I hope someday -- soon -- baseball becomes the norm for girls/women/female players. I have never understood why they are relegated to softball.

I coach youth baseball, typically 10-12 year olds, where the 12 year old season is the last year on the small diamond. That move to the big diamond is where strength really becomes an issue. It's always funny to watch the reaction of the 13 year olds the first time they hit what used to be a line drive to the gap turn into a soft liner to short. We have had a number of girls who played at an extremely high level at the 10-12 year old level but weren't strong enough when they moved into the teen years where the boys tend to pass the girls in physical size.

Good for Pichardo of course and if someone can do it there is no reason she should feel like she can't. To address Traderdave's point about why girls are relegated to the softball in my experience it's rare for girls to grow into the physical strength to make that leap. And of course the girls that COULD do that are likely to get pressure from softball coaches where they can star and obviously the opportunities are likely to be greater for scholarships etc...

This all comes across a bit more negatively than I mean it to. If a girl can do it there is no reason she shouldn't obviously.

Neither of my daughters are big into team sports, but both recognized early on that basketball* and soccer are essentially the same for girls and boys and baseball is not. I have always wondered how much that factors in their total lack of interest in MLB versus having at least some interest in watching basketball with me.

* the womens' basketball is slightly smaller, but it's a minor difference and everyone shoots at the same basket.

Fast-pitch softball looks really fun. More speed involved, more varied approaches at the plate (slap hitters, power hitters, etc), and the pitches themselves are fun.


This is a very exciting development and I hope she has great success.

I have never understood why they are relegated to softball.

They're not relegated to softball any longer. However, once puberty hits, as Jose pointed out, girls have a difficult time competing with boys in baseball, or any sport, as they don't have the physical strength and power. If someone is skilled enough, as this young lady is, they are able to participate in the sport of their choosing.

There was a girl at my sons' high school who was the star pitcher for their baseball team last year, and actually led the team to the CIF championship for their division. She was the first female ever to pitch in the CIF championship game. It looks like she decided to pursue softball once she got to college.

Here's an article about her: Jillian Albayati

Has there been any discussion on whether a more deserving player was cut to make room for her?

I was a senior and landed the final spot on our high school varsity golf team, ahead of a sophomore of similar skill level. I thought it made more sense for the coach to take the "other guy" - who, as it happens, is to this day one of my closest friends.

But in that case, we played 3 or 4 rounds of 9 holes, and lowest score won. No intangibles.

Here, if they wanted her to be on the team but she wasn't quite good enough, I would hope that they would simply have created an additional roster spot.

@6: I always expected the first woman in MLB to be a pitcher. There's no rule against throwing underhand and good movement on the ball makes up for velocity; softball pitchers are very good at these things.

There's no rule against throwing underhand and good movement on the ball makes up for velocity; softball pitchers are very good at these things.

There are a couple of issues. Softball pitchers (male and female) get a lot of their velocity through windmilling; can't do that in baseball. They also generate break by brushing the ball against their legs.

The guys from "A King and His Court" threw over 100 MPH, but none of them every made the jump to MLB. It must be a big leap in style.

I always figured it would e a glove-first backup IF or a C. How hard can it be to out-hit Jeff Mathis? :-) (I know, I know, the smiley means "it's a lot harder than it looks.") Especially with the velocity demands of today, I don't know how likely it is for a woman to generate that sort of velocity. I am a bit surprised, even if just as a Veeck stunt, that no woman developed a knuckler well enough to get a NRI. (A bit surprised ... I understand it wouldn't have been a rational decision on her part to spend years working on a knuckler in hopes of becoming a stunt.)

There's video of her legging out a triple. She appeared to be a very fast runner. The fastest men are faster than the fastest women, but certainly very fast female runners can dust most men.

Has there been any discussion on whether a more deserving player was cut to make room for her?

This wouldn't have happened if she'd just dressed differently. She was asking for it.

A lot of knuckleballs are thrown at speeds non professionals would consider to be their fastball speeds or even faster.

Olivia's website said she throws about 78 to 83 mph and runs a 7.2 second 60 yard dash and a 3.61 second 30 yard dash

I'm somewhat pleasantly surprised that I've only found 1 in 14 posts featuring casual misogyny, and a post calling it out.

I’m glad someone addressed the important issue in regards to female achievement, positing that it happened only because a man was sacrificed.

Here's an article about her: Jillian Albayati

Wow that's cool! San Marcos is just up the road, maybe I'll catch a game and get to see her play

#2 (Jose) -

My son ran into some of that this year when middle school baseball began. He's 11 - but the youngest 6th-grader in the class. And he played 10U last season in travel ball. AND...the middle school plays on the bigger diamond, because the varsity has to.

