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A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball
In 2010 twenty American women were selected to represent Team USA in the fourth Women’s Baseball World Cup in Caracas, Venezuela; most Americans, however, had no idea such a team even existed.
A Game of Their Own chronicles the largely invisible history of women in baseball and offers an account of the 2010 Women’s World Cup tournament. Jennifer Ring includes oral histories of eleven members of the U.S. Women’s National Team, from the moment each player picked up a bat and ball as a young girl to her selection for Team USA. Each story is unique, but they share common themes that will resonate with young female players and fans facing skepticism and taunts from players and parents when taking the batter’s box or the pitcher’s mound, self-doubt, the unceasing pressure to switch to softball, and eventual acceptance by their baseball teammates as they prove themselves as ballplayers. These racially, culturally, and economically diverse players from across the country have ignored the message that their love of the national pastime is “wrong.” Their stories come alive as they recount their battles and most memorable moments playing baseball—the joys of exceeding expectations and the pleasure of honing baseball skills and talent despite the lack of support.
With exclusive interviews with players, coaches, and administrators, A Game of Their Own celebrates the U.S. Women’s National Team and the excellence of its remarkable players. In response to the jeer “No girls allowed!” these are powerful stories of optimism, feistiness, and staying true to oneself.
A Game of Their Own chronicles the largely invisible history of women in baseball and offers an account of the 2010 Women’s World Cup tournament. Jennifer Ring includes oral histories of eleven members of the U.S. Women’s National Team, from the moment each player picked up a bat and ball as a young girl to her selection for Team USA. Each story is unique, but they share common themes that will resonate with young female players and fans facing skepticism and taunts from players and parents when taking the batter’s box or the pitcher’s mound, self-doubt, the unceasing pressure to switch to softball, and eventual acceptance by their baseball teammates as they prove themselves as ballplayers. These racially, culturally, and economically diverse players from across the country have ignored the message that their love of the national pastime is “wrong.” Their stories come alive as they recount their battles and most memorable moments playing baseball—the joys of exceeding expectations and the pleasure of honing baseball skills and talent despite the lack of support.
With exclusive interviews with players, coaches, and administrators, A Game of Their Own celebrates the U.S. Women’s National Team and the excellence of its remarkable players. In response to the jeer “No girls allowed!” these are powerful stories of optimism, feistiness, and staying true to oneself.
- GenresBaseballSportsNonfiction
392 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2015
2 people are currently reading
143 people want to read
About the author
Jennifer Ring
9 books5 followersMy love of baseball dates back further than my academic career, which began in 1979 with a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and continues today at the University of Nevada, where I am Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies. I have loved the game since I was a girl in the 1950’s, before even the Dodgers were in Los Angeles, where I was born. This was also a time when girls weren’t allowed in Little League or anywhere else that baseball was played. With no obvious incentive to fall in love with the game, my passion must have been the result of genetic endowment. When my younger daughter, who inherited the baseball gene, was pressured at age twelve to quit youth baseball, I had flashbacks to my own exclusion from the game, and began writing about girls and baseball in the United States. That might have been the end of the story except that my daughter didn’t quit baseball: she battled her way through high school and college baseball, and onto the Women’s National Baseball Team. While this was happening, I wrote two books about girls and women and baseball in the United States: Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball (University of Illinois Press, 2009) and The Shutout: American Women and the National Pastime (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming 2014). Stolen Bases traces the history of women’s baseball in the United States to the nineteenth century, and before that to an English girls’ game centuries ago. Women have played and loved the game from its very beginning, and probably had a hand in inventing it. So where did “No Girls Allowed!” come from? My new book, The Shutout, is based on oral histories I conducted with eleven members of the USA Baseball Women’s National Team of 2010.
If girls have been pushed out of baseball in the United States, how did the players who compete on the national team manage to stay in the game and become good enough for international competition? And why doesn’t anybody in the United States know that there is a Women’s National baseball Team? The mystery unfolds, and so do the politics of baseball and softball in The Shutout. The eleven ballplayers in the book who describe their baseball journeys are a diverse group of accomplished athletes and women: smart, honest, introspective, funny. They describe the passion and courage it takes to stick with the national pastime as an American girl.
