Crying in Baseball with Julie Kliegman

Could there be a little crying in baseball as a treat? Sports correspondent Julie Kliegman is here to tell Sarah about the history of women’s baseball and softball and to finally teach her the rules of the game. From the days when women played alongside men, to the first women’s team in the 1940s, to the sexist rules placed on their teams, and the impressive modern players that are changing the game, they discuss the past and present through the lens of the 1992 film A League of Their Own. Together they try to follow the sport around what Sarah calls the Crazy Straw of Progress and around a loving baseball diamond that has long led the players home. Digressions include the imaginary Supreme Court case Woman v. Horse, Fried Green Tomatoes, and gym parachute week. More Julie Kliegman:https://www.juliekliegman.com/Pre-order a signed copy of Julie's new book Finding Renée Richards from Astoria Bookshop.org and get 15% off with code YWAPOD15 Edited + Produced by Miranda Zickler:http://linktr.ee/mirandatheswampmonster More You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merch Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Sarah Marshall?

  A thousand boyfriends just dropped their sandwiches, hearing me say that. So sorry to those sandwiches.

• 0:17Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, where sometimes we are all about sports and it 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 and sports today. And also, you are some exciting news and sports because you have a new book coming out. Will you tell us about that?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09Sarah Marshall?

  This very show, you say?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, a couple of 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.

• 1:27Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:50Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:18Sarah Marshall?

  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 gonna 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 like 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.

• 3:01Speaker 01

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

• 3:03Sarah Marshall?

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

• 3:08Speaker 01

  I would tend to agree with you.

• 3:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. She, 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.

• 3:29Speaker 01

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

• 3:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, she's tank girl. She's a big ball of wanting stuff.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  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, right?

• 3:52Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And that like, people, especially men, have always talked very overtly about gender when, when women in sports have come up. And I was thinking just the other day about, like, like, don't you think it's, this is like a whole other conversation, but I feel like there's been this like, interesting Tik Tok-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.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  It seems like seven too many. Yeah.

• 4:24Sarah Marshall?

  Or at least six too many, you know, but the, 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? Cause 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.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:51Sarah Marshall?

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

• 4:56Speaker 01

  That, that is the good take. Yeah, for sure.

• 4:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But, but like, 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 everyday. And you begin to think that everyone is like achieving highly on, in sort of whatever thing you're interested in without you.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:17Sarah Marshall?

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

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Fair.

• 5:40Sarah Marshall?

  But, 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 long distances, like until, until the seventies, which I think was the excuse he used to like, try and drag Katherine 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?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Right. And.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that it takes extraordinary circumstances for people to be proven wrong on something like this, which

• 6:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  comes up in baseball because literally a world war.

• 6:26Sarah Marshall?

  I can't wait.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  As you know, from a league of their own, a world war is what it took to get women playing in baseball professionally. So.

• 6:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, a literal supply chain breakdown and shortage of of human men.

• 6:40Speaker 01

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

• 6:48Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, tell me.

• 6:49Speaker 01

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

• 6:57Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 7:13Speaker 01

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

• 7:17Sarah Marshall?

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

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you'll have to kick them out.

• 7:24Sarah Marshall?

  We'll have to adjust to that.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, or adjust to it. That's the kinder option. Yeah.

• 7:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I would like to do that.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:41Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  The misery is part of it.

• 7:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And that's the Portland basketball thing, too, as far as I can tell. Yeah. And I will say also that, like, 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.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 7:55Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:18Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:29Sarah Marshall?

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

• 8:31Speaker 01

  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, like, cool novelty thing.

• 8:55Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Um, as opposed to like a sport that girls and women could reasonably aspire to play.

• 9:01Sarah Marshall?

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

• 9:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:20Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  And a cool thing, uh, 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.

• 9:34Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Not in Portland and not in New York.

• 9:38Sarah Marshall?

  A city near somebody, but who? Where, where is it coming to?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  It is coming to Illinois. So.

• 9:45Sarah Marshall?

  Great.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:46Sarah Marshall?

  Dead, that, well, not dead metal, closer to you, but still we can, we can meet there.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  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?

• 10:00Sarah Marshall?

  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 to Field of Dreams. Um, 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.

• 10:28Speaker 01

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

• 10:31Sarah Marshall?

