The Rebirth of Baseball

It’s my birthday! Happy birthday to me! I’ve been working on something, but it needs some more thinking and seasoning, so it’ll either be out next week or next year. I’ve got a few odds and ends I’ve been thinking about, so you’ll be subjected to those today.

First, since it’s my birthday I hope you’ll allow me a little bit of self indulgence here.

I’m turning an age I very distinctly remember my parents being, which knocks me a little off balance when I think about it. Since the year I turned 30, I’ve tried not to give in to that “woe is me, I’m so old” stuff. Every so often I still have that odd feeling of realizing that, wow I am not 25 anymore! (I really freaked out when I turned 25, like, massively. A quarter century old! Oh no! And 27, for some reason.) I actually enjoy the process of getting older, of letting go of so many of the things that occupy you in your youth. I find it incredibly freeing. And I 100% believe that growing older is a privilege. I’ve watched too many people die long before they should have to ever take that for granted.

My birthday falls within the Pisces-Aries Cusp, which runs from March 17-March 23. Known as the Cusp of Rebirth, it encompasses the end and the beginning of the Zodiac year, the watery, deep-feeling, intuitiveness of Pisces and the fiery, passionate, impulsiveness of Aries. If Pisces is the wise, elderly Zodiac representative, Aries is its newly born counterpart, bringing fresh eyes and a new perspective to the world.

It can feel like a contradiction; water and fire, wisdom and newness. It brings to mind the mythical Phoenix, which rises from the dead, reborn from the ashes of its previous self. It reminds us that we can always reinvent ourselves. We can become something new when we have accumulated the wisdom to do so.

Reinvention isn’t always a good thing. Though this season sets the astrological stage for using wisdom to grow in a better direction, we are still fallible human beings and we don’t always make the best choices, and sometimes we’re influenced by other things that limit the choices we can make.

Although major league baseball doesn’t typically begin during the Pisces-Aries Cusp, this is one of the years when a couple teams are opening overseas. This year is only the second time ever that a regular season baseball game has been played on my birthday.

The first time was 5 years ago today, and it fits perfectly into the Cusp of Rebirth.

Ichiro Forever

5 years ago, Ichiro appeared in his last game and officially retired. If you were up in the middle of the night watching, you were sobbing right along with him. I don’t have too much to say about that here because I wrote about it that very day, in an outpouring of emotion.

Ichiro meant a lot to me, and I know I’m not alone in that, nor in saying that he and Félix Hernández were what kept me anchored to the Mariners for so many years. I think back on that early morning and it really was the end of so much, and the beginning of more.

Little League Season

Little League hasn’t quite started for us yet, but we’ve got our team assignment for coach-pitch this year. I’m excited to get going on that.

One of the things about having your kid in Little League is you get so. many. emails. I ruthlessly unsubscribe from a lot of things, but I worry about missing something important, so I’ve just accepted that I’m going to spend hours of my life deleting emails. One of things Little League as a whole is pushing this year is the 50th anniversary of girls playing Little League. They have a “Girls With Game” Initiative and are profiling prominent girls and women in Little League during Women’s History Month. Naturally, they are also selling merchandise.

All of that is fine. But something that is glaringly missing from all this “rah, rah, go girls” stuff is the fact that girls began playing Little League 50 years ago because they had to sue to be included. There were multiple lawsuits brought against Little League on the basis of gender discrimination.

We’re at an interesting point in time here, with roughly 50 years since some big achievements for women in baseball. 2022 was the 50th anniversary of the first woman umpire in professional baseball, Bernice Gera, working her first and only game. Later this spring will be the 50th anniversary of Little League capitulating to the “changing social climate”1 and allowing girls in the “No Girls Allowed” baseball clubhouse. November will be the 50th anniversary of the hiring of the first woman General Manager in professional baseball when Lanny Moss took over running the Portland Mavericks. And in a few years, it will be the 50th anniversary of women reporters being allowed in the locker room, although the woman who made it happen, Melissa Ludtke, has a book coming out about that experience this August.

Considering that I am solidly into my 40s, something from 50 years ago doesn’t feel like it was that long ago. It was practically yesterday. But it’s been long enough. It’s frustrating that we’ve had only a handful of women coaches, one major league GM, and, still, no women umpires. On top of that, we suffer through debates every now and then about whether a woman could play in the major leagues. You know, I have no doubt there is a woman out there who could do it. But whether that’s possible or not is so far beyond the point when it comes to real inclusivity. That would look like a thriving professional women’s baseball league.

This isn’t to batter Little League for what is a good-intentioned promotion. It’s not even about Little League at all really. It’s just that a lot of words are said, but so little is actually done. In the context of broader current political things, the lack of real, meaningful movement is all the more frustrating.

On a personal note, I played Little League for one season. It wasn’t really my thing, but at least I got an adorable picture out of it:

I played for the Mariners. I was the only girl on the team, and we won 2 games all season, a fitting tribute to the major league Mariners of that time.

Baseball-Shaped Box

I randomly came across some Little League pictures of Aberdeen native Kurt Cobain online:

I don’t know that there’s much information out there about his Little League career, beyond a few sentences on Wikipedia. I will say it doesn’t sound like he was all that into playing baseball, or any other sport. Kurt Cobain has the type of personality where it’s easy to take little bits of information and turn them into a story about him that may or not be true, and I don’t want to do that here, so I’m going to keep my little stories to myself. I will say, I would have loved to hear him write a song about baseball because I imagine it would turn the “Baseball As Americana” thing on its head.

I hope I’ll have something ready for you next week, but otherwise I have a really fun April Fools newsletter ready to go. I will assure you, it is not an April Fools joke by any means, but a tribute of sorts to a memorable April 1st. For now, it’s kind of real baseball season. But the real real Opening Day is only a week away!