If girls have been pushed out of baseball in the United States, how did the players who compete on the national team manage to stay in the game and become good enough for international competition? And why doesn’t anybody in the United States know that there is a Women’s National baseball Team? The mystery unfolds, and so do the politics of baseball and softball in The Shutout. The eleven ballplayers in the book who describe their baseball journeys are a diverse group of accomplished athletes and women: smart, honest, introspective, funny. They describe the passion and courage it takes to stick with the national pastime as an American girl.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 27, 2024
Happy Opening Day Eve, everyone! I am giddy with excitement, and I have a feeling that sleep will not come easy to me tonight because tomorrow is hands down my favorite day of the entire year. Magic is in the air as hope springs eternal because every team is 0-0 and has an equal chance to win the World Series. For years I have grappled with my inherent love of baseball with the need to read only women during the month of March. By the middle of the month, baseball is calling my name, and I have the need to fill the last two weeks of the month with only baseball books. There was one year where my entire April reading plan was baseball, baseball, and more baseball. Each year I wrack my brains looking for a baseball book featuring women. I know the story of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League well- I must have watched A League of Their Own three times easily when it came out in theaters. Most people of a certain age are familiar with the movie and the women portrayed in it. After the men came back from overseas and Major League Baseball entered its golden age, opportunities for women playing baseball dried up. The game is America’s pastime but half of its populace was told that “you can’t play.” Behind the scenes, women have always been a part of the game of baseball although their presence is not as well known as that of major leaguers. Jennifer Ring is a writer whose daughter Lily grew up playing baseball. She set out to write a book to publicize the story of women who currently take part in playing America’s game.
In 1887 a group of men in Chicago decided that they missed baseball in the winter and devised a way to play a modified version indoors. Using a boxing glove as a ball and a broom as bat, the men played in an early gymnasium. They coined the game “softball” or kitty ball, sissy ball, etc because this game was easier to play than the hardball played all summer long. Eventually, Chicagoans all over the city organized sixteen inch softball leagues through the city’s neighborhoods, creating a culture that is still in place today. The damage, however, had been done: softball was a game for women while baseball was to be for men. Albert Spaulding of Sporting News fame noted that baseball was too strenuous of a game for women during an era when the fairer sex was meant to be demure. This statement would have been understandable if Spaulding had been describing the emerging game of football, but baseball is hardly viewed as a strenuous game. If anything, the sport is the least rough of the four major team sports played in the United States. Spaulding’s statement stood, and women stayed on the sidelines. Unless they played incognito on a men’s team, women largely did not take part in baseball leagues until World War II. Then they went to the bench again when the men returned from war. It would be thirty years before women began to organize sports leagues nationwide.
Title IX was signed into law in 1972. The law was originally meant to withhold federal funds from schools at all levels that discriminated against women in any capacity. Women’s rights groups used this new law to demand equal treatment from their organizations for their sports teams. Sports had not been the impetus for Title IX but today that is exactly what the law is synonymous with. Girls sports leagues cropped up in basketball, soccer, and volleyball. Girls still played individual sports such as golf, gymnastics, tennis, and track. Only baseball was reluctant to change, and by the 1980s, girls softball leagues cropped up to remedy the lack of opportunity for girls in baseball. It is the only such team sport with such regulations in place. Girls who wanted to play baseball had to play with boys and were not always welcome. My suburb started a girls’ softball league when I was in fourth grade. As a baseball fan my entire life, I was beyond excited to finally get to play. I had no idea that these were two separate sports- I viewed my team as baseball and wanted to play the two positions that my two favorite baseball players held. Little did I know that softball was not baseball. For starters, our two best players had played with boys since t-ball. Because the softball league was brand new, these girls switched to softball to be an example of how good any of us could be with seasoning. Also, at the time, softball had an extra position named short center behind second base just in case an outfielder could not make a throw back to the pitcher. I had never heard of this position and as an oblivious sports nut I did not think that short center was discriminatory against girls’ ability to play sports. This was the state of girls sports a mere fifteen years after the passage of Title IX. According to Jennifer Ring, not much has changed since.
