Major League Baseball made a significant — if overdue — statement in 1947 when the Brooklyn Dodgers promoted Jackie Robinson.
Everybody gets a chance to play.
The partnership MLB recently announced with the nascent Athletes Unlimited Softball League isn’t a women’s lib repeat of Robinson’s modern racial integration. An initiative for professional softball doesn’t create a path for MLB’s first female ballplayer. Not literally tomorrow, anyway.
But Jackie’s message — that everybody should get a chance to play — rings loudly again with the coming of the AUSL. And it’s because the league is backed by MLB.
MLB is sharing not only its wealth, infrastructure and gravitas to support professional women’s softball, but former league executive Kim Ng is the AUSL’s first commissioner. She broke barriers herself as the first woman to be an MLB general manager, with the Miami Marlins.
If women’s softball is going to work in the way other pro leagues work, this is the beginning of how it will happen.
The most famous historical example of professional women ballplayers comes from another venture supported by MLB — or at least one of its owners. Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley founded the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which played from 1943 to 1954. Many fans have heard of it, if for no other reason than the Penny Marshall movie with Tom Hanks, Geena Davis and Madonna: “A League of Their Own.”
Wrigley might have viewed women professional ballplayers as a gimmick, and as a chance to make some bridge money for MLB until soldiers came home from World War II. That’s why it didn’t have more staying power. The example set by the women who played will endure. But the movie came out in 1992, and it documents a league that folded nearly 40 years before that. It’s been so long since it was real that events in “A League of Their Own” might as well be a work of total fiction.
Society has changed in the past 70 years. We’re not foolishly worried anymore about individuals breaking their femininity because of sports. Legions of girls play Little League and in high school, and softball has been a huge success in college athletics for decades — and it’s getting bigger. But only a few amateur players have ever gotten a crack at playing professionally. The opportunities have been fleeting, and leagues have had limited staying power.
MLB’s involvement doesn’t make anything a sure thing.
Professional fastpitch softball leagues have existed in one form or another since 1997, but none were backed by the full faith and credit of an existing major league.
What might we be missing without an MLB partnership with professional softball? Just the other day, Tennessee’s softball ace Karlyn Pickens threw a pitch 79.4 mph in the NCAA Tournament. When taking into consideration that a softball rubber is 43 feet from home plate instead of 60 feet, 6 inches like in baseball, it would be like trying to hit a pitch thrown 111.71 mph.
No, it doesn’t mean the Detroit Tigers should be giving Pickens a tryout tomorrow, and that’s not what the AUSL is for. But it would be a sin if Pickens didn’t have a place to play as a pro, like the best-qualified college baseball pitchers do when they’re done with school.
It stands to reason that the quickest and best path to women having a sustainable place to play softball professionally comes from MLB lending its heft.
The WNBA, which also started in 1997, wouldn’t have made it this far and been this healthy without NBA support. But anyone possessing good faith can see that it is growing beyond that. Any of the NBA owners who were willing to invest in it 20-plus years ago might never see a huge return in their bottom line. But that’s not the only way an investment can pay off.
