[As I’ve
done each of the
last couple years, an Opening Day series—this time focused on
AmericanStudying some particularly interesting baseball identities. Leading up
to a special Guest Post on a particularly important baseball life!]
On two young
stars who reflect how much has changed, and why we must remember both.
In 1972, a
Hoboken, New Jersey Little League team quietly contributed to sports
and American history—the team’s coach, Jim Farina, invited 12 year old Maria
Pepe (a baseball fanatic with many friends on the team) to join the team,
and she pitched in three games, becoming one of (if not the) first girls to
play Little League baseball. Pepe’s presence didn’t remain quiet for long, however—the
league threatened to revoke the team’s charter unless she left the team; and although
she agreed to do so, the National
Organization for Women (NOW) took up the cause, eventually bringing the
case to the New Jersey Superior Court which decided in favor of girls having
the ability to try out for Little League teams. Unfortunately, Pepe was 14 by
the time the case was decided, and thus above the age limit for Little League
play. But thanks to her three-game performance and all that followed it,
future girls have received the chance to participate in a youth sport that is,
as Superior Court Judge Sylvia Presser put it in her decision, “as
American as the hot dog and apple pie. There is no reason,” Presser added, “why
that part of Americana should be withheld from girls.”
More than 40
years later, Pepe watched with what she
admits is a mixture of admiration and pain as the most famous female Little
Leaguer to date (and one of the most famous youth athletes in American history),
Mo’ne
Davis of the Philadelphia-area Taney Dragons, became the first
girl to earn a win and pitch a shutout in the 2014 Little League World
Series. Thanks to those singular achievements, to her status as the first
African American girl to play in the LLWS, and certainly as well to the 24-hour
news cycle/social media age in which her successes occurred, Davis has become a
genuine sensation: the first Little Leaguer to appear on the
cover of Sports Illustrated, star
of a documentary short
film directed by Spike Lee, recipient of numerous honors and
recognitions (including her LLWS jersey making
it to the Hall of Fame), and more. While Maria Pepe left behind her moment
of youth sports fame for a career as a hospital accountant and what seems to
have been a relatively typical American life (if one punctuated by brief returns
to the limelight in response to stories like Davis’s), it’s difficult to
imagine that Davis—who apparently prefers basketball to baseball and dreams
of playing collegiately for the University of Connecticut and then in the
WNBA—will not continue to occupy the public eye in one way or another.
That’s a good
thing, to be clear—not only because Davis is a far more deserving and
compelling recipient of such attention than many of her fellow media
sensations, but also and more importantly because her story reflects how far both
youth sports and America have come in the 40 years since the New Jersey
Superior Court’s decision (which is not to say there is not much farther to go,
of course). Yet at the same time, it’s vitally important that we better
remember the Maria Pepes of our history. For every Jackie Robinson, a pioneer
who received and has
continued to receive well-deserved recognition for his historic role and
influence, there are many other figures, in sports as in the rest of society,
whose important and inspiring lives and contributions do not occupy such a
place in our collective memories. It’s precisely to help us better remember such
figures that I am working on my current book and website project, the American
Hall of Inspiration. While Maria Pepe’s inspiring contribution might have
lasted only three games, its impact and legacy makes her more than worthy of
inclusion in such a project, and more importantly in our collective memories.
Guest Post post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. One more
time: what do you think? Other baseball lives or stories you’d highlight?
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