Ring’s daughter Lilly Jacobson loved baseball. Like me, Lilly had parents who loved baseball and passed their fandom down a generation. Lilly is a good ten years younger than me and reaped the benefits of Title IX being around for an entire generation once she started playing organized sports. At age five, Lilly wanted to play baseball and her parents let her. She was one of two girls in her little league because most girls played softball. At age twelve when the players graduate to the major little leagues, girls are told to give up baseball and switch to softball even though they are different games, especially in terms of pitching and hitting, with fielding being similar. A select few girls choose to continue with baseball, and an even smaller percentage go on to play high school baseball, with an even smaller number electing to play in college. As of now, there is no Major League Baseball for girls. There is not even a professional softball league for women. Should women choose baseball over softball, there is not much of a future for them. Those that choose to play all the way through to adulthood play because they love the game. They view softball as different and a knock on them as athletes, especially after being told their whole lives that they don’t belong. With Title IX in place, softball is viewed as women’s baseball. Unless the National outlook changes, baseball for girls will not be seen as a commonplace sports choice in this era of specialization.
The women that Ring talked to experienced similar discrimination as her daughter although each story was unique. Ring gleaned that for women’s baseball to become as viable of an option as soccer or basketball that the entire infrastructure has to change. Rather than softball, girls should play in girls baseball leagues. Softball could be viewed as recreational for those men or women who simply do not have what it takes to play baseball. Rather than telling girls that they cannot play baseball, allow them to have a separate league just as they do in other sports. This is the system in place in Japan, Canada, Australia, and other countries with women’s baseball leagues. When this change is done at a grassroots level, more girls might choose to play baseball. In the meantime, softball is it, and women are given few if any opportunities to play either sport as adults. Their careers end after playing in college, when the top men are just getting started. Mo’ne Davis pitched in little league ten years ago, but even she chose to play softball in college because it meant getting a scholarship. That is the point where even the top women’s baseball players switch because it means a free education, and, until women’s baseball becomes an NCAA sport, that isn’t going to change anytime soon. As a parent who saw her daughter told “you can’t do it” for her entire career, Ring did become whiny at times, but she did bring to the public’s attention how opportunities for women can change going forward.
Being a women who feels more comfortable discussing sports than traditional girly topics, I wish I had the opportunities that some of the women in this book did. I entered the age of park district sports at a time when Title IX had not been around all that long. Girls who played baseball, soccer, and basketball had to join other suburbs’ leagues until junior high because ours did not have girls teams in place, and my parents did not have the foresight to sign me up. Ask me any stat for any player of any sport anywhere, I am game, but that does not translate to athletic prowess. The women portrayed in this book are as good as most men at the top of their game. As more women pass down their athletic experience to their daughters, perhaps the infrastructure of girls softball and baseball will change. In the interim, I have a lot more baseball books on deck. It is spring, and I am ready for men and women everywhere to play ball. Just one sleep away!
⚾️ 4 stars 🥎
In 1887 a group of men in Chicago decided that they missed baseball in the winter and devised a way to play a modified version indoors. Using a boxing glove as a ball and a broom as bat, the men played in an early gymnasium. They coined the game “softball” or kitty ball, sissy ball, etc because this game was easier to play than the hardball played all summer long. Eventually, Chicagoans all over the city organized sixteen inch softball leagues through the city’s neighborhoods, creating a culture that is still in place today. The damage, however, had been done: softball was a game for women while baseball was to be for men. Albert Spaulding of Sporting News fame noted that baseball was too strenuous of a game for women during an era when the fairer sex was meant to be demure. This statement would have been understandable if Spaulding had been describing the emerging game of football, but baseball is hardly viewed as a strenuous game. If anything, the sport is the least rough of the four major team sports played in the United States. Spaulding’s statement stood, and women stayed on the sidelines. Unless they played incognito on a men’s team, women largely did not take part in baseball leagues until World War II. Then they went to the bench again when the men returned from war. It would be thirty years before women began to organize sports leagues nationwide.
