Baseball: Breaking down barriers, one pitch at a time

By Tim Brown, Yahoo! Sports Feb 21, 2011

Justine Siegal delivered pitches to the Indians and her message to the baseball world. (photo)
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GOODYEAR, Ariz. – The girl on the field spent her 13th birthday last week attending the Justin Bieber movie. She wears multi-colored sneakers with mismatched laces. And she once tried to be serious about baseball, only to discover a diamond was a more wonderful place to chase butterflies and sketch infield pictures with the toe of one of those sneakers.

While Cleveland Indians hitters launched baseballs into an empty outfield, the girl on the field sat cross-legged and pushed her cap back on her head and fiddled with her iPhone, wondering just how long she’d have to be here.

Every few minutes she’d lift her head, study the scene on Field 2, then drift away again.

Her mom was throwing batting practice, something no woman had done before in a major league setting, as far as anyone knew.

“Yeah, I’m proud,” Jasmine Siegal said. “Thing is, I can see her pitch any time.”

Thirty-one years since she first held a baseball with some kind of intent and almost 20 since giving up her dream of becoming the next Orel Hershiser, Justine Siegal, 36, continued her fight Monday to persuade and allow girls of any age to play the game she loves. The game they love.

Just like the boys.

Or, as the case may be, to pursue butterflies.

Just like the boys.

She calls her ideal (and her website) Baseball for All. And after spending her prime stubbornly refusing to go away, Justine Siegal rolled her baseball pants to her knees, rubber-banded her hair into pigtails, stood on a back field, palmed three balls in her left hand and aimed, in her words, “To throw a four-seam fastball straight over the top and right over the plate.”

The Indians, the team of her youth and her father and her grandfather’s youths, were kind enough to grant her the stage, a platform behind an L screen maybe 50 feet from home plate. She wore a dark blue jersey, No. 15, for the day in February her daughter, Jaz, was born. The team had committed to a kind of tryout, allowing Siegal to give it a go against a handful of minor leaguers in shorts and T-shirts.

Turned out she did, indeed, throw like a girl. Like a strong, loose-armed, athletic girl who’d been doing this forever. Half hour later, she was re-warming in a game of catch with Indians manager Manny Acta and then pitching to big leaguers, throwing strikes and getting hammered like any good BP pitcher should.

As she strode to the mound, Indians general manager Chris Antonetti said to outfielder Chad Huffman(notes), “She was good earlier.”

“She was?” Huffman said.

“Yeah, she was good.”

“That’s great. I love it. Got a little swagger to her, too.”

Minutes later, catcher Paul Phillips(notes) stepped from the batting cage and said, “Is it bad when you’re going into a round of BP and you’re thinking, ‘Don’t strike out?’ ”

The goal was to hit as many bats as possible. The mission is larger, borne of Siegal’s own experiences growing up in the Cleveland suburb of Cleveland Heights, for years pitching (and occasionally playing third) for whomever would give her the ball, then as a coach for male teams, both for Springfield (Mass.) College and later the independent Brockton Rox.
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Justine Siegal says, "If you tell a girl she can't play baseball, what else is she going to believe she can't do?" (photo)
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Her organization is non-profit. Her message is about choices, and the freedom to make them. Whether her own Jaz ever caught the baseball bug or not, whether any girl did, Siegal believes they should have a place to play, a team around them and a way to earn it, regardless of gender.

“What I want is girls’ baseball across America,” she said between batting practices. “So when I throw, now all of a sudden we have a dialogue [about] how much girls and women love baseball and how they want to be a part of it.”

Beyond that, she said, “I think it’s fairly simple. If you tell a girl she can’t play baseball, what else is she going to believe she can’t do?”

To her uniform sleeve, Siegal had duct-taped a patch honoring Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old girl killed in last month’s Tucson shooting. Green was the only girl on her Canyon Del Oro Little League team.

