Baseball, perhaps fittingly for America's pastime, is a game of stubborn tradition and incremental change. This year, the Yankees will allow their players to don beards (and their fans to eat tiramisu out of little helmets). But women remain unable to play serious baseball, no matter how much they adore the sport. My colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany asks in our April magazine issue: 'In a game in which everything matters, in which we who love it wish to see every possible outcome unfold, how can we stomach the absence of women's baseball'' Today's newsletter explores the changes to baseball in recent years, and what has stayed the same....
A 2024 survey found that women made up 39% of those who attended or watched Major League Baseball games, and franchises have taken notice. The Philadelphia Phillies offer behind-the-scenes tours and clinics for their female fans, while the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees offer fantasy camps that are geared to women. The number of women working professionally in baseball has also grown. Kim Ng made history in 2020 when she became the first woman general manager of an MLB team, the Miami Marlins. As of 2023, women made up 30% of central office professional staff and 27% of team senior administration jobs. In addition, 43 women held coaching and managerial jobs across the major and minor league levels ' a 95% increase in just two years. As a fan and scholar of the game, I'm happy to see more women watching baseball and working in the industry. But it still nags at me that the girls and women who play baseball don't get much recognition, particularly in the U.S. Women have been playing baseball in the U.S. since at least the 1860s. At women's colleges such as Smith and Vassar, students organized baseball teams as early as 1866. The first professional women's baseball team was known as the Dolly Vardens, a team of Black players formed in Philadelphia in 1867. Barnstorming teams, known as Bloomer Girls, traveled across the country to play against men's teams from the 1890s to the 1930s, providing the players with independence and the means to make a living....
I'm borrowing that from a 1998 song by America's sweetheart, Faith Hill, but if you don't know the song, you still know that simple truth. You also know that to fail is to strike out; to fail valiantly is to go down swinging; to be surprised is to be thrown a curveball; to help a buddy out is to go to bat for him; and to succeed brilliantly is to knock one out of the park. And even if you haven't seen A League of Their Own, or have somehow missed Jennifer Garner's Capital One ads, you've probably heard the maxim 'There's no crying in baseball.' In January, I was standing in the locker room of George M. Steinbrenner Field, in Tampa, next to my teammates, whom I had met only the night before. When we heard the immortal words of Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan, the aggrieved manager of the Rockford Peaches women's baseball team, piping out of a nearby speaker, we recognized them and laughed. Then we clapped (or took out our phones for photos) as Len Milcowitz, the field coordinator and unofficial emcee of the weekend, emerged wearing a full Peaches uniform to drive home the point. He'd worn it in our honor, he said. 'You represent the true spirit of baseball in this country, period,' he told us....
The New York Yankees have abandoned their half-century prohibition of beards, a policy that was archaic even from its infancy. Now I find myself strangely, unexpectedly bereft, stroking my own beard in contemplation of what the world might lose when a Bronx Bomber goes unshaven. The Yankees, as any Yankee fan will tell you, don't have a mascot. They don't put names on the back of their jerseys. And most crucially, they haven't had a single player with a goatee, Van Dyke, or soul patch since 1976. This was the bedrock of Yankee exceptionalism. Although Joe DiMaggio famously said, 'I want to thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee''the quote, printed on a sign, long greeted players as they entered the home dugout'the good Lord himself could never be a New York Yankee. God, per many enduring renderings of him, still doesn't meet the team's grooming standards. Though the white-bearded God on the Sistine ceiling would no longer have to shave to play second base in the Bronx, he would have to trim his magnificent head of hair, which descends below his shirt collar. Or it would, if he wore a shirt collar. Baseball players don't wear shirt collars at work, but the ban on over-the-collar hair still applies to the Yankees, for whom the mullet remains a bridge too far. After he was traded to the team in 2005, the Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson forsook his own Mississippi Mudflap, becoming business-in-the-front-business-in-the-back, which might as well be the Yankees' motto....
