Girls play baseball. Girls love baseball. Girls are good at baseball, which unbeknownst to too many is played by women around the country and globe.
Cape Coral High’s Sophia Mathewson, for instance, started for the Seahawks’ JV team as a freshman this year. Last week she was among a select group invited by USA Baseball and Major League Baseball to a developmental camp in Vero Beach, and this week she goes to North Carolina to try out for the U.S. Women’s National Team.
Every year, though, tens of thousands of girls who start in baseball at young ages in this country are pushed out of it as they get older, often not so nicely.
The culprits naturally start with good old-fashioned Neanderthals. Such as the two New Hampshire coaches who allegedly hatched a plan just this spring to bean an 11-year-old girl, the only girl in their league, in the head to drive her from the league.
Or there are the coaches elsewhere who refuse to play the few existing all-girls teams in travel tournaments, prompting one organizer to stop disclosing the teams registered.
There’s also an almost impossible-to-surmount, de facto remnant of old-world misogyny.
It’s called softball, though there is no finger to point at the game itself or its far-greater number of participants.
