Major League Baseball made an important – if late – explanation in 1947 when the Brooklyn Dodgers Jackie Robinson promoted.
Everyone gets the chance to play.
The partnership that MLB recently announced with the budding athletes Unlimited Softball League is not a lady sludge of the modern racial integration of Robinson. An initiative for professional softball does not create a path for the first female ball player of MLB. Anyway not literally tomorrow.
But Jackie’s message – that everyone should get the chance to play – calls loudly with the arrival of the Ausl. And it’s because the competition is supported by MLB.
MLB not only shares its wealth, infrastructure and gravitas to support professional ladiesoftball, but former competition director Kim NG is the first commissioner of the AUSL. She broke barriers herself as the first woman to become an MLB -all -our director, with the Miami Marlins.
If women’s softball starts working in the way other pro competitions work, this is the start of how it will happen.
The most famous historical example of professional female ball players comes from another company supported by MLB – or at least one of the owners. Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wigley founded the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, who played from 1943 to 1954. Many fans have heard of it, or for no reason than the Penny Marshall film with Tom Hanks, Geena Davis and Madonna: “A competition of their own.”
Wrigley may have seen female professional ball players as a gimmick, and as an opportunity to earn some bridging money for MLB until soldiers came home from the Second World War. That is why it no longer had lasting force. The example of the women played will endure. But the film was released in 1992 and documents a competition that folded almost 40 years before. It has been so long that it was real that events in “their own competition” can just as well be a work of total fiction.
Society has changed in the last 70 years. We no longer worry that individuals break their femininity because of sport. Legions girls play Little League and in high school, and softball has been a huge success in university athletics for decades – and it gets bigger. But only a few amateur players once got a crack in the professional playing. The opportunities have been volatile and competitions have had limited endurance.
The involvement of MLB makes nothing certain.
Professional Fastpitch Softball competitions have been in some form since 1997, but no one was supported by the complete confidence and honor of an existing Major League.
What can we miss without an MLB partnership with professional softball? Recently, the softball bait from Tennessee Karlyn Pickens threw a pitch 79.4 MPH threw In the NCAA tournament. If you take into account that a softball rubber is 43 feet from the home plate instead of 60 feet, 6 inches like baseball, it would be as if you are trying to get a field thrown 111.71 MPH.
No, it does not mean that the Detroit Tigers Pickens must give a try -out tomorrow, and that is not what the AUSL is for. But it would be a sin if Pickens had no place to play as a professional, such as the best -qualified university chapters do when they have finished school.
It goes without saying that the fastest and best path to women who have a sustainable place to play professional softball comes from MLB that lends his Lent.
The Wnba, who also started in 1997, would not have come that far and would have been so healthy without NBA support. But anyone who owns good faith can see that it is growing further. Each of the NBA owners who were willing to invest in more than 20 years ago might never see a huge return in their operating results. But that is not the only way in which an investment can bear fruit.
#MLB #finally #supports #ladies #softball #damn #time #Deadspin.com