Every Day Is Ladies’ Day : Ex-CSUN Catcher Cress Hooks On With Women’s Professional Baseball Team

Missy Cress became a professional baseball player last week, but her story is nothing like the movie “A League of Their Own.”

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There’ll be no charm school for the former Cal State Northridge softball catcher. She won’t be wearing a dress either. And her manager isn’t a washed-up curmudgeon with a drinking problem.

Unlike the players in the popular 1992 film, when Cress takes the field for the first time for the Colorado Silver Bullets next month, the all-female team sponsored by a beer company will be playing it straight. And against men.

“This is no April Fools’ thing and it’s not a beauty contest,” Manager Phil Niekro said. “These are strictly baseball players. Once the program gets going, women all over the country will be playing baseball and they’ll get away from that softball.”

Niekro, a knuckleball pitcher who won 318 games over 24 major league seasons, has assembled a big-league cast to coach the women. Former big leaguers Joe Niekro (Phil’s brother), Paul Blair and Joe Pignatano serve as coaches.

The 24 Silver Bullets will play a 50-game, cross-country exhibition season that starts May 8 against the North League All-Stars in North Carolina and includes stops at Candlestick Park in San Francisco and Mile High Stadium in Denver. Lining up against the women will be men’s minor league (Class A and Rookie league teams) and semipro clubs.

Each player will earn traveling expenses and $20,000. The Bullets will earn every penny if their initial reception is any indication.

Earlier this month, the Bullets played their first practice game, squaring off against the Austrian national team. The Bullets won, 7-6, which didn’t make the Austrian men very happy.

Soon after the final out, Cress said, several Austrians referred to the Bullets by using a vulgar term.

“I’m sure some people will feel like women don’t belong out here,” Cress said. “We really don’t know what to expect so right now I’m just thinking about what a great opportunity it is.

“People come up to us and say, ‘Gosh, you guys are making history.’ I would like to have had female players to look up to when I was growing up. It’s great.”

Perhaps, but not everyone will embrace the Bullets with open arms. A well-known columnist for a top sports publication already took a shot at the team.

“Even people who love the opportunities for expression that sports gives women must wonder why a women’s professional baseball team would want to play 50 games against minor league and semipro men’s teams,” Dave Kindred wrote in The Sporting News.

“Maybe if the guys are called out in one strike and the women get seven strikes. . . . maybe if the women run 45-foot base paths and pitch from 35 feet. . . . maybe if a woman’s foul tip is counted as a home run. . . . maybe if the women get nine outs an inning and the men get one. . . . maybe then the men will win by scores of 15-3 instead of 32-0 every night.”

The comments are unfair and premature, Niekro said. He refuses to predict how many games the Bullets will win, but believes the team will be competitive.

“I really just don’t know because some days they look fine and some days they look like they’re still making adjustments,” Niekro said. “But statements like that really bother me a lot because we should at least have the opportunity. Maybe after he sees us play some games he will change his mind.”

Niekro has treated his players as though they were big leaguers. In one scene from “A League of Their Own,” which chronicles one season in a women’s pro baseball league during World War II, Tom Hanks, the reluctant and drunken manager, complained: “I don’t have ballplayers, I have girls.”

The coaching staff has been nothing but supportive, Cress said.

“Everything was first class and the coaches always treated us like professionals,” she said. “It really felt like I was a major leaguer.”

Cress was one of 1,300 women invited to try out for the team and was among 49 finalists flown to Orlando, Fla., last month to compete for a spot on the final roster. The site of the tryout was Tinker Field, former spring training base of the Minnesota Twins.

“All I kept thinking was, ‘Wow, the field is so big!’ ” Cress said. “It’s like, I’m going to play here ?”

That from an athlete who last year played in the College Softball World Series.

“This is so much more challenging,” Cress said. “Even when you hit the ball, you have to run 90 feet instead of 60 and you have to throw so much farther.”

Cress, who also played softball at Royal High and Moorpark College, made the Bullets’ final cut at catcher last week.

She was a starter as a senior at Northridge last season and had a .270 batting average with 17 runs batted in and three home runs.

“The first day I saw her behind the plate, she was above all the other catchers we saw,” Niekro said. “She’s very talented. Her biggest problem has been to throw from the plate all the way to second base.”

The Bullets train seven days a week, three hours a day in their home base in Winter Haven, Fla.

“It’s so exciting but it’s so hard,” Cress said. “I never thought I would play baseball. A lot of this is so new to me. I am walking away from this with so much more respect for baseball players.”

The transition from softball to baseball hasn’t been easy, Cress said. Wooden bats are heavier than the aluminum ones used in softball. Baseball dimensions are tougher to navigate, and the ball is so much smaller and travels faster.

Then there’s the etiquette issue.

“In baseball you don’t run from the batting circle like we do in softball,” Cress said. “Our coach said to walk coolly. You gotta be cool, I guess.

“Oh, and you don’t stand up and cheer in the dugout like we do in softball. The first day Phil said, ‘I’ve never seen an entire team stand up in the dugout and scream so much.’ In baseball you just sit there quietly.”

Getting the women to adjust wasn’t easy, according to Niekro.

“It took us quite while to get the softball flavor out of their mind,” he said. “We still are to a certain extent. But they’re like sponges, they learn so quickly. They’re very coachable. The public has to be patient because this is the first time there’s been women versus men.”

Even if the Bullets are scrutinized all season and get whipped by the opposition, Cress believes the experience will be positive. The monthlong tryout alone, she said, was exciting if for no other reason than the media hoopla.

The Bullets were filmed eating dinner, practicing and just hanging out. They’ve been on television and more than 50 publications have written about them.

Geena Davis, star of “A League of Their Own,” sent the Bullets a letter wishing them good luck, and some of the Bullets even have their own baseball cards.

“It hasn’t been Michael Jordan-esque, but we’ve had a steady stream of media,” said Kathleen Christy, the organization’s director of media relations. “We get about 100 calls a week and the ladies have done a lot of interviews.”

Those have been fun, but nothing Cress said compares to Blair’s request. The former Gold Glove center fielder for the Baltimore Orioles asked that each member of the Bullets sign his baseball.

“We kept saying, ‘Can you even imagine you’d be one of his autographs,’ ” Cress said. “That was just amazing.”