Incredible Progress: More Women Than Ever are Failing to Make MLB
The old saying goes that behind every great man, there’s a woman; what’s becoming increasingly clear is that these women are abject failures, especially when it comes to Major League Baseball. In fact, data now indicates that more women than ever are failing to make it to the big leagues.
This incredible progress, best exemplified by how there were 3.5 billion failures 25 years ago compared to a monumental 4.5 billion failures today, shows how women are breaking down yet another set of barriers in the long road to rejection from professional sports teams.
“My mom failed to make it to the college baseball team so I could fail to make it to the pros,” said Vanessa Whitehall, an executive at a venture capitalist firm. “Growing up, I saw all these people playing baseball on TV, and none of them looked like me, and now here I am not playing professional baseball. I never dreamed I could fail.”
Generational shifts in thinking, from “Rosie the Reject” posters encouraging women to try and then cope with defeat during World War II to the addition of baseball programs in K-12 schools, have no doubt contributed to the staggering lack of women on MLB teams.
“When I failed in the 1940s, I was all alone, but now there’s a whole bunch of women ready to break the old stereotype that women can only succeed in baseball,” said Henrietta Henson, a docent at the Women’s Baseball Failure Hall of Fame. “Girls today can celebrate that they are making less money than men to not play baseball.”
And the men are on board and more supportive than ever.
Joseph Currasco, a former junior varsity high school baseball player who had long worried that baseball would alter the uniforms to exclude pockets and include a bra for female athletes, now realizes that stress was for nothing.
“I used to think that anyone who ever tried to make the big leagues would make it. How sexist and wrong was that? Women have proved that they can outpace men in failure, and I couldn’t be happier.”