Title IX was signed into law in 1972. The law was originally meant to withhold federal funds from schools at all levels that discriminated against women in any capacity. Women’s rights groups used this new law to demand equal treatment from their organizations for their sports teams. Sports had not been the impetus for Title IX but today that is exactly what the law is synonymous with. Girls sports leagues cropped up in basketball, soccer, and volleyball. Girls still played individual sports such as golf, gymnastics, tennis, and track. Only baseball was reluctant to change, and by the 1980s, girls softball leagues cropped up to remedy the lack of opportunity for girls in baseball. It is the only such team sport with such regulations in place. Girls who wanted to play baseball had to play with boys and were not always welcome. My suburb started a girls’ softball league when I was in fourth grade. As a baseball fan my entire life, I was beyond excited to finally get to play. I had no idea that these were two separate sports- I viewed my team as baseball and wanted to play the two positions that my two favorite baseball players held. Little did I know that softball was not baseball. For starters, our two best players had played with boys since t-ball. Because the softball league was brand new, these girls switched to softball to be an example of how good any of us could be with seasoning. Also, at the time, softball had an extra position named short center behind second base just in case an outfielder could not make a throw back to the pitcher. I had never heard of this position and as an oblivious sports nut I did not think that short center was discriminatory against girls’ ability to play sports. This was the state of girls sports a mere fifteen years after the passage of Title IX. According to Jennifer Ring, not much has changed since.
Ring’s daughter Lilly Jacobson loved baseball. Like me, Lilly had parents who loved baseball and passed their fandom down a generation. Lilly is a good ten years younger than me and reaped the benefits of Title IX being around for an entire generation once she started playing organized sports. At age five, Lilly wanted to play baseball and her parents let her. She was one of two girls in her little league because most girls played softball. At age twelve when the players graduate to the major little leagues, girls are told to give up baseball and switch to softball even though they are different games, especially in terms of pitching and hitting, with fielding being similar. A select few girls choose to continue with baseball, and an even smaller percentage go on to play high school baseball, with an even smaller number electing to play in college. As of now, there is no Major League Baseball for girls. There is not even a professional softball league for women. Should women choose baseball over softball, there is not much of a future for them. Those that choose to play all the way through to adulthood play because they love the game. They view softball as different and a knock on them as athletes, especially after being told their whole lives that they don’t belong. With Title IX in place, softball is viewed as women’s baseball. Unless the National outlook changes, baseball for girls will not be seen as a commonplace sports choice in this era of specialization.
The women that Ring talked to experienced similar discrimination as her daughter although each story was unique. Ring gleaned that for women’s baseball to become as viable of an option as soccer or basketball that the entire infrastructure has to change. Rather than softball, girls should play in girls baseball leagues. Softball could be viewed as recreational for those men or women who simply do not have what it takes to play baseball. Rather than telling girls that they cannot play baseball, allow them to have a separate league just as they do in other sports. This is the system in place in Japan, Canada, Australia, and other countries with women’s baseball leagues. When this change is done at a grassroots level, more girls might choose to play baseball. In the meantime, softball is it, and women are given few if any opportunities to play either sport as adults. Their careers end after playing in college, when the top men are just getting started. Mo’ne Davis pitched in little league ten years ago, but even she chose to play softball in college because it meant getting a scholarship. That is the point where even the top women’s baseball players switch because it means a free education, and, until women’s baseball becomes an NCAA sport, that isn’t going to change anytime soon. As a parent who saw her daughter told “you can’t do it” for her entire career, Ring did become whiny at times, but she did bring to the public’s attention how opportunities for women can change going forward.
Being a women who feels more comfortable discussing sports than traditional girly topics, I wish I had the opportunities that some of the women in this book did. I entered the age of park district sports at a time when Title IX had not been around all that long. Girls who played baseball, soccer, and basketball had to join other suburbs’ leagues until junior high because ours did not have girls teams in place, and my parents did not have the foresight to sign me up. Ask me any stat for any player of any sport anywhere, I am game, but that does not translate to athletic prowess. The women portrayed in this book are as good as most men at the top of their game. As more women pass down their athletic experience to their daughters, perhaps the infrastructure of girls softball and baseball will change. In the interim, I have a lot more baseball books on deck. It is spring, and I am ready for men and women everywhere to play ball. Just one sleep away!
