Let's Row Together

See Her Be Her. A perfect title for a baseball film. And true for a whole lot else in life.

“Somebody has to give you permission to be who you are or to become who you are.”

For my friend Jane Leavy, who said these words, that “somebody” was her grandmother.

She gave Jane permission by introducing her to baseball.

Through her window in the Bronx, Jane heard the Yankees.

My “somebody” was my mom whose deep affection for this splendid game became mine, too.

In our Massachusetts home, I heard and watched the Red Sox.

From girlhood on baseball was Jane’s lifelong companion.

Mine, too.

Forming the person Jane became.

Building in me the confidence I needed to run head-long into sports media when the odds were stacked sky-high against me succeeding.

In the 1950s and 1960s, neither Jane nor I had seen ourselves in baseball.

How could we? There were no women to see in what was called our National Pastime.

No female coaches, or managers or players at any level. No woman telling baseball’s stories.

Still, by embedding itself in our girlhoods baseball propelled us to inhabit the game when we grew up.

In fact, I believe that the grip baseball had on us, even with women absent from view, explains why Jane and I became fast friends.

In this game, over time and after a few tough knocks, we’d found this place where we came alive.

At Fenway Park in 2018 with my friends and fellow sportswriters, Jane Leavy, author of “Big Fella,” and the late Robin Herman, who covered the National Hockey League for The New York Times in the 1970s

“Baseball was a place where I could express that part of me that girls and women heretofore were not so welcome to express,” Leavy said. “There was that, and there was clearly my grandmother. Somebody has to give you permission to be who you are or to become who you are. That person was my grandmother. She lived in The Yankee Arms at [New York’s] 157th and Walton Avenue, two blocks from [Yankee Stadium]. Sound travels up those east/west streets, it bounces off apartment houses, and I could sit by her window and hear the thwacks, the cracks of the bat, the crowd. It was my imaginary friend.” [Tara Sullivan’s Boston Globe column, July 31, 2025]

These days, baseball’s health worries Leavy.

To render assistance, the writer in her posed questions to baseball people she knows: “What happened? How did baseball lose America? Why doesn’t it move people the way it once did, the way only it can, the way it still moves me? Who now speaks for the game? And what can I do to help?”

Their responses in mind, Jane wrote “Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It,” offering remedies to fix this game that she believes is drowning in excessive allegiance to analytics which has robbed baseball of its human touch. As Joe Torre told her: “They’re trying to make an imperfect game, perfect. I resent that.”

Jane does, too.

As Tara Sullivan wrote after speaking with Jane: “The humanity of baseball, the links of a historical chain that had always separated it from other sports, the reverence for what had gone before and the honoring of that history by learning to repeat it … is disappearing with each passing day.”

Girls and baseball have been much on my mind this week.

Inspired by the magnificent documentary film ‘See Her Be Her” I saw at a Boston theater with Jean Fruth, whose vision created it. With her, in photo, below.

“See Her Be Her” is streaming on Amazon. I urge you to see it.

Fruth’s film tells a triumphant global story of girls and young women obliterating the stubborn societal norms that insist the game of baseball belongs to men.

It doesn’t, and in reality, it never has. As Katie Casey reminds us.

Still, very few people know women played baseball professionally or that they’ll be playing again in 2026 in the Women’s Pro Baseball League. Nor do many people know that young women compete globally in baseball today.

Three Black women played on Negro League teams in the mid-20th century when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League [AAGPBL] kept them out.

In 2009, Justine Siegal became the first female coach of a professional baseball team. By then, she’d founded Baseball for All at the age of 23. She didn’t want younger girls to have to deal with the barriers she’d confronted - and overcome.

“I was 13-years-old the first time I was told I shouldn’t play baseball because I was a girl. My coach explained to me that he didn’t want me on his baseball team and that I should play softball instead. It didn’t matter that I was one of the best players on the team, that I loved baseball, or that I practiced way more than any of my male friends. It only mattered that I was a girl.

”The day my coach told me to quit was that day I decided to play baseball forever.

”Too many girls are still told they can’t play baseball because they are girls. I founded Baseball For All to empower girls to believe in themselves and to keep playing the game they love. I fear if you tell a girl she can’t play baseball what else will she think she can’t do? I then worry what else boys will think girls can’t do? — Baseball for All, message from Justine Siegal.

