Mike Boyd can murder a baseball. With a cruel crack of his bat, the still-taut 39-year-old can send the spheroid spiraling into earthly orbit--bound for the moon, it seems, never to return.
But just ask the older brother of former major league pitcher Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd and he'll tell you his batting idols aren't Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio or even Hammering Hank Aaron.
It's a woman named Girtharee (Sweetie) Boyd--his late mother.
"To this day, I can still hear that smack when my mother hit a baseball," recalls the Glendale resident, one of six baseball-crazy Boyd brothers born in Meridian, Miss. "If you saw her, you wouldn't care about Maris or Mantle.
"She'd hit the ball a mile and then walk out a single--because she had big breasts and didn't want people to laugh when they saw her run. But man oh man, could my Mama hit a baseball."
These days, as Coach Boyd takes to a Burbank playing field for an afternoon practice, the image of his mother lives on in the throwing and fielding exploits of his players--an all-woman squad Boyd hopes to soon turn into seasoned pros.
The girls of summer.
Call it Mike Boyd's field of improbable dreams. He wants to start a women's professional baseball league--complete with head-on slides, 80-mile-an-hour fastballs, double plays turned like well-oiled clockwork.
And, of course, child care in the dugouts.
For too long, Boyd says, professional baseball has been a rarefied realm of chest-beating, tobacco-chewing, butt-slapping men. It's time, he insists, to give women another run at the sport.
Women briefly held the spotlight during World War II when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League cheered up a battle-weary nation with teams such as the Grand Rapids Chicks, Springfield Sallies and the Battle Creek Belles--an era captured in the recent film "A League of Their Own."
But the 14-team league folded in 1953, a victim of television and returning armies of invading male athletes. Since then, Boyd reasons, women have been shunted into a forgotten ghetto of amateur slow- and fast-pitch softball leagues.
By this fall, he wants to launch a league of six to eight all-woman teams in California or Hawaii. If successful, games could be played during the usually baseball-barren winter months when the men are off filming commercials or playing golf.
"Women have a place in professional baseball and it's right there on the playing field," he says. "Baseball is more than brute strength. It's technique and intelligence. And these women have an abundance of that.
"Baseball needs to be less selfish. Baseball needs more hugs. Baseball needs women."
Women like Gina Satriano--by day a Los Angeles lawyer and by night a fastball pitcher who has tried out for several major league teams. And Shauna Oetting, a 23-year-old Nebraskan who former Dodger Lee Lacy once described at practice as "pure grace, a ballerina on the infield."
Coach Boyd is emphatic about giving his girls a chance to play. Because he also knows the frustration of being an outcast of baseball. The first black to play baseball for Meridian High School in 1971, his pitching arm helped lead the team to a state championship.
But this was seven years before his youngest brother, Dennis Boyd made his big league splash with the Boston Red Sox. In the still largely segregated South, Mike Boyd says it was the color of his skin and not any lack of talent that kept him out of baseball.
He was eventually drafted by the Dodgers in 1973 but never signed. A tryout with the Oakland A's also failed to land him a major league contract. While he cannot prove racism, Boyd says "the major leagues basically told me that I couldn't play with their baseball. So I went out and found my own."
As ensuing years saw Boyd try singing and acting, his heart stayed true to his sport.
Using a technique he calls "Step, Hip, Hands," Boyd has taught private batting lessons, as well as fielding and throwing techniques, to aspiring baseball players from 2 to 67--charging up to $100 an hour for his services.
All he asks of his girls, however, is dedication and hard work.
It was two years ago when, like a single lashed into left field, a light flashed on in Mike Boyd's mind: a revival of women's professional baseball. At parks throughout Los Angeles he had spotted women who could hit the ball like his mother, Sweetie, and wondered if there were more where they came from.
Before long, Boyd had founded two teams--the Prophettes and the Gatekeepers--composed of more than two dozen players: working women, managers, attorneys and students, each of whom would give their right arm to drop their briefcases or book bags and play professional ball.
A league of their own.
Last August, Boyd staged what he calls the first professional women's baseball game in 40 years. Six hundred people paid $5 apiece to watch the Gatekeepers trounce the Prophettes, 11 to 2--a game that included three home runs, one more than 340 feet, Boyd says. The fan reviews, he insists, were stunning. Women's baseball was a hit.