⚾️ 4 stars 🥎
March 19, 2017
The most comprehensive published book exposing the obstacles, history, present, and possible future of women in baseball. It is a must read for anyone interested in equalizing the playing field of any sport. It is also a must read for women who love baseball, men who support equalizing the playing field, and parents of girls who love baseball. Ring explains why softball is not an equivalent sport. Ring also explains how girls get systematically shut out of baseball. I cannot recommend this book strong enough!
February 19, 2021
This is clearly a superior book compared to Ring's other women's baseball work, "Stolen Bases." In this book, she chooses to let the oral histories of the women baseball players tell their own stories.
This a is both a positive and a negative attribute of this book.
First the positive - the fact that those who are living their stories are the ones telling their stories can let their voices be heard. The struggles about making it on boys and men's teams after Little League, the frustrations with bad coaching or missed opportunities, the regrets for making bad decisions, plus the discovery of what brought them to the game and the joy that they found in discovering that there were other women baseball players, is all told in this book. There are a lot of voices here and each player comes from a different background, geographical part of the country, religion, sexual orientation - and it's that diversity which makes for a stimulating read.
However, the negative - sometimes oral histories shouldn't be published. Oral histories are nothing more than the conversations that arise out of the interview process and some things that are said, or misstated, in oral histories are not fit for human consumption. That's why the better reads, even those that rely heavily on oral histories, require strong writing and even stronger editing. That's what is missing from this book. There are times that we are reading Ring's analysis and then in the middle of a paragraph she changes voices to someone else's. Even though she uses quotation marks properly, with page after page after page of reading long quotations makes the quotation marks invisible when included too closely to her analysis.
The other thing that Ring does is repeats herself. It is okay to repeat yourself if you haven't made reference to someone or something in awhile, but at one point I began wondering if this was the Jim Glennie biography. Nearly every chapter contains a reference to Glennie, but instead of adding to where she left off from the previous chapter, she repeats Glennie's background. Once or twice isn't bad, but by the time Glennie has a voice towards the end of the book, we get his background again and the finally hear his voice.
I appreciate that after spending most of the book pointing out the problems of the exclusion of women in baseball (which was the exclusive topic of her previous book), it was refreshing to read the last couple of chapters which actually directly confronts the problems head on and proposes solutions.
This was a good attempt at trying to give voice to the voiceless in this sport and I have to commend the effort. This book has a lot of meat to it but the organization is what lacks. If this was written with a tighter focus and better edited, this would be a surefire winner.
On the back of the book jacket contains a quote from Dave Zirin, sports editor of The Nation: "I don't think a person can say they have a comprehensive sports history library without the inclusion of A Game of Their Own." Considering that this book is in my library, I can equivocally say that my comprehensive sports history library is neither enhanced nor at a loss by the inclusion of this book. Ring's "Stolen Bases," despite it's flaws, actually enhances my library better than this one.
This a is both a positive and a negative attribute of this book.
First the positive - the fact that those who are living their stories are the ones telling their stories can let their voices be heard. The struggles about making it on boys and men's teams after Little League, the frustrations with bad coaching or missed opportunities, the regrets for making bad decisions, plus the discovery of what brought them to the game and the joy that they found in discovering that there were other women baseball players, is all told in this book. There are a lot of voices here and each player comes from a different background, geographical part of the country, religion, sexual orientation - and it's that diversity which makes for a stimulating read.
However, the negative - sometimes oral histories shouldn't be published. Oral histories are nothing more than the conversations that arise out of the interview process and some things that are said, or misstated, in oral histories are not fit for human consumption. That's why the better reads, even those that rely heavily on oral histories, require strong writing and even stronger editing. That's what is missing from this book. There are times that we are reading Ring's analysis and then in the middle of a paragraph she changes voices to someone else's. Even though she uses quotation marks properly, with page after page after page of reading long quotations makes the quotation marks invisible when included too closely to her analysis.
