Striking Out With a ‘Sexist’ (?) Counterprediction

In counterpredicting the usual lineup of psychics’ predictions for the 1990s, I listed a prediction that a woman would become a major league baseball star.

I counterpredicted, observing that no woman could make the throw from third to first base in time to beat a speedy batter--not Babe Didriksen Zaharias, not Martina Navratilova, not Steffi Graf.

I might as well have let that one stand. As I should have foreseen, my counterprediction has been denounced as sexist.

“I am not the best woman athlete,” wrote Lorri Hickok of Placentia, for example. “However, I could make the throw from third to first base in time to beat a speedy batter. Could you?”

I cannot disprove Ms. Hickok’s boast, but I can most assuredly state that I could not make that throw. I couldn’t even have come close to doing it at the age of 19.

As I tried to explain on the telephone to a woman named Beverly (I didn’t ask her last name), that throw is extremely difficult. To begin with, baseball players are such superior athletes as to seem almost another species. Just watching a team trot out on the field is to experience that special grace and coordination. Beyond that, the game requires great strength and speed. The throw from third to first is only one of numerous tests.

Of the millions of boys and young men who aspire to play baseball, only a few hundred make it. They are the cream. To hit major league pitching requires the eye of an eagle and the speed and reflexes of a snake. A double play is a work of art requiring split-second timing, speed, strength and coordination.

It takes nothing away from women, and it does not make me a sexist, to point out that women cannot compete with men in such sports as baseball, football, basketball, hockey and tennis. Nobody knows that better than women athletes.

I was taken aback, though, by a phone call from Chuck Dohogne, who told me that Babe Didriksen Zaharias had signed a contract with the St. Louis Cardinals and in an exhibition game had struck out Babe Ruth.

I didn’t know that. I thought it was possible.

Mildred (Babe) Didriksen Zaharias was the best woman athlete of modern times, maybe of all time. In the 1930s, she dominated track and field and later became a champion golfer, returning from an ultimately fatal cancer to win the women’s national open in 1954.

According to The People’s Almanac “she could stand at home plate and bounce a baseball off the left field wall on the fly. In 1931 . . . she threw a baseball 296 feet to set a world record.”

Babe might have been able to throw a man out at first. I doubt, however, that she could stand at the plate in Dodger Stadium and bounce a ball off the left field wall. The distance is 330 feet.

Babe’s obituary makes no mention of her playing with the Cardinals, though it does note that she played with the professional House of David baseball team.

The House of David was a religious group that believed in the imminent establishment of God’s kingdom on Earth. Their baseball team toured the country, delighting crowds with their biblical beards.

Babe might have played with them, but one thing she couldn’t do was grow a beard.

Ann Meyers, a UCLA basketball player of amazing ability, did sign a contract with the Indiana Pacers of the men’s National Basketball Assn., but she was cut the first week.

I asked Bill Dwyre, Times sports editor, whether a woman might be able to make the throw from third to first. He said the throw from right field to home is harder.

He said he still remembers clearly when he was in right field for the Notre Dame baseball team, caught a deep fly and tried to throw a man out at home.

“I can see it now,” he said. “He tagged up and started for home and I lay back and gave it everything I had. It bounced on the pitcher’s mound and the runner scored. The coach kicked me off the team. He said, “ ‘You throw like a girl.’ ”

Perhaps that poignant story, sexist as it may be, makes my point.

But maybe Zaharias did strike out Babe Ruth. After all, he struck out 1,330 times.