The coach figured out quickly that he didn't have the arm for his normal position, 3rd base, so they moved him to second and that worked very well. But, he struggled pitching, as you'd expect. 10U is 46.5-feet...11U will be 50.5 feet...but he had to jump to 54.5 feet for middle school.

All I've heard lately from him is 'I have to get stronger', and yeah, but also, the hormones haven't kicked in. He was the second smallest kid at tryouts, and he's not been small for his age at all. Frustrating for him for now but he'll get there.

Relevant to the original post though, there was a girl on the varsity team, 8th grade, who from what I could tell was one of the best players, if not the best. Kicked some serious tail on both sides of the ball. I talked with her and her family a couple of times - she abhors softball and really doesn't want to have to make the change in high school or college. Hope she doesn't have to.

Somewhat similar..

My oldest son played cricket whilst at high school in Sydney and they had a girl who played on the 1sts as the wicket keeper.

Alyssa Healy. Well Alyssa was the best player on the team and now 32, has been the keeper for the Australian women's team for years(and that's test matches, one-day and 20/20, where she has the world record score for women's cricket in a 20/20 match)

Not sure how she'd fare in a men's match but since her husband is one of Australia's best fast bowlers I'm sure when she's doing practice in the nets he's not holding back if he's bowling to her.

Every time someone starts to talk about the potential issue with women athletes, I think of the girls volleyball teams, I know everyone else goes to the basketball teams, but the physical traits of the quality women's volleyball can translate to a sport like baseball. The thing people talk about is the average or mean or whatever you want to discuss but it's the exceptional that is going to make the difference. It's not going to be common and I don't think we'll see an Honus Wagner female level player, but I do think that it's possible to see an Edman or some other high level female player if the sport encourages it enough to be a thing. The problem is getting enough names through the minor league developmental system to be given even a fair chance.

This is interesting, wouldn't have guessed this (don't follow tennis too closely): [Serena] averaged 106 mph and recorded the fastest at 128.6 mph in 2013. Williams’s serve speed often exceeded that of her male counterparts. As recently as 2021, her fastest serve at the Australian Open (125.5 mph) equaled Nadal’s fastest at the same tournament and was faster than that of 52 men in the event.

More

CFB: That's the rub. If a Serena comes along in basketball, it's "easy" to see how she would develop, playing (and dominating) women's college then pro ranks then getting a shot with the men somewhere along the way (maybe in high school, maybe having to wait until she's 28 or something). Presumably we have statcast type measures in basketball around work rates and foot speed, etc. that could be used to show that she could defend as well as the 20th best point guard in the NBA or whatever. If there's a woman hockey goalie out there with sufficiently quick reflexes, I can well imagine she'd get a shot. But if there's a Serena of baseball, she's got little choice but to play softball ... or to be a "pioneer" every second of her athletic life, overcoming those extra challenges and I don't want to think about the toxic social media hell she might have to go through.

I assume a sports historian or twenty have looked into how/why women's basketball, soccer, tennis, rugby, volleyball,** swimming, track,*** hockey, field hockey are essentially identical to the men's game in terms of equipment and field dimensions; golf and I think cricket shorten the game but otherwise it's the same; yet in this case, men and women were sent down completely different paths. Even if the dimensions of the game needed to be signifcantly changed, why don't we have women playing baseball on softball(-ish) diamonds?

** is the net the same height? (I have no idea)
*** Here especially I would think it would have been quite easy to have the women run an 80 or 90-meter dash but that wasn't done. I wonder why not.

not worth it on Thanksgiving Week. feel free to make all the inaccurate slams you like.

If there's a woman hockey goalie out there with sufficiently quick reflexes, I can well imagine she'd get a shot.

There have been several at the lower level, but it's a numbers game. How many quality male athletes percentage wise makes it to the upper minors? Or the higher levels. If you have a female player make it to double a and fail to advance, it's going to be taken as a failure by some people, or proof by some people that a woman can't do the job, and only an idiot would think that based upon the sample size of one or two attempts. This is why female leagues are necessary for all of these sports, eventually someone is going to break through, but they have to have a legitimate path to keep chugging along.

FWIW, with respect to Howie's original question - I played at a small D1 baseball school (Campbell) and we didn't have a set number of roster spots (or we were always well under it). Each fall, there would be a week or so of open workouts/tryouts. The most we ever gave a jersey to was ~3, but there was also a year where we kept nobody. Of each potential walk-on, it was simply a question of "is it possible that this guy could have a role?" Said role was generally minor - an extra catcher who'd be better than playing someone out of position in an emergency, a pitcher to soak up blowout innings, pinch-runner, pinch-hitter, maybe a defensive specialist if he really stood out.

