Judging from the amount of amateur men’s, women’ s, and Jack and Jill teams, I’d say that everyone who is not potentially on the path to a collegiate or MLB career plays softball.
Context is everything.
I was replying to a post that said the NPR article said the “blame” for the gender divide in these sports belonged to Title IX.
I suppose I shouldn’t have said the choice was “entirely on (the universities)”. What I really meant was, as you said, it was because of other factors.
I don’t think that’s clear at all.
In my experience, most people who play in any kind of recreational league played the same sport as part of a team in school. People tend to play only in sports where they have some experience.
(And of course, I suspect ALL professional athletes played the same sport for the High School team, and the only ones who didn’t play in college are the ones who skipped college to go pro.)
So a lack of women’s baseball leagues might be entirely due to the lack of girl’s baseball leagues.
Especially since the athletically inclined will seek another outlet. I bet there are plenty of women who wanted to play baseball as girls, and would play baseball as adults if they had, but since they weren’t able to play Varsity Baseball in high school they played soccer, and now they play soccer instead of baseball since it is what they have experience with.
As you say, this isn’t necessarily a gender issue. The first Girl’s Varsity Baseball team will have nobody to play against. Not every sport can be offered everywhere: the high school I attended didn’t have a football team.
People who liked to play football did one of three things:
- They moved to a town with a football team,
- They took up another sport, or
- They played only for fun, in front yards and vacant lots.
I’m just saying we don’t really know what the level of interest is in baseball for women because, if you’ll pardon the pun, the playing field has never been level. Things are much better now than in the past (and interest in women’s baseball seems to be on the rise). And I’m not suggesting we bring in the metaphorical bulldozer (say, require every school to field a Girls’ Varsity Baseball team). We just need to admit that the field isn’t level, and we don’t know how many women would want to play baseball if it was.
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This is definitely true. For men there is little recreational baseball; most recreational ball is softball, either fast or slo pitch.
The weird thing, speaking as a guy who has played both, is that in many cases this makes sense for MEN but not for women. Softball - and you can get many grades of softball to allow for shorter or longer hits - slightly levels out the differences in talent among men. A baseball can be hit much further and harder than a softball. Softballs shrink the field, as it were.
Honestly, there’s almost no such thing as recreational baseball. Even amateur levels that I’ve been involved with are seriously competitive. I’ve also played slow pitch at anywhere from very competitive, sanctioned tournaments and leagues down to the take-all-comers beer league. Slow pitch can be much more inviting and, I agree, levels out the playing field. Any goof can hit a slow pitch softball.
Yeah, besides the pick-game of “lob league” we used to play as kids, I can’t think of any recreational baseball. It’s all 16-inch and (nowadays) 12-inch softball around here.