Book Review: Ring, J. (2015). A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball

Ring, J. (2015). A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

A Game of Their Own is an oral history of the American female baseball experience as told by ten members of the 2008 Team USA. The interviews were conducted by Jennifer Ring, a professor of Political Science and the Director or Women’s Studies at the University of Nevada.  Ring knows her subject well.  Besides writing a history of American women in baseball, her own daughter was a member of Team USA and experienced many of the difficulties outlined in this book.

In summary, the problem is this.

While American females may play coed baseball as preteens, once they reach adolescence they are largely shut out of any opportunity to continue playing baseball.  They may be offered inducements to switch to softball, which they can continue playing into their young adult years and for which they may even be awarded university scholarships. They are not legally prohibited from playing on high school baseball teams or in independent leagues, but coaches and parents often conspire against them in favor of boys, who have well established paths to collegiate and professional careers. The U.S. Baseball Federation Inc. (USA Baseball) aids in organizing and sponsoring a female team for international tournaments, but American women are always at a disadvantage for having to cobble together ad hoc teams, many composed of present or past softball players. Their rivals at these events — the Japanese, Australians, Canadians, and Venezuelans —  field teams comprised of women who have played coed or all-female baseball since childhood in countries that have local, regional, and national baseball tournaments for females.  Basically, American women are not allowed to play the game they love because there is no institutional support for coed or female leagues within the United States. 

Review: Gómez, C.G., 2007. A New Perspective on Mexican Baseball Origins (and others)

Baseball in California 1860s

Where did baseball come from?

Finding out requires quite a lot of careful work.  MLB’s official historian spent a lifetime on the subject and concludes the game as we know it is a tapestry woven from traditions and practices from across 19th century America.  There are obvious and documentable turning points, but no clear beginning.

The same is true of baseball in the USA’s southern neighbor. In the most recently published account of the game there, historian Jorge Iber concedes, “It is challenging to document baseball’s origins in Mexico.”

No one, it seems, thought it worthwhile to record the arrival of something so ephemeral.  After all, it’s just a stick-and-ball game, a rudimentary feature of many cultures and nothing likely to attract anyone’s attention – until years later, once the game has grown into a profit-generating business.