I know, single data point, but when those spots were given it was not at the expense of someone else. I would think intuitively that Brown would be in a similar boat.

We have had a number of girls who played at an extremely high level at the 10-12 year old level but weren't strong enough when they moved into the teen years where the boys tend to pass the girls in physical size.

I've told this story here before, but...years ago I interviewed a young lady who had played little league baseball with the boys but switched to softball in high school. When I asked her why, she replied, "The boys got muscular arms and chests, and I got boobs."

Link.

So I did a quick search for "Serena Williams sprint speed" just out of curiosity. I think this is interesting. The top women players are about 4KPH slower than the top men's players (that Djokovic number almost looks like an error but I'll leave it to those who follow tennis if that makes sense). I'd be curious where someone like Halep would show up on the men's list. Is her 23KPH top 100? Top 500?

26 - Seeing Milos Raonic at #9 on that list makes me question it :-)

Australian Open was a field of 128.

I always figured it would e a glove-first backup IF or a C. How hard can it be to out-hit Jeff Mathis? :-) (I know, I know, the smiley means "it's a lot harder than it looks.")

In years past I thought a glove-first IF like Mark Lemke would be the prototype. But Mathis or Lemke doesn't even get drafted if it was known that was their ceiling. So the problem is in getting a female to the point where they would have a chance. While Mathis has his uses, he was probably drafted with a line like "Grade A defense, doesn't hit well but could grow into power and/or average". If the line was "Grade A defense but will never hit enough to be anything other than a backup", then nobody drafts him and puts in the development expense.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/columns/story?id=1612228

Jeff Mathis

Baseball HoF used to have a link to old scouting reports. That seems to have vanished.

Let's also remember though that Mathis was a half-time starter, not a backup, then transitioned to 50-60 starts a year and started 76 as late as 2019 at age 36. Rightly or wrongly, he was far from a fringe MLer (>3000 PA, >800 starts), far from the border of AAAA. Koyie Hill made it over 1000 PA and 250 starts. Dustin Garneau has played in the majors each of the last 8 seasons and has over 3 years service time.

It's true enough that you can't hit 200 in rookie and A ball and expect to advance. But there must be at least 100 Cs that play in the majors every season (the Reds alone had 7) and #90 is not a high hitting threshold. Garneau for example relies a lot on walks but does also have decent pop. Michael Papierski is a walks machine.

When I went looking for Serena's serve speed, I wasn't expecting to find her in the middle of the male pack. Looks like her sprint speed (in her early 30s) might have been a bit slow by male standards but it's distinctly possible that Serena for most of her career was in the top 100 tennis players on the planet, maybe in the middle of the pack on the men's pro tour. (Maybe far better once we take the more important elements of skill into account.) Top 100 catcher on the planet will get you ML service time. But sure you have to be able to hit 16-20 year-old male pitching to get the chance to prove you're top 100.

I'm halfway with Walt, in that I always assumed it would be a defense first second baseman, not sure about the catcher part though. That seems like the one position where the physical differences are the smallest of importance, sprint speed, arm strength etc are all less important factors.

I get the argument for pitchers, you get yourself a female Bruce Sutter with a unique rotation/movement for the time period and they might surpass the lack of speed.(supposedly the fastest pitch thrown by a woman was 83 mph, but this was a 15 year old 2 years ago, so she might have moved up some) I know people push the knuckleball angle also, but most of the successful major league ones were throwing 80+ mph fastballs also. But I could see a woman who can throw in the 80's, who also learns the knuckleball, becoming successful.

When I went looking for Serena's serve speed, I wasn't expecting to find her in the middle of the male pack. Looks like her sprint speed (in her early 30s) might have been a bit slow by male standards but it's distinctly possible that Serena for most of her career was in the top 100 tennis players on the planet, maybe in the middle of the pack on the men's pro tour. (Maybe far better once we take the more important elements of skill into account.)

I think this is overstating Serena's chances by a long shot. Tennis is a game of power and speed. If you are even slightly slower than your competitors, you had better be more powerful, which usually requires a 6'5" + frame. Then variables like spin and shot angle also come into play. With none of leverage, physical strength nor speed to her advantage, I think she gets beaten handily.

Notwithstanding the 1998 exhibition set Serena lost 6-1 to the then-203rd ranked male player (who smoked cigarettes during changeovers) and her own statements on the topic, I think McEnroe is closer to the mark when he said she would be ranked around 700. Other tennis pundits have offered that she would not be able to handle the better NCAA players.

I don't know where the right spot would be but i would guess it's outside of the top 100

The Williams sisters boasted they could beat any man outside of the top 200. A 31 year old German called them on that boast and destroyed them. So the boast got changed to outside of the top 350. Now sure they got better as they got older but it's unlikely they would have ever gotten close to being good enough to make it into tournaments and by all accounts Serena was aware of that.


For whatever reason tennis is the one sport where they keep doing battles of the sexes and women still do not de well in these things.

There probably is no woman in the world strong enough to hit 20+ homers a year in the major leagues. There probably also is no woman in the world with a strong enough throwing arm to play pitcher, nor probably catcher or shortstop either, at the major league level. It takes long, strong fingers to throw a knuckleball effectively (just like any other pitch), so that's also extremely unlikely.

A female major leaguer would be in the Brett Butler mold, I think: fast (by which I mean a world class female sprinter, which would translate to plus but not plus-plus speed in the major leagues), in tremendous shape, with excellent instincts, excellent command of the strike zone, and excellent bat control, no power but can hit .300/.370 with above-average range in the outfield (or possibly second base, or both) and steal some bases. She'd have a short career; women hit their physical peak sooner than men do.

The problem with this is that that skill set (which takes a phenomenal amount of work over many years to develop to the major league level) is not merely deprecated in modern professional baseball, it's all but extinct. Male players with that skill set can't get traction in the pros; scouts ignore them. But maybe one day soon Organized Baseball will finally do something about its problem with the painful overabundance of the Three True Outcomes, and that will make it likelier we could see a woman or two reach the majors and stay there.

oh
mah
gawd
becky
look at her bat!! i mean, look at it - it's out there

and that team sure nuff must be teh sukc if they got some grrrrl there who is better than any other man dontcha think?

i think that even though so many males in this country who play baseball are from White families got $$$ that in spite of right wingers a whole LOT of them are not the same kind of sexist that say dave kingman/jck morris is. lots of kids even from right wing families are a lot more, um, socially liberill then their families... theres a lot of football teams who are actually good ( not pro of course) got female kickers and the players don't hate her for being a female.

i think that it is the coaches who seriously push 12 year old females to quit baseball and get offn their teams and go pay something girly. there is zero reason who females should be shoved into softball when they could perfectly well play BASEBALL with other females. in mah not so umble opinyin it started after the AAPGBL broke up and some team wanted to draft one of the first basemen into the minors and the wimmen haters - mostly all of the ballplayers and FO - had a complete mental fit about what if some grrrrl was actually good enough???!!! why next thing you know they will think they should be able to have their own checking account without some man signing it for them.

i think that if a female wanted to still continue to play with/compete with males, she would have to be tall and wide and unusually muscular for a female especially in the arms and shoulders (i've seen it but it is not real too common - did any of all yall ever see john hudek's daughter who played college ball). she would have to be unusually fast for a female and throw as hard as a male infielder (not sure she could throw hard enough to do OF or 3B)

she would also have to be absolutely OBSESSED with baseball and have access to pro quality pitching machines (and all those camera thingys to correct your throwing/hitting/stances) and coaches, practice and lift like every day - and prolly have a major leaguer daddy who is completely supportive.

i think she would have to have barry bonds quality talent and drive because best i can tell it isn't real too likely any female not shooting up roids gets anywhere near the size and strength she would need to throw over 90 or drive a baseball more than 350' or run as fast as your average major leaguer. i REALLY hope i am wrong because i would seriously love to see a female major leaguer bfore i die. i have actually seen a few females (born that way) who were at least 6' and 200+ lb with shoulders like a linebacker. but then again you need that ungodly hand eye coordination and speed and strength too

For whatever reason tennis is the one sport where they keep doing battles of the sexes and women still do not de well in these things.

Pool has had open tournaments for several years, and the top women pros who enter them often advance past the first few rounds, and in one major regional tournament one of them even came in second, beating several top pros along the way. The best women would likely rank somewhere among the bottom of the top 100 or 150 men, but they'd still win a fair share of their matches when competing against them. This wouldn't happen in tennis.

Of course the difference between pool and other sports like tennis and baseball is that strength and foot speed are irrelevant. The defining traits of pool champions are world class levels of hand-eye coordination, concentration, strategic intelligence, and stamina that comes into play during multi-day tournaments where you might be playing matches from 9:00 AM until 2:00 AM the next day. None of these traits are particularly found in one sex or the other. The main reason for men's dominance in pool is cultural. Regardless of current realities the dominant image of pool halls remains one of low life characters who prey on strangers, and for some strange reason not too many young women find this sort of atmosphere appealing.