type with visor sunglasses and fluffy white hair. And the Florida grandma type is like, holding this person's hand, like with. With her hand. And it's just, I don't know, it's just lovely. It's like a, it's a, it's an intergenerational hug.

[B]

Yeah, it's. It's just a really beautiful picture. And it was taken by the journalist Howard Megdol at the tryouts for this league. And, and that is Kelsey Whitmore is the younger woman you just described. And the person she is embracing is Maybelle Blair from the original All American league. Blair was 98 at the time of this picture. And just like, imagine how cool it would be to see your dream come full circle like this.

[A]

Yeah, I'm thinking of that stupid Madonna song that I don't even like, which is especially annoying because it's over footage of these, like, jacked old women playing baseball together, which I just love. And yeah, I think that there's. There's like two things that this is making me think of that I feel like have been themes in my head the whole time we've been talking. And one is that I feel like the way American men talk about baseball has always been fascinating to me because I feel like they see it as some kind of sacred ritual of masculinity. And I think that there is like some kind of special reluctance to allow women and queer people and anyone who isn't sort of along the David Strathearn orientation on this character grid, I guess this reluctance to let in non members of the club because of this idea that if other people get to experience this as a rite of passage, then it won't be as powerful for us anymore or something like that. And I don't think that's a How any of this has ever worked, but it's a good excuse for denying people opportunities, I guess. And I think that that's one of. One of the themes here, you know, this idea that if baseball is so central to masculinity, then how can women do it? How can people outside of the mold that we've always looked to done it? Although actually the kind of men who play baseball and are allowed to play baseball have changed a lot, both in terms of racial integration and the fact that you don't really see guys who look like Babe Ruth anymore, I don't think. But maybe we should. But anyway, I'm getting in the weeds, but, you know, I guess I feel like there's this sort of. This sense that, like, baseball is kind of an American religion. And that has allowed there to be some sense that it's just to keep it exactly the same as it has always been to the greatest extent possible. While of course also projecting logos onto the pitching mound or whatever, which I think is gross. That is something that I would like to not be different. But I don't know. The arguments people come up with to resist change, I think, think maybe a lot of the time are gesturing toward this idea that if we share something with more people, then there will be less of it to go around. And I don't think that's true generally and certainly not of baseball, which is by definition an intangible concept that there is not a limited amount of in the world. And B, because looking at this picture just makes me think of like, I'm glad to have kind of gotten out of this very 90s idea of what progress looks like, and this idea that you win something and then it's yours forever and nothing ever backpedals because certainly in the last 10, 20 years, we've seen not just backpedaling, but just like. I mean, I think American progress in many ways can be accurately described as a crazy straw. You know, and if you realize that you're inside of a crazy straw, it's much better to understand that and to understand how it works than to think that you should be going straight upwards. And if you're not doing that, like, if you're not on a ladder, then you must be in a chute. And it's like, no, it's not a shoot. It's a crazy straw. We just kind of. We win something and then we lose it, and then if enough people fight hard enough for it, and if the timing is right, then we can get it back again. Again. And the fact that ground that people once gained has been lost, has been taken back by people who want to keep the world as it once was. That doesn't mean that you can't win it back again.

[B]

I love that. Yeah. It's kind of like you said, it's all about knowing, trying to recognize where you are in the crazy straw and plotting a path toward a better arc through it. Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And that doesn't happen overnight.

[A]

Well. And also isn't kind of the worst thing that can happen in a way, in sports, to be a team that starts out strong and then you stay strong and then he finished strong, and then you win and no one has a chance against you, and you're the New England Patriots.

[B]

That. Yes.

[A]

I don't know much about sports, but I do know that you did land that pretty well.

[B]

Good job. Yes.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

Absolutely. It's boring, and no one wants that. Right. You want to see the struggle. The struggle is a part of sports.

[A]

Right. And I guess maybe that's a way of showing us not that we want to create fake reasons to struggle, because that's what the Liver King was all about or something. That was about a lot, really. But it's maybe something that reminds us that you can't predict how things are going to go and that your sense of identity can come not from what you have at any given moment or what you've done at some time in the past, but how you're able to react to whatever you're dealing with at the second and in the next second, and also to not celebrate something when there's three seconds left on the clock. Because you never know.

[B]

Right. That's way too early. But, yeah, no, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And I think baseball is a spoiler sport. That's all about how you react under difficult circumstances and under pressure. If you let someone on base, well, guess you better refocus on the mound and get the next person out. Right. Like throw strikes. Like there's no way out but through. And I think that is true for this fight to gain acceptance as well.

[A]

Yeah. What has it been like for you to grow up with baseball ball and in terms of just sort of, I don't know, the way that it has maybe contributed to your. Your understanding of life or your perspective, you know? Do you. Because I, like, I've. I've thought an embarrassing amount about figure skating when I am sort of entering high pressure moments in my life, I'll tell you that.

