Did anybody else read the Thread title as “Cat women compete in Major League Baseball”?
It’s not in vogue, but Wakefield is getting 10 million or so a year to be a starting pitcher. If someone out there (male or female) could throw it as well as he does (and he’s good, not great) they would get a job in MLB.
I remember hearing on the radio of some of the local pros facing off against a women’s softball pitcher — in a women’s park, of course, with the closer mound. None of them got a hit, and it sounded as if they looked pretty foolish.
The closer mound helps: it’s not the speed of the pitch but the reaction time and bat speed of the hitter. It also helps that the hitters had only trained to spot pitches with totally different motion.
That said, anybody have any statistics comparing bat speed through the strike zone between men and women? Seems to me that’s the most important statistic for figuring whether women could hit Major League pitching for a decent average. I mean, look at Ichiro: a good leadoff singles hitter is still in demand because of today’s insistence on OBP as an indicator of team success.
For most of the year there are 800 active players on major league rosters, not including 20-60 guys on the disabled lists. In September it can theoretically go as high as 1280 but never does.
Posted by What Exit?
That’s not true. It IS a matter of fashion. The knuckleball has never been in vogue, ever; knuckleball pitchers have always had trouble convincing major league teams to give them a shot. Tim Wakefield wasn’t drafted until the eighth round and didn’t make the majors until he was 26. Wilbur Wood humiliated minor leaguers for years before he got a full shot. The great Phil Niekro did not stick in the majors until he was 27 despite being very successful in the minors. Hoyt Wilhelm, who was the greatest relief pitcher in the history of baseball pretty much starting the day he arrived in the major leagues, didn’t make the majors until he was 29. These guys ALL pitched well, for many years, in the minor leagues. They were not struggling pitchers who suddenly started getting men out.
Major league scouts have an extreme prejudice against pitchers who are not A) big, and/or B) throw really hard. For the most part that’s borne of experience; throwing really hard is a good indicator of a pitcher’s ability. But pitchers with trick pitches, or even trick deliveries - look how long it took the great Dan Quisenberry, who was completely passed over in the draft, to stick in the majors, or Kent Tekulve, another skinny sidearmer who did not make it until he was 27 - will generally be passed up again and again and again, until either the team has no other options or the pitcher is so ridiculously dominant they have no choice. Shit, even CARL HUBBELL - King Carl, The Meal Ticket - was late getting to the majors.
It is physically quite possible for a woman to be a successful knuckleball pitcher; the problems with this happening are threefold:
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Prejudice. Baseball, like it or not, is NOT a perfect meritocracy. Baseball scouts, managers and coaches prefer certain body and play types to others, irrespective of performance; a woman, and a woman who’s a trick pitch artist at that, is way, way out of their comfort zone.
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Development opportunities. Tim Wakefield made the major leagues in part because he was one of millions of young boys who, starting withy Little League, were gradually developed, pruned back, developed and pruned back again, advancing up the ranks of competitive baseball, dropping many of the players at each successive rank. It would be hard for a legitimately talented ballplayer NOT to get noticed.
Women simply do not have the same development system churning through them to find the diamonds among the rough. It would be very easy for a woman with an interest in baseball and legitimate skills to be missed.
Furthermore, many, if not most talented female ballplayers are shuttled into softball, for what reason I simply do not understand.
- Physical attributes. We think of Tim Wakefield as a guy who doesn’t throw hard, but bear in mind Wakefield can actually throw an 85-mile-an-hour fastball. By major league standard that’s very, very slow, but by normal human standards it’s INSANELY fast. Most adult men cannot throw a baseball harder than 65-70 miles an hour no matter how hard they try. If you stood in a batter’s box and were presented with a succession of 85-MPH fastballs you’d find the experience quite frightening.
Realistically, even a knuckleball pitcher has to be able to throw at least 80; no pitcher in the modern history of baseball couldn’t hit 80-85 at their peak.
