The Dawning Of A New Day For Women In Baseball
Looking back at the path to leadership for women in baseball, and wishing success for the growing cadre of new women leaders in the game.
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . Helene Britton was the first owner of a professional baseball team, inheriting the St. Louis Cardinals franchise upon the death of her father Frank, and uncle Stanley Robison. Britton owned the team from 1911 through 1916 and when she attended National League owner meetings other owners spent time trying to persuade her to sell the team because she was a woman.
. . . Following Branch Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson from the Negro Leagues to play Major League Baseball, Effa Manley, the owner of the Newark Eagles, fought for compensation for team owners and recognition of Negro Leagues contracts. A few months following Robinson’s entry into the major leagues in 1947, Manley and the Negro Leagues received compensation for Larry Doby, the first African American to play in the American League, which established a precedent for player compensation. The move showed the legitimacy of the Negro Leagues, giving the teams a measure of respectability never before seen from MLB.
Leading Off
The Dawning Of A New Day For Women In Baseball
By Bill Pruden
Reflective of my ever-advancing age, I well remember when a staple of Major League Baseball’s marketing efforts was the “Ladies Day” promotions that owners hoped would help develop a female following for the game. Little did they know where that would lead.
While a quaint concept in the eyes of a twenty-first-century fan, Ladies Day, an idea dating back to the 1880s, hit its stride as a popular marketing gimmick beginning in the 1920s and 1930s when they allowed women aged 16 and older to reap this benefit. Despite its success, it was not without its detractors. Indeed, criticism came from many directions, but especially from males who not only belittled women’s understanding of the game but also expressed fears that a woman’s attendance at the ballpark would infringe upon her responsibilities at home.
Ultimately the practice would end in the 1980s when a legal challenge claiming reverse discrimination led to its disappearance. However, by that time an impressive female fan base had been developed--although the role of Ladies Day in that process remains open to debate. But regardless, female interest in baseball was real, with modern attendance figures revealing an almost even split between men and women.
Still, fan base aside, one might still question the legitimacy of the label “National Pastime” when half of the nation’s population was kept not even on the sidelines, but banished to the bleachers.
Indeed, happily for the modern fan—man or woman—the involvement of women with MLB is no longer limited to sexist promotions or simply being fans. And yet the recent revelations surrounding the now-former New York Mets General Manager Jared Porter make clear that women are in no way fully integrated or accepted members of the baseball community. But whether it be on the field or in the front office, to their credit and despite the clearly herculean challenges they face, women now have an increasingly widespread, if still grossly underrepresented, presence in the game. Make no mistake, it is a presence based on talent, ability, passion, and an interest that has likely long been there but, lacking any real encouragement, was allowed to lie dormant for too long.
In fact, baseball, slowly mirroring the rest of the world, has come to realize that women are ultimately a resource untapped for too long, a realization of particular importance to a game that can use all the new ideas and all the talent it can attract. Notwithstanding the clear and long-time fan interest they had displayed, the movement of women from the bleachers to positions of professional and organizational influence has been a slow one.
Baseball history reveals a periodic, if inconsistent female presence at the highest level—ownership—where most women owners inherited their teams from their husbands. In fact, the first woman to buy a major league sports franchise was Joan Whitney Payson, a one-time minority owner of the New York Giants baseball team who had opposed the 1957 relocation of the team to San Francisco. In the aftermath of that move, she became a leader of the effort to bring national league baseball back to New York and ultimately became a cofounder and the majority owner of the New York Mets. In that role, she became a central part of the team’s lore and quickly became as identifiable a figure as any of the less-than-stellar players who populated the expansion team’s early rosters.
Of course, to the delight and amazement of the baseball world, Payson’s long-time dedication was rewarded when the Miracle Mets both shocked and delighted the baseball world by winning the 1969 World Series.
But interestingly, Mrs. Payson was not the first female World Series-winning owner in the greater New York region. In fact, the Negro Leagues boasted their own female owner in Effa Manley, whose co-ownership with her husband of the Newark Eagles from 1935 to 1948 was capped by a victory over the legendary Kansas City Monarchs in the 1946 Negro League World Series.
Meanwhile, in recent years, the design efforts of Janet Marie Smith, first with Orioles Park at Camden Yards, then with the renovation of Fenway Park (including putting seats atop the iconic Green Monster), and most recently at Dodger Stadium, have earned her an honored place in the pantheon of stadium designers, while revealing yet another way in which women have made an important contribution to the game.
And yet, despite her subsequent accomplishments, Smith’s initial interview with Baltimore Orioles executive Larry Lucchino began, by his own account, with a question about which league had the designated hitter. It was a query to which Smith quickly replied, “I am offended by that question.” She should have been, since it quickly became apparent that not only did she know baseball, but she had a vision of the game and its role in the community that ushered in a whole new era of stadium creation and design.
