Excerpt from

Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball

by Barbara Gregorich

Nearly one hundred years from the time the first bloomer teams strode onto the ball fields and into public notice, a young woman named Julie Croteau made headlines by playing college ball on an otherwise-male team. As an eighteen-year-old freshman in the spring of 1989, Croteau played first base for the Seahawks of St. Mary's College in Maryland, and her debut was covered by eleven news organizations. Three years later the first baseman made headlines again, this time because she quit the team and took a leave of absence from college. For this ballplayer, the treatment of women in baseball was part of a larger question - the gender division of sports during the formative years.

Born December 4, 1970, Julie Croteau grew up in Prince William County, Virginia, and begun playing T-ball at the age of six, two years after girls had won the right to play in Little League. At age eight she entered Little League, where she batted .300 and her coach said of her, "as a first baseman, from a defensive point of view she was one of our best." Although neither Ray nor Nancy Croteau were baseball fans, they were pleased that their daughter loved the sport so much. From Little League Julie progressed to Major League (ages 13-15) and also played in a fall baseball league for fourteen-year-olds. She began to attend baseball clinics at thirteen and at sixteen entered the Babe Ruth League (ages 16-18), playing there until she was seventeen and a senior in high school. During those years, says her father, she "had teeth cracked and her nose busted, all kinds of bumps, bruises, twisted ankles, just like anybody else. She's a good ballplayer, just like the guys."

At Osbourn Park high school, the five-foot-seven, 122 pound lefty tried out for the junior varsity baseball team. The JV coach phoned Julie's parents and suggested that their daughter take up softball. Nancy and Ray Croteau were angered. "The coached didn't call the boys and suggest that they change sports," says Nancy Croteau. "They didn't tell them to go play golf." When it became clear that Julie wasn't going to take up softball, the coach accepted her on the JV team. She had hoped to play first base, at least part of the time, but the coach moved an outfielder to that bag and benched Croteau. "I felt like the coach was embarrassed to have me on his team," she says. "It was if having a girl on the team was bad enough, but having a girl who could start would be a putdown on the school."

During her junior year Croteau tried out for the JV team again, but wasn't accepted. As a senior she tried out for the varsity baseball team, the Osbourn Park Yellow Jackets. After the coach cut Julie from the team, Nancy and Ray Croteau, both lawyers, filed a lawsuit asking that she be reinstated.

That was when Julie Croteau first made national headlines, and soon reporters were interviewing everybody connected with her career. "She's a young lady with a lot of heart and fortitude and the skills to go along with it," said the coach of her Big League team. "I think she's just as capable of playing first base as many of the boys." Ross Natolli, the baseball coach at Catholic University, where Julie had taken a series of clinics, believed that "She has average high school ability for boys. She's a line drive hitter, and she makes good contact. I'm seeing seventy to eighty high school games a year, and she has enough ability to make most high school teams."

Twelve of the seventeen members of the Yellow Jackets appeared in federal court to support their coach, while the remaining five delivered a letter to the press, proclaiming, "We don't in any way back the plaintiff. Not because she is female, but because we feel this suit has no grounds at all. . . . Our job is to win baseball games utilizing the best seventeen athletes. We feel we have the best seventeen, bar none." In publishing the letter, most newspapers duly recorded the 4-13-1 record of the Yellow Jackets, casting some doubt on the young men's claim to have "the best seventeen, bar none."

Ultimately the U.S. district court judge handling the case ruled against Croteau. In his opinion Title IX, the federal statute that prohibits sex discrimination in school programs receiving federal funds, did not apply to the case. Mike Zitz, a reporter covering the trial, remembers how terrible he felt watching the proceedings, and how when the judge announced that there was no constitutional right to get to first base, "the entire Osbourn team jumped up and down like they were in the World Series."

In addition to being a reporter, Zitz was manager of the Fredericksburg Giants of the Virginia Baseball League. He recalls that when the verdict was read, Julie Croteau "was crushed. I could see how much she loved baseball and I couldn't live with myself if I didn't give her a chance to . . . see what she could do." So he invited Croteau to try out for the Giants.

Elated with the opportunity to be evaluated as just a ballplayer, Croteau tried out for and made the Fredericksburg Giants in the summer of 1988 and has continued to play with the semipro team every season but one since then. The team ranks consist of those who have played minor league ball and those who are going to play minor league ball, as well as college and sometimes high school students.

Around the same time that Julie lost her court case and earned a spot on the Giants, St. Mary's College of Maryland accepted her as a student with the understanding that if she could make the school's NCAA Division III baseball team, the administration and coach would do nothing to stop her. That fall, Croteau practiced with the Seahawks and in the spring she made the team.

