She Has Few Problems Crossing This Border

The young woman walked across the grass and construction workers in a nearby lot stopped their hammering and began to gawk.

The young woman walked to the top of a small slope, paused, looked around and threw the small object she was carrying in her left hand.

Curveball low to Gabe Rosenthal, Ball 1.

Ila Borders took a deep breath, reared back and threw again.

Called strike, on the outside corner.

“Attagirl!” rang a voice from the crowd milling around, a crowd of nearly 300, and Ila Borders threw one more time.

CLANK!

A high fly ball to center field, a routine fly, a can of corn, a piece of cake. Ken Turner, the Southern California College center fielder, squeezed it and history had been made.

Ila Borders, the first woman to pitch in a college baseball game, had retired the first man she faced.

It was an amazing moment--amazing just to see Borders out there, in her blue and white pin-striped cap, surrounded by eight male teammates and decades of tradition that held that this was a man’s game, no women allowed, shouldn’t you be keeping score or something?

But it would soon be eclipsed by another amazing moment, and another, through nine innings and 104 pitches and 27 outs and the incredible final score:

Southern California College 12, Claremont-Mudd 1.

Winning pitcher: Borders (1-0). That’s what it will say in the box score, now and forever, a simple notation that will stand as one of the greater understatements of our time.

Yes, on the afternoon of Tuesday, Feb. 15, 1994, Ila Borders pitched and won. She also retired the first 10 batters she faced, took a shutout into the eighth inning, pitched a complete game and restricted Claremont-Mudd to a meager total of nine baserunners--five hits, three walks, one error.

And, two strikeouts. Jake Schwarz swung and missed amid hoots in the fourth inning, Rosenthal followed suit to lead off the sixth. The crowd went wild on both occasions, because, as we have been taught since Little League, striking out against a girl is one of the greatest fears known to man.

Rosenthal reacted violently, spiking his bat into the ground so hard that it kicked up and hit the on-deck batter, Scott Andrews, in the hand.

Later, Rosenthal would homer to left field to break up Borders’ shutout in the eighth inning.

“I guess I broke even,” he said. “Barely.”

Borders, a 5-foot-10, 165-pound freshman, wears her long light-brown hair in a ponytail that bounces from under her cap as she jogs to and from the mound. Tuck that hair under that cap and Borders would have blended entirely into the scenery--just another left-hander with a compact windup, an over-the-top delivery and good location around the plate.

“She’s a good pitcher,” Rosenthal had to admit. “She threw a lot of junk . . . (but) she’s always around the dish.

“I think she’ll do well. She’ll win again.”

Winning once made SCC, a small Christian college in Costa Mesa that competes on the NAIA level, a media hub for one day. Reporters from every local newspaper and television station were there to record the event, plus Sports Illustrated and ESPN. Photographers swarmed the SCC dugout. After the game, and a postgame ice-water dousing by her teammates, Borders held a press conference at second base, out in the open spaces, to accommodate the crush.

Borders stood directly on the bag, not a soapbox. She claimed she wasn’t striking a blow for feminism or taking one giant step for womankind. Borders said she was just winning a game for SCC.

“I just don’t see it as making history,” she said. “I wish I could explain it. I love baseball so much--I dream about it in the classroom. To pitch professionally is my first goal in life.”

And this, in Borders’ mind, was just another, albeit significant, step along the way.

“I definitely feel like this is a beginning for me,” she said. “I don’t know where my ability is going to level off. I don’t know who will give me the chance to pitch in the pros. But I am not going to look back when I’m 60 and say, ‘I wish I would have tried.’ ”

Borders could barely the sleep the night before taking this plunge.

“I got three hours and that’s it,” she said. “I was thinking about the game all night. I never wake up before 6, but today I was up at 5.”

Mostly, Borders was thinking about the first pitch, the first pitch ever by a woman in a regular-season collegiate baseball game.

Eventually, she decided it would be a curveball.

“I know they’re a first pitch-hitting team,” Borders said of Claremont. “I was not going to give them a fastball down the middle and have them spank me . . . I didn’t want them thinking, ‘Oh, hey, we got a girl out here and we can rattle her.’

“I had to establish in their minds that ‘That’s not a girl pitcher, that’s a pitcher out there.’ ”

By the seventh inning, Borders had made her point. She took a three-hitter in the eighth inning, where she began to labor for the first time, yielding a home run, a single and two bases on balls, needing 31 pitches to retire the side.

This was not surprising. Previously, Borders’ longest stint on any level, high school included, was 5 2/3 innings.

Before the ninth inning, SCC Coach Charlie Phillips walked to the mound and asked his pitcher, “What do you want to do--get your standing ovation now or after the ninth inning? How do you feel?”

“I lied,” Borders told reporters with a laugh. “I told him, ‘I feel fine.’ ”

Suspicious, Phillips offered Borders a compromise: One hitter. Get him out and you can stay in.

Borders nodded and got Tyler Laughery to ground to shortstop on her fourth pitch.

Two more batters.

Two more sinkerballs.

Two more groundouts.

Phillips watched his team pour out of the dugout and pour a tub of ice water on the winning pitcher’s head. “She’s going to have a bad hair day,” Phillips quipped.

It was a beautiful sight to behold for Phillips, who had taken heat from the day he offered Borders a scholarship. Phillips said other coaches swore at him: “How could you do this and open up this can of worms?” Phillips’ players also complained: “How can you let her take my innings?” Gary Johnson, a scout for the Kansas City Royals, “just trashed her,” according to Phillips.

“Who says she can’t do it?” Phillips said. “She just did it.”

Over at second base, a reporter with a microphone was asking Borders what she felt about the old saw, “So-and-so throws like a girl.”

Borders wrinkled her nose.

“I don’t know what that means,” she replied, glaring at the questioner. “I’ve never heard that phrase before.”

Tuesday afternoon, Ila Borders took that phrase and twisted it. Turned it into a compliment of the highest order.