Maria Pepe’s baseball dream lives in the young girls of tomorrow
The baseball made an audible popping sound as it landed in my mitt.
Standing across our front lawn, the person who’d delivered the ball with such force, was my daughter Mirabelle, long brown hair in a ponytail. A little girl who once fit across my chest with room to spare, sleeping peacefully on me as I read to her, the two of us getting to know each other just days after her birth, could now bring her arm through the fall air like a whip, the fits and starts of learning to play giving way to the comfortable, late-afternoon rhythm of a simple catch.
This was merely one of the joyful moments I experienced in my role of shepherd for Mirabelle as she played in the Maria Pepe Baseball for All-Tournament this past weekend in Edgewater, NJ.
The name, Baseball for All, captures so much of the current two-front battle any girl faces simply for wanting to play baseball. It’s startling to experience, a generation after the decision to play baseball was, for me, binary. I wanted to play, so my parents signed me up for Little League. That was it. I was a boy.
We live in a town where girls are allowed to play baseball, and Mirabelle did this past year, the lone girl in her age group, on her or any of the other teams. Still, even if she isn’t aware of it just yet, I feel all the eyes on her as she plays—for good and for ill, a barometer not just of her own abilities, but a referendum on any other girls who dare to do the same thing.
It’s anything but a simple calculation, with so many of her friends playing softball, or not playing sports at all. And as a father, I am always listening, looking, trying to determine how to be supportive without letting her feel like this is a battle she must wage on behalf of others, to be sure she’s going to the ballgame because she loves the feeling of her bat whooshing through the strike zone and connecting with the ball, that mixture of awe and pride as she glances back to me as we practice at a nearby batting cage, making sure I see, while registering her own new power.
She is excitedly following in the footsteps of Pepe herself, who made this decision to play with the boys possible back in 1972 when she, backed by the National Organization for Women, fought Little League’s effort to remove her from her Hoboken team, costing her a chance at playing in the Little League World Series. Pepe won the case, but as always, the gears of our justice system grind far slower than the fast-forward of childhood, and no, Pepe never got her chance to play in the World Series, nor did she even get the uniform back that was taken from her.
Her emotions were clear to anyone who so much as glanced at her on Saturday morning, the small group of girls from Baseball for All’s first tournament in 2015 already having swelled to 160 gathered in Edgewater, teams from all over the country, players even on Mirabelle’s team from Pittsburgh, the suburbs of Chicago, another from Baltimore, her parents apologizing for the sorry showing of their Orioles this season.
“I feel humbled and blessed,” Maria said to me. We’d first gotten to know her back in the spring, during Mirabelle’s 8U team practices. “I’m just taking it all in.” And then she made Mirabelle promise to get a hit for her.
The tips of the artificial turf field danced in the morning sunlight as the 160 strong overwhelmed the infield, sitting for opening ceremonies. Pepe was given a Baseball for All uniform, a symbolic making whole for a woman who’d helped make this possible, given to her by Justine Siegal, who has wildly expanded what normal looks like for a woman who loves baseball, including a time as a coach for the Oakland Athletics.
“I was 13 the first time I was told I couldn’t play baseball. And that’s when I decided I would play baseball forever,” Siegal said. “You are not just the future of baseball, but the present. And I see you. And your parents see you. Everyone sees you.”
There were girls playing who will be at the forefront of changing what we know of what is possible for girls, and then women, in baseball. A second grader on Mirabelle’s team named Piper works at her craft every day, with hitting instruction, learning to catch to make herself ever more valuable to the teams she wants to make—high school varsity, and then who knows? Her movements are pure, athletic, her body weight shifts in a single, brutally powerful motion as she swings, her line drives scooting into the outfield and past the outfielders.
But then there are girls like Mirabelle, who love to play baseball but love many other things as well. Mirabelle also loves her violin, her books, her extended games of make-believe, her impromptu dance parties, and perhaps most of all, she loves to talk. She’ll have to make a choice, and soon, whether the amount of work it will take to keep playing at the level of her peers is how she wants to spend what feels like precious little time already, as homework gets more onerous and other parts of her life tug more insistently on her sleeve.
Baseball For All means for anyone who chooses this path, there is a place to pursue it, free of those sometimes well-meaning, but infuriatingly universal efforts to steer her into softball. It’s where Maria Pepe ended up, but as she said on Saturday to the group assembled, “Softball is okay, but baseball is as American as apple pie. Baseball is for me. And girls should get to choose.”
And so Mirabelle chose. She chose to bat lefty her first two times to the plate on Saturday afternoon, and her initial hit was a merely well-placed grounder of the infield variety, Mirabelle scrambling up the first base line ahead of the defensive response. But the second one she sent, straight and true, between third base and shortstop. Her reaction time in the field has improved as well, knowing where the play is, who to throw to, all the small mental puzzle pieces starting to lock into place as her body learns to take advantage of her newfound knowledge.
No one judged the girl on the field. Everyone was the girl on the field, and so it was just a baseball game between two groups of kids in differing shades of blue uniforms, laughing and running, usually to the right place, as a thousand iPhone photographs were snapped.
The game ended, and then the older Baseball for All participants held a clinic for the younger girls, and Mirabelle couldn’t wait to get back onto the field, racing with her teammates around the bases, starting to master the art of sliding, before huddling with her new friends to pose for some team photos. I remembered those moments from my own Little League life, how I treasured them, and understood as well that these memories only follow opportunity, and that for too many girls, that pathway doesn’t exist, or pushes them, well before they’re ready, onto artificial exit ramps.
The next day, Mirabelle got up early, raced through her breakfast, and the moment we parked at the field, couldn’t wait to run back out into foul territory, glove in hand, to warm up. She played the infield, the outfield, even some pitcher—and registered another two hits, though her hardest-hit ball, a sharply-struck ball up the first base line, happened to land in the glove of the opposing first baseman.
The out didn’t deter her, and when the game ended, she and a few teammates stuck around for more, begging me to throw them some batting practice, taking up a makeshift game on the now-open field, only leaving when parental pleas turned to parental dictates.
Before we left, we walked over to watch the 18U All-Star game, these accomplished young women playing the game at an elite level. I watched Maria Pepe, her hands in her lap, taking in the ballgame from the bleachers.
She went on to a life in accounting, not baseball. “I always found myself surrounded by men, but that wasn’t going to stop me from my chosen profession,” Pepe said.
And that simple ability to choose, that same menu of options available to boys as they race toward manhood—that larger lesson is precisely why this matters so much, why sports, or anything within a social construct, cannot be separated from the political, from the overt messages. Our actions are always telling our children something. And we must listen to the Maria Pepes when they tell us what they hear, and we must change, we must do better.
It’s been hard to feel like that happens much, especially in 2018. This past weekend, for Mirabelle, for Maria Pepe, for this strong and growing group of girls, it felt as if it did.
The next day, I picked Mirabelle up from school. She was still sore, her legs aching with that unfamiliar pain of athletic accomplishment, the residue of muscles starting and stopping. But we’d also talked on the drive home from Edgewater about what it would take to keep up with the boys in her class next year in Little League, and how much better the girls will be at the next tournament when she will have aged out of 8u.
She asked me to have another catch. And so we did, our conversation about her day floating back and forth above the ball my daughter, every day pulled that much closer into a world full of people determined to steal agency from her, fired with authority into my glove.