“I want to do my best”
Don’t we all, Ms. Yoshida. Don’t we all.
Eri Yoshida, a knuckleball pitcher, will play for the Kobe 9 Cruise in a new independent league starting in April 2009. The team selected her last month along with 31 male players in the league draft.
“I still don’t feel like I’ve really become a pro baseball player, but I want to do my best,” Yoshida said at a news conference after signing her contract. “My specialty is the knuckleball, so I really want to be able to get batters out using it effectively.”
The Cruise are more like a farm team and a far cry from Japan’s mainstream pro teams such as the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. But the 5-foot, 114-pound Yoshida has broken a barrier in baseball-crazy Japan, where women are normally relegated to amateur, company-sponsored teams or to softball.
Yoshida, who started playing baseball when she was in second grade, said she wants to emulate Boston Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield, who has built a successful major league career as a knuckleballer.
I don’t want to make too big a deal of this, but when you love a thing, a subject, a sport, and you don’t see anyone like you doing it, when you become accustomed to the idea or the convention that it isn’t something that anyone like you — anyone female, anyone of color, anyone disabled, pick your “like you” — does or has done or probably will do anytime soon, or it’s rare, or it’s a fight to do it, it’s not that you love it any less, that thing or sport. But when you finally see that “like you” there, you realize how much you wanted it to love you back. Now, maybe you can mean to it what it’s always meant to you.
I used to stand behind home plate with stanky umpire pads on, back in the late ’80s, watching a girl named Caroline throw the best heater in Summit Junior Baseball. I felt a sort of kinship with her because people said our dads looked alike (they didn’t, really), and because we both had to do the same thing every time — wait for everyone to 1) see that we had our shit straight, and 2) go about their business. It usually didn’t take long. Some people want you to fuck up so that they won’t have to change their thinking about certain things, because that’s a pain and makes them uncomfortable, but if you get done whatever it is you’re supposed to get done, after about ten minutes nobody cares. If Yoshida can get outs with the knuckler, that will become the story.
I would like, someday, to live in a world where the story is not what women can or cannot do, but what we do, period (no pun intended), and the woman part is incidental. The Kobe 9 Cruise has the right idea: she has boobs, and she’s tiny…ohhhhh yeah, that flutterball’s tyin’ ’em up, so who cares.
Tags: Eri Yoshida news Tim Wakefield
I’m rooting for her. I saw Ilya Borders pitch minor league baseball as a reliever; she had a decent hook, but without the fastball to back it up she couldn’t last against the competition. But a knuckleball is the absense of power, and some of the most successful knuckleball pitchers of all time did it with basically that one pitch. So I think she could pull it off.
Besides, the world needs more knuckleballers. As Ron Luciano once wrote, “Hitters may think it is immoral, but it is not in fact illegal.” (This after describing how a Phil Niekro knuckler actually wove behind the hitter’s back on the way to the plate once. hee!)
Wow. Nicely put.
I remember reading the blurb when she was drafted and thinking, roughly, “Cool…she’s so YOUNG…oh shit, please let her be awesome and shut the eejits up fast.”
Oh, Sars. You rock.
Plus, she’s 16. *Sixteen*, y’all. Holy crap.
To this day, I really don’t get why women aren’t allowed? accepted? expected? in MLB. I mean, what with the variety of things to do in baseball, surely folks can’t really make the argument “well, they don’t have enough muscle/weight” like in American football* – can they? Do they? It just really puzzles me.
*that being said, some women are bigger than men, etc. etc.
I hope she’s able to rise through the ranks. I also love that Tim Wakefield seems as excited about her as she is about him.
*I would like, someday, to live in a world where the story is not what women can or cannot do, but what we do, period (no pun intended), and the woman part is incidental. *
Oh, I want to live in this world!
I hope Eri grows to be so great that she ends up playing in the majors (any country) and wipes the floor with her opponents, no matter what gender they happen to be!
Back when Jenny Finch had her segments on TWIB, one week they brought her to an MLB park so she could pitch bp to the boys. Her rising heater* buckled ’em all. Of course, most of their reactions, after the initial ‘Holy shit!’, were, ‘Aww. Adorable! Isn’t it funny she throws hard!’ with the undeniable nervous subtext of ‘I wasn’t really trying to hit her; if I was really trying to hit her I woulda. And besides, she’s pretty– I was distracted. ‘Cause I’m a dude. A Major League Dude. And no girl’s strikin’ me out, nuh-uh.’
I always hoped Jenny would lay the next one into their thoraxes, but hey. Sportsmanship and all.
Go Eri!
*I know they proved it on Mythbusters that there’s no such thing as a rising fastball, what with the height of the mound and the distance to the plate, but softballers pitch from the flat and closer, and MB didn’t examine that, so I’m sticking with my story.
I’ve wondered about the specific “no girls allowed” rules in sports (especially American football) for a long time now, because usually the reasoning for those rules is something like, “Well, girls aren’t as big/fast/strong” what have you. But tiny, slow, wimpy guys can still try out, sooooo why eliminate people on a characteristic .other. than their ability to play the game?
I grew up playing with the boys, and you’re right, Sars, it really did take next to no time for people to get over their shit and get back to the game. On the other hand, I also absorbed a lot of the “girls are different, that’s just the way it is” mindset, and I’m only just now (at 29) realizing that, no, it doesn’t make sense that girls play shorter halves in high school soccer games; or that women have different saftey equipment requirements in .adult. hockey; or that women be discouraged from “rough” activities like football and boxing. That societal compulsion to protect the fragile women-folk and keep them perdy runs pretty deep.
@ Beth: Seriously. Thank you, Wakefield, for not being condescending or a jerk.
Not a baseball fan – (like to play it, not so much on watching men spit & pick at thier crotches) but I want to watch this tough teenager work her magic. Bet I get hooked on the sport, too.
GO ERI!!!! Knuckleball those knuckleheads!
Title IX always pissed me off. To me it was/is the height of culturally accepted segregation. “Separate but equal” (e.g., baseball for the boys and softball for the girls) means “separate, but not at all the same” to me. The only good thing girls got out of it was volleyball and there’s still a men’s version of that, just not in most schools. It’s demeaning to women to say that girls should have their own separate things. If a chick is good enough to play a sport that is typically male-dominated (or male only), then let her!
And don’t get me started on stupid “co-ed” rules. (Most) boys will pass you the ball if they know you’re good, eliminating the need to require that a girl be involved in the play.
Having said all that, I’m pretty sure that there have been a few women who have made it into the MLB minor leagues, just not the majors. It’s just so hard for girls to get into actual _baseball_ because of the Title IX crap that there are only a very few who are good enough even for the minors. I don’t think there’s an actual rule banning women from the majors. Could be wrong though (in which case….grrrrr MLB).
And “Go Eri!”
@ Princess Leia “The only good thing girls got out of it was volleyball and there’s still a men’s version of that, just not in most schools.”
Hardly. Title IX has tremendously expanded women’s participation in sports. In 1970, 1 in 27 female high school students played sports. in 2005, it was 1 in 2.5.
It would be great if greater equinamity could be achieved without the bureaucratic structure of Title IX, but progress would have been slower without it.
@attica: I have some serious qualms, we might say, about the Mythbusters baseball special. Oh look, turns out that corking bats and screwing with the ball has no effect! Whaddya know about that! I’m surprised that they didn’t do an “experiment” to “find” that peak strength doesn’t affect hitting ability and therefore steroids don’t matter.
It’s like the Moon Landings. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you produce; the people who believe are believers for irrational reasons, and so they’ll never not believe.