[B]

Yeah, I think sports are great because they're there, they're consistent. And I have loved, like, the rhythm of baseball and having baseball on in the background at various points of my life. Like, I think that baseball teaches you patience. You know, even just watching it, like, I never played baseball, but, like, just watching it, you can embrace the slowness of it. It's a feature, not a bug. And you can embrace the fact that despite its slowness, you have to pay attention every single second because you never know when, like, a hit is going to break out, out or, you know, as you'll see a series of run score, anything like that.

[A]

It's preparing you for toddler parenting potentially, I guess,

[B]

to the extent that anything can prepare one for that.

[A]

Yeah, well, yeah, that's true.

[B]

But yeah, so it's. It's just nice. And it is something I want more people to experience, whether that's playing or watching or both. And I think there's a lot to be excited about with a sort of scrappy new league. They held spring training this year. They have a co founder and commissioner named Justine Siegel, and she's long been a major driving force behind getting girls and women interest and opportunities within baseball. She has a nonprofit called Baseball for All. For those wondering, as I said earlier, the teams will play on a neutral site in Springfield, Illinois.

[A]

Hmm.

[B]

But they represent Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. There's also some kind of, like, I don't want to be a downer in this episode on kind of like a sour note, but there are some, like, early questions and curious things about this league.

[A]

Look, we love a sour note on this show.

[B]

That's true. Yeah, I mean, there's some early reporting out there from one of the only journalists who's closely following the league. Their name is Jen Ramos Eisenhower. And they've put forward a lot of questions to the league about what may happen beyond 2026, whether they have plans to move out of the neutral site into their home cities. Jen also pointed out to the public that there were unpaid internships listed on the league's website, including for some pretty key positions like clubhouse manager. We're like, that's not really an intern's job. It's certainly not an unpaid intern's job job. Also, like, there's questions about how much these players are going to be paid for their time and their sacrifices. Like, each team apparently has a salary budget of only $95,000, which sounds like a salary for one person, but they have to roster 15 players with that money.

[A]

Oh my gosh, they're not grad students.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That. Which is that. That is what you would pay grad students, which is also a travesty. But that's a different topic. Yeah.

[B]

Right. But like, so I don'. Know if the money is being split evenly among each player, but if it was, that comes out to about 6,300 per player for the season.

[A]

I mean, even if it's being split unevenly. Yeah. There's like, no, there's no good outcome with that figure. Yeah. I mean, this is the kind of thing where it's like, well, I hope it works out, but the, the strength of the idea can't float. Poor execution, if that's what we end up with, you know, and, and that matters too. It always does.

[B]

Yeah. So, like, I have my doubts here about if this is like the answer we've all been waiting for, but you know, it's certainly a step in the right direction. It's. I'd rather have someone like Kelsey Whitmore, Monet, Davis get these opportunities and get none at all. So, you know, I think whether or not this league is a long standing success, it's only the beginning for girls and women in baseball. Really. There's going to be a lot more to come if any of these people who we've been talk about have anything to say about it.

[A]

Yeah. And the answer is not any specific league or specific financial backer, given how those can come and go like a summer's day, but trying and continuing to try and seeing the value in trying to build that and giving people that opportunity and accepting change and, and temporary failure is part of that, I think.

[B]

Right. So I would Say at this moment, we don't exactly know, like, where we are in like the loop de loop of the crazy straw we're in, but with any luck, it's somewhere on the upswing, you know, I don't know.

[A]

Yeah, but I mean, I don't know. The point is that women want to watch other women do cool stuff. And dare I say it, lots of other people want to watch women do cool stuff stuff as well. Men also, despite some of those loudmouths who want to give you all a bad name. I think that people just fundamentally, and this is where we get into maybe one of the bigger zoom out topics too, where it's like the more you talk about gender in sports and the differences that it creates and the sort of different cultures that we built over time around it, what you kind of come back to, I think in the the end is the irrelevance of it ultimately, you know, and just the sense of like. Well, at the end of the day, people like to watch people do cool stuff and then it makes them think about doing stuff and then maybe they'll try it, maybe they'll watch more of it. But we just like, we as human beings, we like to see each other and it feels like we like if we're allowed to consider women in sports. It's almost like that's what it takes for me anyway, to sort of zoom out and articulate. I love talking about women in sports, but it brings me back to ultimately the sense that it just completes the picture to show sports is not really a gendered thing at all, but just something that is there for everybody.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we've said things to this effect on this show before, but gender, it just goes to show that gender does not need to be the organizing principle of media social sports anyway.

[A]

Yeah. The organizing principle of sports needs to be who feels like doing it that day.

[B]

Yeah, I love that though. I really do.

