Women’s Minor League Baseball Team Gets Major Response

One heard about it on television, got in her car and just started driving from her home in Cincinnati. One flat tire, a smoking engine and a night spent at a Georgia rest stop later, she made it.

Another woman pleaded and cajoled until a police officer allowed her onto a highway in Tennessee that had been closed by an ice storm. And one managed to get a flight out of New York’s LaGuardia Airport even after another plane skidded off a snow-slicked runway.

Neither rain nor snow nor a long history of being kept out of the boy’s club of professional baseball was going to keep them from their chance to join the first women’s minor league team, the Colorado Silver Bullets. They will play men’s teams this summer in a barnstorming, groundbreaking series of games that maybe, just maybe, will lead to one of them some day breaking into the majors.

“It’s a dream. I keep pinching myself,” says Lisa Fritz, 36, the Cincinnati woman who willed her aging car to get her to the team’s final tryouts here a week ago -- and was one of just three out of 75 aspirants invited to spring training.

“I had a good feeling about this, though,” she says, “because when I pulled in here, the odometer went to ‘77,777.”’

Lucky numbers -- Mickey Mantle wore No. 7 -- and all, the new team adds a grace note this season to this already myth-laden and sentimentalized sport.

Baseball, increasingly the game of millionaires who talk to their agents on cellular phones from the locker room, every once in a while can still make you smile at its innocence: The game that has long let men remain boys now is letting women remain girls.

Or at least dream a little bit longer.

“It’s ‘A League of Their Own,”’ says Phil Niekro, the wily knuckleballer and 14th winningest pitcher of all time who is managing the Silver Bullets.

That delightful 1992 movie, based on the real-life women’s baseball league that flowered in the 1940s while the men were off fighting World War II, is evoked often here at the Silver Bullets spring training camp. In fact, two of the team members -- Julie Croteau, who became the first woman to play men’s college ball while a student at St. Mary’s College in southern Maryland, and K.C. Carr, a St. Louis-based actress -- were in the game scenes of the movie.

But while the “League of Their Own” teams played each other -- wearing short skirts designed more for their audiences than actual utility -- the Silver Bullets are affiliated with the independent Northern League of men’s teams. But, because the novelty of baseball-playing women, even in the standard baseball attire of pants and jerseys, makes them such a promotional dream, they have been invited to play all sorts of teams this summer, including some minor-league teams.

Spring training began Monday with 49 women -- a firefighter, a lawyer and several mothers among them -- and perhaps even more hopes and dreams on the line than the men’s teams also preparing for the season elsewhere in the state.

Gina Satriano, 28, an assistant district attorney who prosecutes cases in the Compton area of Los Angeles, still gets emotional talking about what this team means.

“I had to fight to be the first girl in California to play Little League. They kept me from playing on the college team,” Satriano says, her blue hat squashing a mop of curly brown hair and her eyes moistening at the memories as she takes the field for the team’s first workout. “I’d moved on in my life. I thought I’d left baseball behind me. But all I ever wanted was an opportunity like this.”

Among the large group of family and friends supporting her dream to play pro ball, one is particularly proud of her: her father, Tom Satriano, who played with the California Angels and the Boston Red Sox in the 1960s. “He knows, he’s been here,” she says. “I talked to him last night, and he said, ‘You’re going to have the highs and the lows. When you have the lows, call me.”’

Right now, the giddiness of getting to play real baseball -- as opposed to the slower-pitch softball that most of these women were shunted to around high school age -- is keeping any lows at bay. Just getting to this point -- some 1,100 women attended tryouts held across the country this winter -- has been a cherished experience, and even the prospect of more than half of them getting cut before the season starts in early May can’t dampen their spirits. They already seem like a team, with the kind of instant rapport that comes from shared experiences.

“It’s like you’ve known each other forever,” says Elaine Amundsen, 25, of Milford, Conn., who is delaying her training as a private investigator to play on the team.

The players will be paid $20,000 for about five months of work, comparable to what minor leaguers make, team officials say. The team is part of the Knoxville, Tenn.-based Whittle business group -- known more for its Channel One television broadcasts to schools and the Edison Project, which hopes to start a nationwide chain of private schools -- and sponsored by Coors, and thus named after its light beer.

While some observers have expressed dismay that the team will be an advertisement for drinking beer, the players say the greater good of having a women’s team outweighs such concerns.

“I feel this opportunity was not available to me last year, and this year it is, so I commend Coors,” says Croteau, 23, who is as close to a name player as anyone on the team.

Now a graduate student at Smith College, Croteau says she initially didn’t believe it when she got a call inviting her to try out for the team.

“I actually, literally fell out of my chair,” says Croteau, who is surprisingly delicate-looking and soft-spoken for someone who has battled her whole life to play baseball. She sued her Virginia high school, unsuccessfully, to play on the boys’ team, and did play three seasons on the St. Mary’s team, but left the team after what she considered harassment from some teammates and coaches.

“I feel very passionate about baseball. It’s the only thing I’d drop everything for,” Croteau says. “I feel I’ve paid my dues. This time, it will really make a difference for the future. I don’t want the girl after me to listen to what I had to listen to.”

There are skeptics of course, those who think there’s no way a woman can hit a tiny ball coming at them at 80 or 90 mph. Or pitch it at that speed after, for the most part, throwing a softball underhanded for most of her playing life.

And then there is the media to contend with, cynical journalists casting jaded eyes at their venture. “When they first asked you to do this,” one reporter asked Niekro, “did you ever feel it was below your dignity?”

A photographer kept hoping to get his dream picture: a player in the locker room primping in a makeup mirror. (For one thing, no media people are allowed in these locker rooms, and for another, as with any team, Ben Gay appears to be more common than Maybelline.)

Still, the Silver Bullet staff says even the most dismissive journalists usually end up impressed with the purposeful nature of the players and the seriousness with which the coaches are treating this from-scratch program. While this year’s games will be just exhibitions, the team hopes to demonstrate a level of playing ability this season that could lead to getting ranked the way other minor league teams are, A through AAA.

“I’ve always felt baseball was the only good shot women have at playing at the professional level,” says Paul Blair, the one-time Baltimore Orioles center-field star who was hired to work with the Silver Bullets on base-running and outfield skills. “I don’t see women playing basketball with the big boys, or football, but with baseball, it’s really just talent. It doesn’t matter about your size.”

Except for a couple of 6-foot-plus players, the athletes do look rather tiny out on the field, which has bigger dimensions than the softball diamond most are used to. Most are 5-foot-5 or taller, although one is a mere 5 feet tall. They look like your kid sister or the neighborhood tomboy, and they’ve proved an irresistible story to the media, especially for network weekend broadcasts and news organizations as far afield as Japan, London and MTV. ESPN and a couple of networks are interested in airing some of their games this summer.

“One of my daughters told me, ‘Daddy, you’re in Vogue,”’ says Bob Hope, a former marketing director for the Atlanta Braves and Hawks who is now president of the team. He’d toyed with the idea for a women’s professional team for years and partially credits the popularity of “A League of Their Own” with finally making it a reality.

As the father of two daughters, he says, he has a personal interest in seeing the team succeed. “It goes beyond marketing,” says Hope. “It’s a legacy we can leave to our daughters.”