A national pastime for only half the nation

The Dodgers and New York Mets were playing like girls.

Small ball was in full effect. There'd been no home runs, nothing hit deep to the warning track. This was about pitching, defense and fundamentals.

What a perfect game to watch with Jennifer Ring. "Look at this," she said, just after the second inning, the Dodgers ahead of the Mets, 2-0, on a warm May evening at Dodger Stadium. "What a cathedral! Look at that big, beautiful field . . ."

Ring, a baseball fanatic who doubles as a social critic and political science professor at the University of Nevada, then tosses a grenade: "I love baseball, but baseball has a big problem. It's just a sham that our national game basically excludes half the population. Women are pretty much shut out of this game."

I have to hand it to Ring. She's willing to hit a line drive -- straight into the system's teeth. This is why I invited her. Having read her book, "Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball," I had come away deeply impressed by her sharp, thoroughly researched examination of gender discrimination in the sport. So impressed that I put out the call: Dodgers game, professor, on me.

There we sat, up in the cheap seats, chomping on hot dogs, talking shop. By the third inning, with the game already a war of attrition, I'd had the history lesson: how in the early 1900s, a mythic narrative was shaped that echoes to this day. Baseball in America was connected with being aggressive, orderly, religious, militarily strong and, most of all, manly.

Women? As far back as the mid-1800s, they played baseball. Yet, by the 1930s, they had been, for the most part, not so gently excluded from the game.

"This was the thinking: Girls needed exercise," Ring said. "But not too much because it could make them like men. And besides, by the '30s, baseball was being sold as the national sport. Back then, you don't want a national sport that is for girls. . . . Hasn't changed all that much."

Softball, an imperfect facsimile in the minds of many, became the fallback. The field was smaller, the ball trundled in padding. Soft-ball. How perfect, went the tired old saw; after all, women are delicate little creatures.

For decades, nothing changed. It wasn't until the 1970s, when lawsuits partly opened the doors, that girls were sanctioned to play Little League baseball with boys.