The other thing that Ring does is repeats herself. It is okay to repeat yourself if you haven't made reference to someone or something in awhile, but at one point I began wondering if this was the Jim Glennie biography. Nearly every chapter contains a reference to Glennie, but instead of adding to where she left off from the previous chapter, she repeats Glennie's background. Once or twice isn't bad, but by the time Glennie has a voice towards the end of the book, we get his background again and the finally hear his voice.
I appreciate that after spending most of the book pointing out the problems of the exclusion of women in baseball (which was the exclusive topic of her previous book), it was refreshing to read the last couple of chapters which actually directly confronts the problems head on and proposes solutions.
This was a good attempt at trying to give voice to the voiceless in this sport and I have to commend the effort. This book has a lot of meat to it but the organization is what lacks. If this was written with a tighter focus and better edited, this would be a surefire winner.
On the back of the book jacket contains a quote from Dave Zirin, sports editor of The Nation: "I don't think a person can say they have a comprehensive sports history library without the inclusion of A Game of Their Own." Considering that this book is in my library, I can equivocally say that my comprehensive sports history library is neither enhanced nor at a loss by the inclusion of this book. Ring's "Stolen Bases," despite it's flaws, actually enhances my library better than this one.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 13, 2018
In 2010, Japan defeated Australia 13-3 in the championship game of the Women’s World Baseball Cup. If you don’t remember anything about that tourney or know the names of any players, including the team from the United States, you are not alone. Women’s baseball has not been as publicized as much as a small fraction of the men’s game. This doesn’t mean that there are not female baseball players, and the stories of eleven members of the US squad are captured in this excellent book by Jennifer Ring.
Ring tells the story of each player, one of which was her daughter, on a team that was largely ignored by the press. Compounding the issue is something that each woman faced while pursuing their athletic dreams – they were told that baseball wasn’t the proper game for them to play, instead they should play softball. Ring’s writing beautifully illustrates the determination of these young women saying “no” to this belief and instead continuing on with their baseball careers.
No matter which player is telling her story, the reader will be captivated by their grit and persistence. The reader will also learn about the systemic exclusion of girls and women in baseball and why the belief that softball is an “equal” sport is wrong on so many levels. It should be also mentioned that many of these players were excellent at the game, that many of them played with males in high school and college and more than held their own. The extra pressure many of them were under because they had to “prove” themselves will also be felt by readers as well.
More than just the content or message, what I really believe makes this book very good is Ring’s writing. Her style captures the emotions and heart of each player instead of just reporting on what they did on the field. If nothing else, for that reason alone everyone who reads baseball books should add this one to their libraries.
I wish to thank University of Nebraska Press for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
http://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/201...
Ring tells the story of each player, one of which was her daughter, on a team that was largely ignored by the press. Compounding the issue is something that each woman faced while pursuing their athletic dreams – they were told that baseball wasn’t the proper game for them to play, instead they should play softball. Ring’s writing beautifully illustrates the determination of these young women saying “no” to this belief and instead continuing on with their baseball careers.
No matter which player is telling her story, the reader will be captivated by their grit and persistence. The reader will also learn about the systemic exclusion of girls and women in baseball and why the belief that softball is an “equal” sport is wrong on so many levels. It should be also mentioned that many of these players were excellent at the game, that many of them played with males in high school and college and more than held their own. The extra pressure many of them were under because they had to “prove” themselves will also be felt by readers as well.
More than just the content or message, what I really believe makes this book very good is Ring’s writing. Her style captures the emotions and heart of each player instead of just reporting on what they did on the field. If nothing else, for that reason alone everyone who reads baseball books should add this one to their libraries.
I wish to thank University of Nebraska Press for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
http://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/201...
August 20, 2018
Fascinating that those who never played baseball with men think it can't be done, but those who have know it can.
May 3, 2020
Super informative book on women's baseball in America. I had no idea there was a Team USA for the sport or that there were any leagues in this country specifically for women's baseball.
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July 16, 2015796.35708 R5812 2015
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews