Our semi-national sport.

[Senior citizen]

Babe Dedriksen Zacharias was as good a baseball player as any male professional, but could only prove it in exhibition games, since baseball did not allow female pros.

How would males feel if our "national sport" was all female, no boys allowed?

Worse, in recent years I used to pass by a park where several times a week you'd see young boys learning baseball and young girls being taught softball--as if the Babe had lived in vain.

If any other industry only hired males, we'd be up in arms and boycotting. This isn't a kid's tree-house, it's a multi-billion dollar industry and it is time it grew up. Didn't the chimp once own a baseball team? That alone should tell us something.

[Eloriel]

1. Excellent post about an oft-overlooked (at least by me) subject

Sports.

I love this line, which of course brings up something totally UNIMAGINABLE:

How would males feel if our "national sport" was all female, no boys allowed?

Most men would simply freak out at the mere mention of such an idea. LOL.

[Senior citizen]

2. I read an excellent biography of Dedriksen.

It seems that as a child the Babe benefitted from benign neglect--nobody cared when the Babe played baseball with the boys.

From the little I know of statistics, very high incomes weigh heavily in determining averages. So if we want to achieve pay parity, one step in the right direction might be to have a few multi-million dollar a year female pro baseball players.

[Eloriel]

3. Chuckle. Good point.

Me? I'd kinda like to see income parity achieved the other way. But a few millionairess sports stars couldn't hoit. :evilgrin:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. How would males feel if our "national sport" was all female,

no boys allowed?

When I read that, I got a vision of Double Dutch being made our national sport.

For those who don't know, Double Dutch is a form of rope jumping with two ropes both twirling "backdoors" against each other in double time, which has developed into a competitive sport among early teen girls in inner city schools.

Until I went hunting for images, I didn't realize that it had become an international competitive sport.

[geniph]

5. It drives me nuts that even the best female baseball players,

the stars of Little League, are driven out of the sport at age 12 and forced to play softball instead. Nothing against softball, but why in the holy hell can't young women in high school and college keep playing hardball, which is certainly perceived as the more exciting sport?

It drives me NUTS.