At the same time, her subsequent accomplishments notwithstanding, Smith’s interview serves as a poignant reminder of the challenges that women in baseball have had to surmount in the effort to make clear that being a baseball fan, much less, a knowledgeable one or one able to contribute in substantive ways, is not dictated by one’s chromosome make-up.
But for all that Smith’s work represents, as well as what it contributed to a critically important aspect of the multi-faceted baseball experience, it is the appointment of Kim Ng as the Miami Marlins’ general manager, coupled with the recent hiring of coaches Rachel Balkovec, who in 2019 became the first woman to be a full-time hitting coach for an MLB team, Alyssa Nakken, who in 2020 became the first female to coach on the field during a major league game, and Bianca Smith whose recent hiring by the Boston Red Sox as a minor league coach made her the first African American woman coach in a professional baseball organization, that offers the most evidence that baseball may finally be willing to open the doors to women and all they can offer the game. And yet a review of their credentials and experience makes clear the full extent of the challenges that remain.
Kim Ng becoming, at age fifty, the first woman GM was a hire that represented a massive cracking of the glass ceiling, for it announced to the baseball world that yes, women could be entrusted to handle the operations side of baseball. In fact, for years there have been female executives at the minor league level, but those jobs have been about marketing and community development and some of the other aspects of baseball that are so much a part of the distinctive minor league experience.
In contrast, Ng’s appointment came only after she had amassed a record of professional experience noteworthy for its depth and breadth. Her resume featured substantive, successful stints with multiple teams as well as the MLB central office, a cumulative record that by any objective standard can only be said to dwarf that of those in the recent pipeline of youthful, well educated, wunderkinds beginning with the 28-year-old Theo Epstein.
In fact, with the trend in GMs being towards ever younger, analytically oriented college grads, most of whose sports resumes paled in comparison to the experience that Ng boasted, the sport’s gender-blind spot could not be missed when the Marlins finally made the call. Indeed, while both the Marlins and baseball itself had every right to be pleased with her hire, those who noted, albeit quietly, that it was about time, could be excused for seeming to throw a bit of a damper on the celebration, so strong was her background and record.
But it was also another reminder that as history has shown, barriers and glass ceilings are not easily breached. Rather, while the well-earned opportunities afforded Kim Ng and the slowly growing collection of on-field women personnel represent major steps forward, at the same time, given how long it has taken to reach this point, they also represent risks in terms of future progress. Does anyone doubt that at the first sign of failure the chorus of naysayers will be ready to sing, maligning their efforts and the whole idea of women in baseball?
It was not an accident that Jules Tygiel titled his singular work Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. But for women, every opportunity they get, every barrier they seek to surmount represents less an experiment than a leap of faith. There can be no denying that in Robinson's case the pressures associated with breaking the color barrier, a line deeply ingrained in both the sport and American society, were unprecedented. And yet his talent as a baseball player had been proven beyond a doubt by his efforts in the Negro Leagues.
In contrast, from the start of their careers Kim Ng, Rachel Balkovec, Alyssa Nakken, and Bianca Smith, and all the others starting their climb, have had to contend with the old adage about a woman needing to do twice as good a job as a man to be recognized. But they have to do it in a field in which from the beginning they have had to do it right or risk falling off the ladder and ending their climb. Long consigned to the softball fields, women in baseball (unlike basketball for instance) have not had a comparable parallel path on which to hone their skills while pursuing their dreams and passions. And if they don't make it, there will be those who will simply label them the object lesson and broad-brushed examples of the fact that women and baseball don't mix. Unfortunately, failure is not an option readily available to trailblazers and pioneers.
From my spot in the stands, I wish nothing but success for Kim Ng as well as the growing legion of women coming behind her, a group anxious and capable of bringing a new and distinctive spirit and perspective to the game. May their passion and talent bring them the success and fulfillment they have worked so hard to achieve, while also reminding all of us that talents and dreams need know no gender.
Bill Pruden is a high school history and government teacher who has been a baseball fan for six decades. He has been writing about baseball--primarily through SABR sponsored platforms, but also in some historical works--for about a decade. His email address is courtwatchernc@aol.com.
Extra Innings
“I just get a great sense of spirit when I look at her, and I just think about the kind of spirit that anyone like her, or like me, or like any of the other women way back when—we all had to carry that spirit with us. We all had to be, as she says, dogged in pursuit of our goals.” - Trailblazing reporter Melissa Ludtke on Kim Ng’s hiring as Marlins’ GM