[A]

Yeah. And some of us would like to sit quietly under a tree and read and that's fine too. Some of us probably would have been better served by doing more solo activities where they couldn't have been hit in the face by a ball that they didn't see coming. Possibly. Yeah.

[B]

I'm all for people not getting hit in the face.

[A]

Yeah. It's also just great for people to have as many choices as possible to find the things that they love doing and that can kind of help them to have the relationship with their body that they deserve. Because I don't really like exercising in a team capacity. Fundamentally, because I think that understanding social dynamics and moving my body around at the same time is just, like, even just thinking about. About it makes me feel like freaking out a little bit, because those are two things that I. That take 75% of my capacity, and so I'll be, like, at 150% the whole time. But if I can just, like. If you, like, point me in a direction and tell me to start walking, I can just kind of keep going until I hit a body of water. And that's what. And that's what I've always liked doing. And also, if we're allowed to listen, we kind of know what feels good to us. And I think having. Having as many things open to us as there can possibly be is also what we deserve, just as physical creatures that exist in space.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I hear this again and again from friends who, like, didn't click with team sports growing up necessarily, or didn't click with a certain team sport. And then, as adults, have found types of exercise and movement that really work for them. And they're very surprised to know that they don't actually hate fitness or hate moving around.

[A]

It's.

[B]

They just hated the few options they had at the time.

[A]

Right. Yeah. Because Jim is in school, for a lot of people, is like, eight forms of social hell and parachute week.

[B]

Parachute week, yes.

[A]

Yeah. Also, I could never climb a rope. Not once. And, like, there was never, like, even the suggestion that it might happen. You know, it was. It was so clear that that was not gonna. I was not gonna climb that rope.

[B]

Did your gym have one? Because my gym class did not. And I'm so grateful for that.

[A]

We. I. Yeah, it. It at least came up when I was in, like, later elementary or middle school, I think. And there were. And there were, like, other. There were. I, like, most of the other kids could do it, but they were also much shorter. Well, Julie, I'm just. I don't know. Thank you for listening to a lot of my disjointed ramblings about topics that I only slightly understand and telling us the story and preparing us for our summer of sports watching. Tell us again about any books that you might happen to have coming out.

[B]

Oh, yeah, it's funny you say that, because I do happen to have a book coming out.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

And more than that, it's a book about someone finding her place in professional sports, so it's called Finding Renee Richards. You pre order wherever you find books, but if you want a signed copy, pre order from my hometown, Astoria Bookshop, here in Queens.

[A]

That's so fantastic. Yeah. I loved reading it and kind of being immersed in this period of, I don't know, American sports history, but also really just history broadly that I feel like I had never encountered before. Before I talk to you about Renee, and also, you know, for people who've listened to that episode that we did, I think it'll be really wonderful to see you then get to enter that story that you had been telling us about, because you ended up interviewing Rene for, I mean, perhaps countless hours.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Many, many, many hours.

[A]

Yeah. And there's. There's something so fascinating about being someone who is interested in a life that someone has led. And when that door kind of opens, it feels like the thing in Beetlejuice where you draw a door and then a door is created where there was no door before. And you are able to then talk to that person and ask them the questions that you have. And you depict this relationship that you developed with her as you were writing about her life. And I really loved, especially the time that you dedicated to kind of showing the two of you kind of developing this understanding of each other, it seems like.

[B]

Thank you, Sarah. Yeah, I really appreciate that, because I did think that was part of the story. It's not even a blip on the trajectory of her entire life story, but I do think. I do think it's part of it. And I wanted to show interacting with professional trans athlete and grappling with her, changing opinions, changing views. And I'm glad you feel like I accomplished that.

[A]

Yeah, no, I did. And I feel like there is, because there's something so interesting about, I don't know, writing itself as a discipline, writing memoir, writing biographies, nonfiction, where it's like, there's certain, you know, best practices and kind of conventions, but at the same time, everything is up in the air sometimes in terms of the best way to depict what the story seems to encompass, I guess. And part of that, I think, is, you know, you as a younger queer person, talking to someone who broke new ground in her time and now is. Is living in a world that progressed, I think you could say, because of her actions and has grown into something that, you know, she doesn't entirely understand, but that you're both trying to understand each other. I don't know. I just really loved. I think that depicting the trying is really. I loved getting to see that, and I would always love to see more of that.

[B]

Thank you, Sarah. Yeah. And I guess just to tie nice bow on it, both the book and what we've been talking about in baseball are, to state the obvious, showing that sports aren't just for men, they're for people, like you said.

[A]

Yeah. And the book is called Finding Renee Richards. And when is its publication date? When can we read it?

[B]

August 18th.

[A]

August 18th. Oh, my gosh. And, Julie, thank you for coming on and teaching me how baseball works and telling me what an inning is and writing this book. It's been so wonderful.

[B]

Sam.