THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL (or Hockey, or Tennis, or Football, or ...)

Batter Up! Hear the call.
It's time for one and all
To play, ball!

Official Song of the AAGPBL (http://www.aagpbl.org/)

To play hard ball that is. On the radio this morning, I heard of survey indicating that many men's college coaches still resent Title IX; the regulation that assures schools using federal funds maintain equality in athletic opportunities for men and women. Apparently, these male coached feel that women are either not interested in sports, or less capable, less athletic than men.
It's hard to believe that in the land of the free, men are still whining about Title IX after all these years. The continued success of the US women's soccer league and the WNBA certainly attest to the American female's interest in sports and superb athletic potential. And we have our share of US women sports heroines: Babe Didriksen Zaharis, Flo Jo, Mia Hamm (no relation), and a star-filled list of Olympic medal winners.
And there was Alta Weiss, who played semi-pro baseball in the early part of the 20th century. Alta, an impressive athlete, played ona team with men, and used her salary as a ballplayer to finance her education. Then she went on to battle against gender stereotypes again as a doctor. You can't keep a good woman down.
I learned about Dr Weiss in the book, Women in Baseball: The Forgotten History by Gai Berman Inge. It turns out that women have been playing baseball for as long as baseball has existed. Even in the late 1800's, as women's colleges were being founded, intramural baseball leagues flourished on their campuses. The book even includes an amusing drawing of a young player using her long skirt to stop a grounder. These young women played serious ball, sustaining bruises and injuries that often caused society, and especially concerned parents to call for an end to such activities. But even when these voices succeeded, the girls would play less formal games.
And women kept on playing well into the 20th Century. There was of course, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, made popular by the movie, A League of Their Own.

And there was Toni Stone, an African-American woman, who in the early 1950's played on teams in the Negro Leagues with men like Hank Aaron and Satchel Paige. And she played well, in her first game she garnered 2 RBI's.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/baseball/stone.html

And around that same time, there was Eleanor Engle, a stenographer, who signed a contract to play for the minor league Harrisburg Senators. She was good enough to make the team, get the contract, take the field;and for Ford Frick, the baseball commissioner to ban women players from Major League Baseball and nullify her contract. See today's green button link for an newspaper article on that controversy.

So much for women being uninterested or incapable. It may only be a matter of time before a courageous woman breaks the gender barrier, just as Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the MLB.

And perhaps, it not just having to share the funding that the men and their coaches are griping about. As woman's sports start to share the media spotlight, perhaps they worry that their macho, men's-club sports world will become as intergrated as the rest of society.

And in a just society, we're all players on the same team. Let's try to make it to the World Series.

Come on, guys! Did you come here to whine, or to play ball? Shake it off and get back in the game.

WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN? Or Will The Real Deep Throat Please Stand Up?

Today the guessing games are over. For most of my life, from time to time since Watergate, the media pundits would "round up the usual suspects" and try to guess who Deep Throat might have been. Theories circulated, some become popular, then fizzled. The four people who knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, kept silent: Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and of course, Deep Throat.

Driving home from work today, I heard on NPR that Deep Throat had outed himself. By the time the six o'clock news came on Woodward and Bernstein had confirmed his identity. Urged on by the family he'd kept in the dark for thirty years; Mark Felts, former second in command at the FBI, revealed himself to be the most famous whistleblower in history.

In this day of live news feeds, instant communications, and open self-revelation (this latter even to the regrettable point of public self-humilation), it is hard to imagine such an important secret being kept for 33 years. And it is testimony of the integrity of the three journalist who shared Felts secret all these years. I'm sure there were considerable financial and other temptations over the decades; but they held their ground, and their tongues.

And the Felts family was right. At 91, and in poor health, Felts deserves to be acknowledged for the role he played in the Watergate drama. He put himself at risk to speak the truth. And while that truth proved to be the swan song for the Nixon Administration; it also showed the strength of the American government, and Constitution. The President resigned, but the United States continued. And Watergate showed that no one in America is above the law.

I was 14 when Nixon resigned. I remember watching his speech on TV with my family. But all I really remember about the speech was that it was the shortest he'd ever given. For years, I'd seen news about the Watergate investigations and hearings, even seen parts of some of the hearings on TV, as well. This was Social Studies class in action. I remember I was not surprised by the resignation, and perhaps like most of America, was a bit relieved when it finally happened. But I knew it was an important moment in our nation's history.

I grew up in the Sixties and Seventies, a time when most US households had just one TV. In fact, Nixon's resignation came not too long after our old black and white Zenith had finally died and we got our first color TV. But on that old Zenith, I'd watched the news with my parents.
Every evening Walter Cronkite, or sometime David Brinkley and Chet Huntley, appeared in our living room. I saw soldiers in the jungles of VietNam, two Kennedy funerals, scenes of race riots and civil rights protests, anti-war protests, the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, and Neil Armstong step on the moon for this first time.

And in grade school, they would bring in TV's so we could watch the Apollo launches during class. History-making events seem to have sprouted in my childhood like dandelions. No, wonder I'm such a history buff.

And in all that living history, I saw American at its worst. But I also saw American at its best, and I saw its great potential. And I still see it today, despite all the Red versus Blue naysayers.
Because during those turbulent Cold Wars years, I saw American reach ever and ever farther towards new frontiers, and ever and ever closer to her ideals of liberty and justice for all.

I've seen our country wrestle with dilemnas and become better and stronger because of those struggles. And we will do it again.

And today, we have an unmasked hero to remind us of what we all can accomplish. One voice can make a difference.

Thank you, Deep Throat!

Lest We Forget

In honor of Memorial Day, today's green button link is a list of and American soldiers who died in Iraq; 1657 as of May 29, 2005.

Please also visit this list for the 185 casualties in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2004/oef.casualties/.


And for a true picture of what this holiday is all about, you can visit this list of casualities from every American war and deployment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_casualties_of_war

From our Revolutionary War to the present, these soldiers died because they believed in our country; in the ideals, promises, and challenges expressed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution; in freedom; and in the rights of each American citizen.

Let us remember the more than 650,000 American individual lives today. And let us work to honor them, and their comrades in arms who are fighting today, by doing our work for freedom here at home.

For what right do we have to ask our soldiers to risk their lives for our country, if we shirk our duties as citizens here at home? We must be active citizens and make sure our government it doing its job for the American people. We all know the job descriptions; there're in the Constitution and every history text book.

Our Founders did not ask much of us, just to be active and informed, and to use our votes and voices. Let us take on our work enthusiastically and wisely. For we are also freedom fighters, here in the safety of our homes. Freedom is always an on-going process; there are no guarantees.

So let us honor these worthy Patriots, by being true and worthy Patriots ourselves. Then the United States of America may always be "the land of the free and the home of the brave."