In 2018, Justine introduced me to Karen Zerby Buzzelle, the mom who’d founded Boston’s all-girls’ baseball team, the Boston Slammers.

The Slammers tell girls they can be just a baseball player – not “the girl on the team.”

Curious to learn more, I hung out with the Slammers’ coaches and players that season. After all, when I’d fought Major League Baseball for equal access in the 1970s, girls like Maria Pepe were also in court fighting Little League Baseball for the right to play this game just as boys had opportunities to do.

In 1972, Maria Pepe, then 12-years old, was selected for her Hoboken, NJ Little League team. After playing three games as a starting pitcher, she was told she could not continue to play under Little League rules dating from 1951 that prohibited girls from playing Little League baseball. With support from her coach, James Farina, Maria Pepe fought for the right to play. The National Organization for Women filed a gender discrimination case on her behalf and won. Her case led to the nationwide acceptance of the right for girls and women to play sports.”— Baseball for All describing Maria Pepe

Like me, Maria won.

Which is why five decades later, when read this headline, I was furious.

Nearly half of a century later, how could an 11-year-old girl playing baseball be so threatening that pitching at her head seemed like a good idea?

It reminded me just how long it can take for attitudes to change after the law does.

Foster's Daily Democrat, a newspaper near the girl's home in New Hampshire, published a story after her father contacted local baseball officials to alert them that "two coaches said they would instruct a player to 'bean' his daughter — strike her in the head with a baseball during practice.” Their goal was to intimidate his daughter into leaving the baseball program. Other coaches at the meeting when this plan was discussed had shared this information with him.

By then, his daughter was the only girl playing in her age-bracket of this baseball league. For years, she’d played T-ball and baseball with teams in her region, mostly without incident. When she was younger, several teammates were girls, but as they became pre-teens, those girls switched to softball.

When I read this story, I was attending Slammers¹ spring practices indoors. In the summer, they’d scrimmage against boys' teams, play in a regional girls' baseball tournament in New Jersey in honor of Maria Pepe and compete in the Boston Mayor’s Baseball Cup tournament. The Boston Globe’s Stan Grossfeld covered their winning ways in early rounds of the Mayor’s Cup competition.

When Slammers' coaches heard about this girl’s situation in New Hampshire, they invited her to practice with them. She did. [My photo, below.] Her father told me that until the Slammers called he didn’t know an all-girls’ baseball team or league existed.

Not long after that Slammers’ practice, I wrote about Kim Green and Alice Weldin, who in 1974 found out that girls their age were playing baseball and they wanted to play. When Kim’s mom learned that Pepe’s court ruling wouldn’t apply to them, she threatened legal action, and then made baseball happen for her girls, as a Washington Post story described in 2014.

“As a kid, all you hear is you can’t do something,” said Kim Green, a firefighter in Oakland. “You think, ‘My brother can play. Why can’t I?’

“Sylvia [Kim’s mom] plastered notices around the school and the area: She would hold tryouts for an all-girls Little League team, players ages 8 and 9. ‘One hundred-something girls came out,’ she remembered.

“They whittled the group down to a team of players with talent and experience, anchored by Kim and her friends. In uniforms of powder blue — not pink — the Angels charged through Midway’s Little League competition. They won the first eight games of the 1974 season against all-boys teams. Kim’s best friend, Alice Weldin, who has since died of cancer, was the Angels’ catcher. From her spot behind the plate, she could hear the disgruntled mumbling of batters and the angry chatter of boys in the opposing dugout, most often the phrase ‘she plays pretty good for a girl.’ … ‘We changed a lot of reactions,’ Kim said. ‘Parents thinking if a little girl can hit like this, she can play.” Washington Post

Kim Green’s niece, Christina-Taylor Green, was 10-years old when she was killed by a bullet while she waited to meet her hero, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. At the age of nine, she had played second base as the only girl on her Tucson Little League team.

See Her, Be Her. That’s what Christina did.

With Jean Fruth’s film. Justine Siegal’s efforts. The Boston Slammers and other girls’ baseball teams. With women coaching, managing, umpiring and playing professional baseball. With Rockford, Illinois, the home of the Rockford Peaches in the AAGPBL hosting the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2026/2027, girls see what they can be.

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1. The Slammers are three all-girls' baseball teams – one with the upper age of 11, the others 13 and 18 years old.