As Siegal pitched, she calmed her nerves and dried her palms by singing to herself, a song by U2 called, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own.” And she thought of all the people who should have been on the mound beside her: Grandfather Alvin, who’d turned her on to the Indians of Municipal Stadium, father Michael, who loved the game like she did, and Jaz, whose precociousness, well, had to come from somewhere.

“At the same time,” Siegal said, “I feel all those people who told me ‘no’ are with me, too.”

She’ll throw more batting practice Wednesday, for the Oakland Athletics. In the meantime, Justine and Jaz almost certainly will find other things to do. On a rainy Sunday, they’d spotted a rainbow over Scottsdale, and through the puddles chased the end of it in their rented Volkswagen bug.

They got close enough for Jaz to take a picture on her iPhone, which she held up with a grin, her brown eyes sparkling.

There’d be time for baseball later.

“We should do and be whatever we want to be,” her mom said. “If baseball’s it, then go for it.”

Tim Brown is a national baseball writer for Yahoo! Sports. Follow him on Twitter. Send Tim a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.

What could the redefinition of rape mean for women?

by Jessica Ashley, Shine staff, on Tue Feb 1, 2011

Both reproductive rights and the definition of rape could change with the introduction of a U.S. House bill by New Jersey Republican Chris Smith.

H.R. 3, also dubbed the politically saturated "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," would take the current restrictions on federal abortion funding a step further. Since 1976, the Hyde Amendment has excluded abortion from public health-care programs like Medicaid. The exemptions to this amendment are mandated funding in cases of incest, rape, or when the woman's life is endangered. The Hyde Amendment must be renewed annually.

In part, H.R. 3 proposes that the exemption would only cover women who are "forcibly" raped and become pregnant. House Speaker John Boehner has said the bill is a top priority. It presently has the support of 173 representatives, ten of whom are Democrats.

Critics say that this would not only redefine rape, it would disallow government assistance for non-forcible sexual assaults, including many statutory rapes. A lack of consent, the political action organization MoveOn.org, states, is the definition of rape, not "bruises and broken bones."

"I don't know how anybody could suggest that there is any rape that is acceptable. I just think it sends a very clear message direct from the heart of the Republican party to women in America about exactly how Republicans feel about women," said Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schulz, a Florida Democrat who said H.R. 3 is "nothing short of a violent act against women."

Some supporters of the bill have said that the clamor over the term "forcible rape" has been blown out of proportion while others have not made public statements on H.R.3, according to CBS News.

Congressman Smith said that, although President Obama signed an executive order to uphold federal funding restrictions on abortion, health-care reform offers the opportunity to sidestep the amendment.

"We are setting up a funding scheme to pay for abortions," Smith said. The bill he introduced would make the proposed changes permanent.

The word "forcible" is one small part of this legislation. The bigger issue is reproductive rights of women who have already been victimized and are vulnerable to the many systems at work here. Sure, it can be argued that the word is not worth all of the outcry. However, to the young woman who has been drugged or date raped, the minor girl who has been manipulated by a man of legal age, or the many other individual cases where a female has been sexually assaulted where force cannot be seen or perhaps even proven, this is big, scary, threatening phrasing.

Before this moves forward, perhaps we need to ask whether Roe v. Wade is being chipped away through this bill, and who will pay the price -- not just for abortions that follow rape, but for the blows to women's health care, rights, and the ability to recover from crimes committed against women.

What do you think of the proposed bill and possible redefinition of rape?

Women, Girls Created Paleolithic Cave Art by Jennifer Viegas

Most scholars have assumed that all prehistoric artists were male, but new evidence suggests women and even young girls produced at least some cave drawings, according to a study in the latest Oxford Journal of Archaeology.

The study focused on finger flutings made on the walls and ceiling of Rouffignac Cave in the Dordogne, France.

The flutings -- lines drawn with the fingers on soft surfaces -- as well as other art in the cave are thought to be 13,000 to 14,000 years old, based on stylistic considerations.

The figures pictured here were likely created by a 5-year old girl. The researchers came to this conclusion based not only on her hand dimensions but also on the height of the places where she had been able to reach. [more]