Mo'Ne Davis and the Unfair Exclusion of Women from Baseball

The latest breakout star of the Little League World Series is a 13-year-old pitcher who threw a three-hit complete-game shutout to get the Taney Youth Baseball Association into the LLWS. Mo'Ne Davis's 70-mph fastball would be enough to get the baseball world to take notice, but as you can gather from the pronouns in the paragraph or from the fact that she walks up to "Run The World (Girls)" by Beyoncé, Mo'Ne is a girl. That's the big, big exciting news worthy of tweets like this:

Her gender is framed as a big reveal, as the most impressive detail about her awesome accomplishment. Let's set it straight: The most impressive thing about Mo'Ne is that she can dominate her peers so convincingly; her abilities have nothing to do with gender. SportsCenter's tone suggests it's incredible because she's (wow!) a female, which contributes to the idea that women and girls have been traditionally excluded from sports as a result of being weaker, less able, or less interested than little boys. That's not true, however. Sports, and baseball in particular, became male-dominated not by accident, but as a result of decades of systemic exclusion.

If you look hard enough, there are plenty of examples of women and girls who can play baseball as well as men and boys. In 1931, a 17-year-old minor leaguer named Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Mitchell had been pitching for over a decade at that point, having been taught the art of throwing breaking balls by her neighbor, future Hall of Famer Dazzy Vance. Ruth, Gehrig, and the rest of the New York Yankees came to town to face the AA Chattanooga Lookouts in an exhibition game, and Mitchell was the starter that day. Ruth was called out looking, Gehrig swung and missed thrice. Of course, Ruth's ego could hardly stand the humiliation of being foiled by a female, and he made it known that he saw women unfit for the sport. Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis (who, by the way, makes Bud Selig look like a goddamn angel) agreed with the sentiment and voided Jackie's contract with the Lookouts, effectively discouraging other women who aspired to play ball.

Women were officially declared ineligible to play in the MLB in 1952, a rule that held until 1992, when Carey Schueler, the daughter of White Sox general manager Ron Schueler, decided she wanted to make a run for a roster spot and the Sox drafted her in the 43rd round. But in the 22 years since, hardly any progress has been made to get more women into baseball—instead, they're shunted off into softball, a second-tier sport without the cache or chance at wealth that baseball provides.

In June Emma Span, wrote an exceptional piece in the New York Times about how girls and women are conditioned to play softball rather than baseball:

Even where no official rules keep them out of baseball, girls face enormous pressure to switch to softball. "They get chased right out of middle-school baseball," said Jennifer Ring, the author of Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball, whose daughter fought to play in high school and played a season on Vassar College's Division III men's team. When a girl persists in playing, Ms. Ring said, "you can't count on it being a good experience, because you have to explain why you're even there."

A friend of mine named Katie ran into this when she wanted to play baseball like Jackie Mitchell once did. She wrote to me in an email:

I played baseball with my brothers and all the neighborhood kids all the time. When it came time for Little League, my Dad asked if I wanted to play. At that time, girls couldn't play in Little League. First I said yes, but about a week before he had to go the league office and make his case for me, I told him no. I was a shy girl and the last thing I wanted was to deal with the hullabaloo that would have been created by being the only girl in the league.

The good news for girls who love to pitch, bat, and field, is that we've entered an age of social enlightenment in which they can follow their dreams in ways they haven't been able to in previous eras. A recent campaign by Always took a big swipe at the connotations of doing an activity "like a girl," in a series of provocative spots:

The endgame here is not necessarily for Mo'Ne Davis, Kayla Roncin, and Chelsea Baker to break the glass baseball ceiling by themselves, but simply to demonstrate that it's time to do away with tired ideas about female strength and passion. Don't get me wrong: I want each and every one of the aforementioned girls to reach their own personal goals, but I don't believe they have obligations to blaze trails for the sake of anyone else. Their examples are enough, and parents of even younger girls are taking note. In an emotional piece in Philadelphia magazine last week, a father wrote about how his daughter wants to throw like Mo'Ne:

Our daughter was one of two girls on her Taney baseball team this season (her friend Sarah was an All-Star selection!), which had just 16 girls out of 182 kids in the AAA division of seven- and eight-year-olds; she was one of five girls out of about 70 kids in her age group at Temple's basketball camp in June; and she was the only girl at Penn Charter's sports camp in July. To show our daughter that being a girl does not mean she cannot play baseball as good as, if not better than, the boys, I've driven her to a handful of Taney's games this past month to watch Mo'Ne play ball.

As for now, Mo'Ne's focus should be on keeping her head up and keeping her pitch count down. Mo'Ne and other little girls face unique challenges in a male-dominated field, of course, but when these girls are on the field, they are athletes just like everyone else. They have to pitch well, pitch better, and avoid blowing their arms before they make it to the minors.

Lindsey Adler has been listening to "Run The World (Girls)" on repeat all day. Follow her on Twitter.