  Great. Softball.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  You did a great job. Yeah.

• 10:35Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Uh, softballs are bigger. Uh, softball fast pitch is underhand pitching with that like windmill windup motion that you see.

• 10:45Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. Uh huh.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  And yeah, baseball is typically overhand. The softball mound is closer to home plate than in baseball. Softball has a smaller field overall. There are 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?

• 11:14Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  They're entirely different sports with different techniques.

• 11:18Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  So historically, we have fun old girls who play coed 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?

• 11:44Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Right. That's a much better comp. Yeah. Tennis and pickleball. So it, 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.

• 12:08Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And it always, and 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. Cause that is kind of how American history is, at least was taught to, I think us as kids in the nineties.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 12:26Sarah Marshall?

  As progress being sort of very unidirectional and, 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. Um.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:41Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, although I have to say, I love popcorn. I would like to be engulfed in popcorn. But yeah.

• 13:06Sarah Marshall?

  I would like to be engulfed in popcorn, too. So it's a kind of a cheerful metaphor of being engulfed in something.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:24Sarah Marshall?

  Right. It's like, they accepted it for a while, it turns out. But 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?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 13:47Sarah Marshall?

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

• 13:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:07Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  It feels like a fairly uncontroversial thing to say.

• 14:12Sarah Marshall?

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

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Right. That is a key part.

• 14:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Which also, I think, is an underrated part of the, the whole team sports conversation, right? And the, of course, your book gets into this from, you know, in, in many different ways, the debate currently happening and, 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 are 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.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:20Sarah Marshall?

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

• 15:25Speaker 01

  It seems like not a real problem. Correct.

• 15:28Sarah Marshall?

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

• 15:36Speaker 01

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

• 15:41Sarah Marshall?

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

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, like, I think this isn't really a complicated story in that sense. It's 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.

• 16:02Sarah Marshall?

  Or what, or your Madonna equivalent. Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:06Sarah Marshall?

  I think when I was, when I was a kid, I failed to understand the rules of softball in like, second grade. And then since then have always decided that the base related sports are just too technical for me to grasp. But 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.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:31Sarah Marshall?

  But what else?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:41Sarah Marshall?

  Cool.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  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

• 17:06Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  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?

• 17:17Sarah Marshall?

  Is, 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 like the shape that it is, but I like that everyone gets to say diamond all those times.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 17:35Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 17:44Speaker 01

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

• 17:48Sarah Marshall?

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

• 17:59Speaker 01

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

• 18:01Sarah Marshall?

  You can put them back together. Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Five second rule.

• 18:09Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, you run it. Yeah, I knew that. I just couldn't know it at that second. Um, 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 how basically it?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Or whoever's at what base? Like, yeah, that, yeah.

• 18:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, right.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Get tagged out by an opposing player with a baseball.

• 18:32Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, yeah. Mm hmm. 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?

• 18:55Speaker 01

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

• 19:02Sarah Marshall?

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

• 19:08Speaker 01

  There should be.

• 19:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I jump roping can get really technical. Um, okay. So, yeah, so that so thank you for that. And baseball is like famously can get kind of long. And I know that there was like a there was a World Series game this past year that or last year that went into like eight billion extra innings or something like that.

• 19:29Speaker 01

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

• 19:57Sarah Marshall?

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

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and more boring. Let's do it.

• 20:08Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so and when, when I, when did baseball come into existence? It was like a little, like post-Civil War, something like that?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Um, 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

• 20:27Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 20:28Speaker 01

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

• 20:37Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:53Sarah Marshall?

  And that was, was founded after the start of World War II, or after America entered?

• 21:00Speaker 01

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

• 21:06Sarah Marshall?

  Perfect.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 21:08Sarah Marshall?

  Which they changed to Harvey Barr's in the movie to avoid legal issues, we presume.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:31Sarah Marshall?

  It'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.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Right. Um, so there were like a few key points of the league. One of them being that like, everyone had to be super feminine. The, 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.

• 22:00Sarah Marshall?

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

• 22:02Speaker 01

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

• 22:12Sarah Marshall?

  What do you think about that?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:24Sarah Marshall?

  You can try to anyway.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:39Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow.

• 22:40Speaker 01

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

• 22:47Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Right. Um, 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.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  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, um, 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

• 23:41Sarah Marshall?

