Passan: Mo’ne Davis and the fascinating subculture of women in baseball
From Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports on August 19, 2014, with mention of SABR member Justine Siegal:
Everybody is watching her. It’s not just the teenage girls who look at Mo’ne Davis and see an anomaly: the preternaturally confident adolescent, one with the self-assuredness necessary to march out onto a baseball diamond surrounded by boys on all sides, stand in the middle of it and belong. Not just act like she belongs, either, but manage the attention and the stardom thrust upon a 13-year-old from South Philly and the responsibility of maybe, possibly being the one. Best of all is what she has owned from the instance she introduced herself to the country: the moment.
No wonder, then, that in addition to the girls it’s old men and soccer moms and little boys and grandmas and dads and office workers and doctors and neighbors and even those utterly and wholly disinterested in baseball who are tuning in to the Little League World Series this year for her. Even though it’s because she’s a she – because the novelty of a girl who can throw a baseball 70 mph and hurl a shutout against the elite of her age group’s elite is a match made in zeitgeist heaven – it’s more because of who she is than what she does.
Read the full article here: http://sports.yahoo.com/news/mo-ne-davis–and-why-no-one-should-laugh-at-the-idea-of-a-woman-playing-baseball-032951116.html
Originally published: August 19, 2014. Last Updated: August 19, 2014.