The Seahawks knew that their opening game, in March 1989, would be covered by national news cameras because a woman was playing in an NCAA game. Players were tense, Julie Croteau included. The game was rained out, delaying the dreaded event and making everybody tenser still. Finally the team played its season opener against Spring Garden College of Philadelphia, losing 4-1. The Seahawks' leading pitcher of the previous season was so nervous that his first fifteen pitches were balls. Croteau went 0 for 3 but didn't strike out, and she fielded six chances flawlessly. "I kept thinking about the fifteen cameras," she said. Jack Bilbee, coach of the opposing team, told reporters: "I thought she was one of their better players. Especially with two strikes on her. She really hung in there." Charley Bolen, Seahawks third baseman and team captain, admitted, "There was a lot of pressure, but we pulled together. If a girl is as good as Julie, she deserves to be on the team. I think everyone feels she's a good addition to our team. She has good character, and she's a good person."

At first Croteau felt that fans came to judge her as a player with intention of judging all women by her performance alone. After several weeks, she felt less pressure to represent all womankind. Even from the time she was in high school, however, she always recognized that her actions would affect other girls and women who wanted to play baseball. Her playing college baseball "sends a message to high schools," she told reporters. "If it's all right at college, it should be all right at high schools and middle schools." As the Seahawks' second-string first baseman, Croteau batted .222. Under long-time coach Hal Willard, the team struggled to a 1-20-1 record.

Looking back on her first season, Julie Croteau reflects that "what happened is that for some reason I was this hero and everyone accepted it and the media covered it and the media and school were telling everyone it was a great thing, let's not destroy it. So everyone believed it." At the end of the first year, the coverage stopped: this particular baseball player was no longer news. "When the media went away, so did the message."

Instead of receiving feedback on how good it was to have a woman playing baseball, the school and team received no feedback and things went back to normal. And Julie began to think about what she saw all around her: that sports in general are considered a male privilege and birthright, and that women who want to participate in mainstream sports - "We'd have to call them men's sports," says Croteau - are dissuaded, derailed, and thwarted every step of the way. Thinking about the big questions of women and sports and society disturbed her: she felt she needed time to get away and think. She thought of quitting the team and school her junior year, but didn't do so because she felt it would be unfair to her teammates. When the 1991 season ended, she quit.

Newspapers carrying the story reported that Croteau quit baseball because her teammates read aloud articles from Penthouse magazine and used obscene slang referring to female genitalia as standard baseball lingo. "What I said and what the media covered were two different things," maintains Croteau. "I was talking about a problem with all sports, and I used my experiences as a example. But they wrote it as if I was criticizing my team and my school and baseball, not the general situation of all sports." Croteau says she has heard far worse than Penthouse articles outside of baseball, and no words she heard on the field would make her quit.

For the next fourteen months, Julie took her leave of absence, working three months as an intern for the Women's Sports Foundation and appearing as an extra in the film A League of Their Own. She considers meeting the AAGBL players and learning about their league one of the highlights of working on the film.

In the summer of 1992, Croteau was playing baseball with the Fredericksburg Giants once again, and that fall she began her senior year at St. Mary's College. No longer on the Seahawks, she is still passionate about baseball, as she is about social justice. At one time she wanted to be a civil right attorney, but today she's wondering whether there might be a better way for her to help break down the gender barriers in sports, possibly by working in sports administration. As a high school senior, Julie Croteau believed there would some day be a woman in the major leagues. Asked whether she still thinks so, she responds immediately. "I do believe it. I really do."

Starting out as a ballplayer, Croteau became interested in more than professional baseball. It's the nationwide school system she's most concerned with. "Most people don't go on to play professional sports," she points out. "They play high school sports, and there shouldn't be gender divisions in high school sports. Let students play according to their abilities, not their sex." It's true that today girls can play in Little League, but what about afterward? "They usually cut you off [in high school]. And when they cut you off in high school, they cut you off for college."

At one time major league teams signed players directly from high school and sent them into the minors. A few exceptions, such as Bob Feller and Robin Yount, came directly from high school into the bigs. Since the 1960's, however, college ball has become a training ground nearly equivalent to the minors. Today most top high school prospects go to college and play baseball. Some of them, such as Jim Abbott, play major league ball immediately after graduation. Most college players, such as Frank Thomas of the White Sox, spend a year or so in the high minors.

Today women who want to play baseball will seek to do so in high school and college, where, unlike in the minor leagues, there is no formal directive against them. Julie Croteau knows of three high school women who have applied to play baseball in college next year and haven't been turned down. She hopes her experience will help these women. "I'll do everything I can to keep them there," she promises.



From Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball by Barbara Gregorich (Harcourt Brace, 1993). Copyright 1993 by Barbara Gregorich. Reprinted with permssion. All rights reserved.

To order a copy of Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball by Barbara Gregorich, call Harcourt Brace & Company at 1-800-543-1918 and refer to ISBN# 0-15-698297-8 or visit the Harcourt & Company website at http://www.harcourtbrace.com.