So it’s not enough a woman knows how to throw a knuckleball; they have to throw much harder than even most men can throw. There are women out there who can bring it pretty hard, but not THAT many, so that cuts into your available talent pool.
Might another possibility be as a mere publicity stunt, by a losing team who can’t get much worse and just wants to get folks in the stands? Though I suppose you could argue that that’s not exactly “competing” in MLB.
There were three women who played in the Negro League:
Toni Stone 1953-54; 2nd base; hit .243 in 1953
Mamie Johnson 1953-55; pitcher; 33-8 record
Connie Morgan 1954-55; 2nd base (replaced Toni Stone)
Sorry, Bill Veeck is dead.
I am truly thrilled to be the first to post this information in this thread. I introduce you to: Virne Beatrice “Jackie” Mitchell.
This high-school student was signed to the Southern Association’s AA Chattanooga Lookouts in 1931.
She struck out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and five other professional baseball players.
I urge you to read the article. It’s quite interesting.
Also, from this site:
I think a woman could beat a man with a specialty pitch (like the knuckleball) like everyone else says, and could definitely be fast enough to be a pinch runner. A woman could also be smart enough to call pitches as a catcher and I don’t really see the strenuousness of the position being that much harder on a woman.
But I don’t think a woman catcher could throw with enough speed to get a guy out at second (especially from her knees) and definitely don’t see a woman being able to throw convincingly from the outfield (a lot of the players right now who aren’t outfielders can’t get the ball home very quickly).
I don’t think a woman could hit with the power of a man. It just takes too much upper-body strength. Like I said, I’m sure she could run. If a woman wanted to bat in the MLB she’d have to be able to bunt with amazing precision or get all of her balls on the ground and into holes, and have olympic-speed quickness.
That being said - all women’s fast-pitch softball players could kick my ass. And could probably kick some MLB ass at their own game too.
Men’s professional softball used to exist in the uper midwest (still might?) and is popular in New Zealand, IIRC. I don’t know how women have done against men in the same sport.
I played baseball with a guy at the U of Wisconsin who also played Pro softball in the summers. Every once in a while, maybe 3-4 times a game, he would throw a softball style pitch from the mound. It was the speed of a slow changeup, but the motion of the ball and the strage release point would throw hitters off completely. If he used it more often, people could time it and be all over it. He couldn’t use it in intersquad games because everyone knew what to expect when he began his motion.
So if a woman has been signed on to a minor league team, and women have been banned from MLB, what was the plan after that?
As I see it, there’s two ways to go:
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The minor leaguers were just trying to become more competetive in and of themselves and didn’t intend to send a woman up to The Bigs.
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MLB is chronically short of decent pitching, with all of the expansion teams and the slow downward spiral of inner-city recruitment of baseball players, and they’d tear up the prohibition on women players if it meant they could win a few more games. Signing on a woman was a trial balloon to see if there was an untapped resource for pitching.
Could a woman learn to be a knuckleballer? It would be difficult, not because of arm strength but because of grip. It takes fairly large and strong hands to be able to hold a ball with the knuckler grip.
Throw in the fact that every knuckleballer needs the arm strength to throw some sort of fastball (Wakefield, Candiotti and Steve Sparks have/had low-to-mid 80s fastballs) and a good breaking ball, and it becomes a lot harder. Knuckleballers usually have a reputation for being rubber-armed (witness Wakefield’s relief appearances in the playoffs) and I don’t know that a female pitcher could do it.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on how female hip structure affects pitching motion.
Doh: “not ONLY because of arm strength…”
If only sportswriters still wrote like that. sigh
“Cynics may contend that on the diamond as elsewhere it is place aux dames. Perhaps Miss Jackie hasn’t quite enough on the ball yet to bewilder Ruth and Gehrig in a serious game. But there are no such sluggers in the Southern Association [The league she pitched in], and she may win laurels this season which cannot be ascribed to mere gallantry. The prospect grows gloomier for misogynists.”
(Quoted from linked article.)
You don’t get that in Sports Illustrated.