  No. Yeah. No, it really doesn't.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  There's no explicitly gay character, um, 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.

• 23:57Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And it's not, it's not even, I would say implied.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:01Sarah Marshall?

  You know, not, not even with Rosie O'Donnell, who

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:05Sarah Marshall?

  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, 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, we read Fried Green Tomatoes. And I think people have talked a lot about how the like explicit lesbian-ness was kind of like taken out of the movie. And it's sort of, I think, possible to read those characters as friends, Iggy and Ruth.

• 24:48Sarah Marshall?

  But in, in the book as well, it's like, it's always like 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 like the parents of a child. And yet, no one is, you know, no one ever uses the word gay or lesbian or, or anything like that. You know, it's just like said that they loved each other. And if you're, you know, 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 like, southern book from 1987.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:24Sarah Marshall?

  Really.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, there's, 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 Frankie De La Crata 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

• 26:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Tear the whole league up.

• 26:11Sarah Marshall?

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

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 26:15Sarah Marshall?

  For want of a nail, you know, etc.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. 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.

• 26:54Sarah Marshall?

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

• 27:05Sarah Marshall?

  It's like the Indianapolis clowns.

• 27:08Speaker 01

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

• 27:26Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and why was that?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Propriety, presumably.

• 27:30Sarah Marshall?

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

• 27:37Speaker 01

  I think that was the idea, yeah.

• 27:38Sarah Marshall?

  Or yeah, or for her own comfort and safety, potentially.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Presumably also for the men's comfort and safety, unfortunately, right? Like,

• 27:47Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 27:47Speaker 01

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

• 27:50Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm, yeah. And, well, and I realize that there's like, you know, it's probably very different brothel to brothel, but, uh, what, give me a whole movie about that, probably, you know?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, the pants victory.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:25Sarah Marshall?

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

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, like, if you were someone who wears skirts or dresses, you've tried to run in them probably, and that's less than ideal. Um, 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, right?

• 29:14Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  I think that's the key thing here.

• 29:17Sarah Marshall?

  Well, it's like how Debbie Thomas, I think, was given an extremely hard time at the Calgary Olympics for skating in basically a unitard. Because God forbid, a woman wore effectively pants on the ice. You know, and again, this idea that like, it really is fascinating to me how consistently it recurs sort of in the history of women in sports where this idea that like, if women are going to be like strong and competent and like clearly have like 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

• 30:00Sarah Marshall?

  identity from is maybe something women can do too. Oh, no. That like, 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 like, this sort of, you know, policing body, which, you know, generally is run by men ultimately, have to get really particular about what they're allowed to wear, you know?

• 30:24Speaker 01

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

• 30:30Sarah Marshall?

  Great.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  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?

• 30:39Sarah Marshall?

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

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:48Sarah Marshall?

  Really. Um, yeah. And also that it's also interesting that like, so often there, there seem to be like random bylaws saying that women can't wear something that is like, less revealing and/or more functional. Which I think is very annoying.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  It is very annoying, Sarah. Yeah.

• 31:11Sarah Marshall?

  All right, let's continue.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Yes. So would you like to take a little bit of a detour away from real life baseball and talk about fictionalized women's baseball?

• 31:22Sarah Marshall?

  Heck, yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  And really dive more into a league of their own, which I know is obviously a main area of your interests.

• 31:30Sarah Marshall?

  I would love to. Yeah, that's, this is where I have my best footing, for sure.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Great. So you know, it was released in 1992.

• 31:39Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Many, many decades after the league it's 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, is kind of like a movie about Tom Hanks, like, learning that women are people.

• 32:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, very much so.

• 32:05Speaker 01

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

• 32:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I mean, 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?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 32:19Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 32:27Speaker 01

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

• 32:41Sarah Marshall?

  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 ballplayer before alcoholism destroyed his career.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Right. I think he sees this as like, a punishment for

• 32:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  the way his career went.

• 33:00Sarah Marshall?

  And like, fundamentally, extremely demeaning.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 33:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and, you know, and he has great lines like, "I haven't got ballplayers, I've got girls."

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:14Speaker 01

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

• 33:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Which is not a criticism.

• 33:37Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 33:51Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, shout out to Madonna. Shout out to Hans Zimmer scoring it, for sure. And so, 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 is a standard that we've never held men in sports to.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  So I just think like, we can acknowledge and celebrate women playing sports for their own goals and their own satisfaction and their own motivations.

• 34:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 34:56Speaker 01

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

• 35:02Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 35:18Sarah Marshall?

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

• 35:22Speaker 01

  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 women in the early 90s probably would have been a nonstarter, especially in like a Tom Hanks kind of vehicle.

• 35:39Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  I don't think they would have had this like $40 million budget had they been trying to make a movie about queerness.

• 35:46Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, Tom Hanks was in Philadelphia at about that time, but this was like the period when like you could make a movie about gay people if someone was dying of AIDS, I think was was kind of the caveat at the time.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  It had to be like a very serious movie.

• 36:03Sarah Marshall?

  And they'd already done that one movie for that year.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:08Sarah Marshall?

  And also, it's just like, yeah, in the 90s, that, you know, there were a lot of kind of inroads being made, but it was, it would be hard to find a mainstream movie depicting an explicitly queer character who was having fun.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, let alone like groups of queer women having fun, right?

• 36:26Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  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 dies at war in the film.

• 36:44Sarah Marshall?

  Poor Betty.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 36:46Sarah Marshall?

  And we have, I also love the kind of Hollywood age thing where we have Gina 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 it is, part of it is set in Oregon and they say Oregon correctly, which is important.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  That is no small feat.

• 37:10Sarah Marshall?

  It's surprisingly rare.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:21Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 37:30Speaker 01

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

• 37:33Sarah Marshall?

  But yeah, I love that we have Gina Davis playing like, you know, she's back on the farm with her little sister and you're like, okay, maybe she's supposed to be like, like 22 or something. And then her husband is Bill Pullman and you're like, well, how old is Bill Pullman supposed to be?

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:50Sarah Marshall?

  Is he just like a? Old man

• 37:55Sarah Marshall?

  who married little Kena Davis, or is he also, 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.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:08Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like actively hard for me to watch that movie and not think about 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?

• 38:49Sarah Marshall?

  No, I haven't. Have you?

• 38:51Speaker 01

  I have seen parts of it.

• 38:52Sarah Marshall?

  How is it?

• 38:53Speaker 01

  It's interesting. Um, so it was like eight episodes or something on Amazon Prime. And I feel like it was very much trying to find its footing.

• 39:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. They don't give anyone enough time these days.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  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 men 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.

• 39:49Sarah Marshall?

  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

• 40:01Sarah Marshall?

  Seen 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 Gina Davis. And she's like, wow, that black lady has an arm.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 40:20Sarah Marshall?

  And then it's over and it's like, back to the other stuff. We acknowledge that some, sometimes, sometimes a black woman has a really good arm, you know, and you're just like, well, I, I don't know.

• 40:34Sarah Marshall?

  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 gotta get, we gotta 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.

• 41:19Sarah Marshall?

  But we guess this, 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.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  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, it serves as like an entry point instead of being like,

• 42:14Sarah Marshall?

  The one little moment.

• 42:15Speaker 01

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

• 42:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and like, I feel like there is this like, 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.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:43Sarah Marshall?

  Why don't they like that?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Doesn't it just like, I mean, men call in, but I feel like it just, don't call in, actually, but um, I think it just like threatens their 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? Like.

• 43:05Sarah Marshall?

  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 have never been that good at it objectively.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:24Sarah Marshall?

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

• 43:30Speaker 01

  That is such a good point, but I think.

• 43:33Sarah Marshall?

  It's too logical, I know.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Right. 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.

• 43:44Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  And a very large proportion of men think they can.

• 43:49Sarah Marshall?

  No.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Right. 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.

• 44:30Speaker 01

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

• 44:35Sarah Marshall?

  That's true. Yeah. But I'd like to be in a terrible.

• 44:41Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:54Sarah Marshall?

  But, you know, or something, competitive cheerleading, anything.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah. You, you want to be in a Jimmy John's, which is an interesting thing to unpack. But yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Maybe that's for another episode, though.

• 45:10Sarah Marshall?

  I want to be in an All American Un place with like a mounted TV.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:15Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:22Sarah Marshall?

  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 would 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'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.

• 45:54Speaker 01

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

• 45:59Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was something beautiful about that. Yeah.

• 46:15Sarah Marshall?

  And that was how you would end up watching The House of Yes on Portland's ABC affiliate at 4:00 PM on a Sunday because that was what they were showing inexplicably.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  There you go. Yeah.

• 46:27Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 46:39Sarah Marshall?

  But what if that wasn't what was happening in every bar I ever went to?

• 46:43Speaker 01

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

• 46:46Sarah Marshall?

  Let it be on.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  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 one TV for women amongst all the TVs for horses. It was a little comical.

• 47:16Sarah Marshall?

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

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's

• 47:29Sarah Marshall?

  that's like a very like 1800s kind of like woman v. horse.

• 47:36Sarah Marshall?

  Who is the fairer creature?

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:43Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, woman versus horse. Okay.

• 47:47Sarah Marshall?

  It's a Supreme Court case. It's been going on for many years now.

• 47:51Speaker 01

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

• 47:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, horse. It's always horse. Nothing against, nothing against horses. Sorry to this horse, but.

• 48:05Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 48:25Speaker 01

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

• 48:32Sarah Marshall?

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

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:37Sarah Marshall?

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

• 48:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:57Sarah Marshall?

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

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my understanding of it. Like, these things just like kind of peter out, right? Eventually.

• 49:17Sarah Marshall?

  It's a fad, like the Lombada.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  So I think A League of Their Own renewed 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.

• 49:34Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 49:43Speaker 01

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

• 49:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, such a big band music.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:04Sarah Marshall?

  You and I just want like a does but length cut of A League of Their Own, where we can see all the specific stuff.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I sure missed it.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  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's leagues, lose money. Like, you can't expect

• 50:39Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  anything like this is going to succeed right away. So we're, 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?

• 50:55Sarah Marshall?

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

• 50:59Speaker 01

  So she is the name of the woman in baseball that I think if our listeners have heard of any woman in baseball, they're most likely to have heard, at least in passing, of Monet Davis.

• 51:09Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  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 eighties.

• 51:26Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  But she really like achieved this level of like 15 minutes of fame that these other women bef- 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.

• 51:59Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:01Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. You got the cover up?

• 52:04Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:14Sarah Marshall?

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

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's, you, you haven't allowed the other team to score any 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.

• 52:43Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  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?

• 52:53Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  And you're not allowing them to score. There's something super powerful about that.

• 52:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. No, that makes sense. And is a shutout also, like, is pitching a shutout something that you Could be like really great at baseball for your whole life and just never do.

• 53:09Speaker 01

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

• 53:53Sarah Marshall?

  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. And 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 cover of both Time and Newsweek.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:17Sarah Marshall?

  The same week, you know?

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 54:20Sarah Marshall?

  But, yeah, and also that it's, she looks about like 13, like, what, what age is she?

• 54:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 01

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

• 54:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 01

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

• 54:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but, but also, I think, I don't know, to 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?

• 55:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Some illustrious career, right, in her chosen profession.

• 55:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, like LeBron James or something.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Right. But like so many people are, she was, you know, basically forced to pivot to softball in college.

• 55:32Sarah Marshall?

  Man.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I think she thought she'd never play baseball again. And she's in her mid twenties now, and she's going to be part of this new baseball league that I mentioned is starting up in August.

• 55:45Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, clearly, this is, this is a very good pivot.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:56Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:06Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:24Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  We're gonna take another detour, though, if that's all right with you.

• 56:29Sarah Marshall?

  Absolutely.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:41Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 56:51Speaker 01

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

• 56:56Sarah Marshall?

  What's your, what's your sales pitch for Pitch?

• 57:00Speaker 01

  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 fucking 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.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  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

• 58:03Sarah Marshall?

  A long time ago.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  You know, national politics, a very long time ago. It was a simpler time then.

• 58:09Sarah Marshall?

  Something like that.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:11Sarah Marshall?

  All the popcorn hadn't popped yet or something.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. It was still, it was still, you know, just in the microwave or whatever.

• 58:20Sarah Marshall?

  Still being lazed.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  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 was one of them. She is kind of the face of women's baseball today, or one of the faces of women's baseball today alongside Monique Davis. And so she plays in this independently for the Stompers. And in 2022, she plays for the Staten Island Ferryhawks, which is in the Atlantic League, which is an MLB affiliated league. So that's a very cool milestone.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  So we have like, in the background of these like fictionalized depictions, I wouldn't say there's like 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.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:35Sarah Marshall?

  What countries are there opportunities in for women?

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. Um, I think it's like typically like Australia, Canada, China, Japan. Japan's a big baseball country in general.

• 59:48Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Mexico, like, these are the kinds of teams we see in the World Cups.

• 59:53Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Yeah, we gotta get with it.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  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 because Rockford is the home of the Peaches, a team featured in A League of Their Own.

• 1:00:09Sarah Marshall?

  Of course. Love it.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  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-

• 1:00:29Sarah Marshall?

  We like corn here.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do. Um, 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.

• 1:00:51Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  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. It's called the Women's Pro Baseball League, and it is starring our pals Monet Davis and Kelsey Whitmore, which is really cool.

• 1:01:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. That's amazing.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Better late than never to get these opportunities.

• 1:01:36Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:53Sarah Marshall?

  But what if, what if one of the girls can't read?

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:03Sarah Marshall?

  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 guess what the American people want. Cause 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.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:57Sarah Marshall?

  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 gonna start playing Iron Chef?

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:10Sarah Marshall?

  And we're just gonna see if people watch it because presumably we kind of only 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, um, 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, um, as an import. And there's just something about like, I just think it's important to let people try stuff out and see what they

• 1:03:50Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:00Sarah Marshall?

  This is like an objectively cool thing.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:14Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, okay. I see a younger looking femme-presenting person with long hair, tall baseball cap, looking like very smiley and, I don't know, nice tan, like, young and healthy and very happy in front of some screens that say Women's Pro Baseball League. And it's hugging, like, a very Florida grandma type with visor sunglasses and fluffy white hair. And there, and the Florida grandma type is like, holding this

• 1:04:56Sarah Marshall?

  person's hand, like, with, with her hand. And it's just, I don't know, it's just lovely. It's like, it's a, it's an intergenerational hug.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's just a really beautiful picture. And it was taken by the journalist, Howard Megdal, at the tryouts for this league. And that is Kelsey Whitmore is the younger woman you just described. And the person she is embracing is Maybel 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.

• 1:05:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I'm thinking of that stupid Madonna song that I don't even like,

• 1:05:40Sarah Marshall?

  which is, is especially annoying because it's over footage of these, like, jacked old women playing baseball together, which I just love. And, yeah, there's just, 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, you know, anyone who isn't sort of along the David Strathairn orientation on

• 1:06:25Sarah Marshall?

  this character grid, I guess. You know, 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 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, 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

• 1:07:10Sarah Marshall?

  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 that, you know, I guess, I feel like there's a 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, 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.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:45Sarah Marshall?

  Which I, I think is gross. That is something that I would like to not be different. But I don't know that like, the arguments people come up with to resist change, I 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.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:12Sarah Marshall?

  Which is by definition, an intangible concept.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:15Sarah Marshall?

  That there is not a limited amount of in the world. And B, just 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, you win something and that's yours forever. And nothing ever backpedals because. You know, 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.

• 1:08:59Sarah Marshall?

  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 chute. 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. And, you know, the fact that ground that people once gained has been lost, has been taken back by, you know, by people who want to keep the world as it once was, that doesn't mean that you can't win it back again, you know?

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  I love that. Yeah. It's kind of like you said, like, it's all about knowing, like, trying to recognize where you are in the crazy straw and plotting a path toward a better arc through it, right? And that doesn't happen overnight.

• 1:09:50Sarah Marshall?

  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 you finish strong, and then you win and no one has a chance against you and you're the New England Patriots?

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  That, yes.

• 1:10:06Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know much about sports, but I do know that.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  You did land that pretty well. Good job. Yes.

• 1:10:13Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's just, it's boring and no one wants that, right? Like, you want to see the struggle. The struggle is a part of sports.

• 1:10:22Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And I guess maybe that's a way of showing us, like, you know, not that we want to, like, create fake reasons to struggle because that's what The Liver King was all about, or something. That was about a lot, really. But, you know, that 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.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Right. That's way too early.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  But yeah, no, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And I think baseball is a sport that's all about how you react under difficult circumstances and under pressure. If you let someone on base, well, I 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.

• 1:11:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. What has it been like for you to grow up with baseball? 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, and do you, because I like, I have, I have thought an embarrassing amount about figure skating when I am sort of entering high pressure moments in my life. I'll tell you that.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  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, or, you know, you'll see a series of runs score, anything like that.

• 1:12:38Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  To the extent that anything can prepare one for that, yeah.

• 1:12:47Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, that's true.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  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 interests and opportunities within baseball.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 1:13:42Sarah Marshall?

  Look, we love a sour note on this show.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  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 Eisen, 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, where like, that's not really an intern's job. It's certainly not an unpaid intern's 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

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:14:42Sarah Marshall?

  Well, my gosh, they're not grad students.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:45Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  Right. But like, so I don't 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.

• 1:15:02Sarah Marshall?

  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, if that's what we end up with, you know, and, and that matters, too. It always does.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  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 or Monique Davis get these opportunities than get none at all. So, you know, I think whether or not this league is a longstanding 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 talking about have anything to say about it.

• 1:15:54Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:34Sarah Marshall?

  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 as well. Men also, you know, despite some, some of the, those loud mouths who, who want to give you all a bad name. I think that the people just fundamentally, and this is where we get into maybe the kind of 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've built over time around it. Like what you kind of come back to, I think in the end is the irrelevance of it ultimately, you know?

• 1:17:19Sarah Marshall?

  And just the sense of like, well, at the end of the day, uh, 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 like. I love talking about women in sports, but it brings me back to ultimately the sense that like it just completes the picture to show sports is not really a gendered thing at all, but just something that is there for everybody.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:11Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that though. I really do.

• 1:18:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And some of us would like to sit quietly under a tree and read. And that's fine, too. Um, 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.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:45Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. It's also just great for people to have like 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, you know? Cause I, I don't really like exercising in a team capacity fundamentally, because I think that like, understanding social dynamics and moving my body around at the same time is just like, even just thinking about it makes me feel like freaking out a little bit. Cause those are two things that I, that take 75% of my capacity. And so I'll be like at 150% the whole time. Um, but if I can just like, if you like, point me in a direction and tell me to start walking, I can just

• 1:19:28Sarah Marshall?

  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 as many things open to us as there can possibly be is, is also what we deserve, just as. Physical creatures that exist in space.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  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 like types of exercise and movement that really work for them. And they're, they're very surprised to know that they don't actually hate fitness or hate moving around. It's they just hated the few options they had at the time.

• 1:20:12Sarah Marshall?

  Right, yeah, because gym is in school for a lot of people is like eight forms of social hell and parachute week.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Parachute week, yes.

• 1:20:22Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:40Sarah Marshall?

  We, I, yeah, 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, like, most of the other kids could do it, but they were also much shorter.

• 1:20:57Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's funny you say that because I do happen to have a book coming out. And more than that, it's a book about someone finding her place in professional sports. So it's called Finding Renee Richards. You preorder wherever you find books, but if you want a signed copy, preorder from my hometown Astoria bookshop here in Queens.

• 1:21:42Sarah Marshall?

  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 talked to you about Renee. And also, you know, to, for people who've listened to that episode that we did, I think it'll be really wonderful to, to see you then get to enter that story that you had been telling us about, because you ended up interviewing Renee for, I mean, perhaps countless hours?

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, many, many, many hours.

• 1:22:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And there's, there's something so fascinating about, you know, being someone who is interested in, in a life that someone has led. And when that door kind of opens, it feels like the thing in Beetlejuice where you like 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, and you really like, you depict this, you know, this relationship that you developed with her as, 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.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  Thank you, Sarah. Yeah, I, I really appreciate that because I did think that was part of the story. It's, it's not even a blip on the, you know, 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.

• 1:23:37Sarah Marshall?

  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 biography, 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, and part of that, I think, is, you know, you as, 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.

• 1:24:22Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. I just really loved. I think that, that depicting the trying is really, I loved getting to see that and I would always love to see more of that.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  Thank you, Sarah. Yeah. And I guess just to tie a 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.

• 1:24:47Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  August 18th.

• 1:24:56Sarah Marshall?

  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.