Symposium features deep dive into women on the diamond
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum chronicles the history of the game throughout the world. But sometimes, history is happening right in Cooperstown.
On June 1, the Cooperstown Symposium hosted the seventh annual Skirting the Issue panel moderated by Jean Hastings Ardell. The panel, held in the Museum’s Bullpen Theater and entitled The High Times and Challenges of Women Who Play Baseball, included Gabrielle Augustine, Marti Sementelli, Justine Siegal, and Kat Williams. Topics covered included each panelist’s introduction to the game, a favorite moment from their careers and how male perception of women players have changed.
Both Williams, a professor at Marshall University and president of the International Women’s Baseball Center, and Siegal, founder of Baseball For All, talked about some of the challenges they faced when they played, but noted that the newer generations have become more open to the idea of women in baseball.
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Sementelli, a member of Team USA’s Women’s Baseball Team since 2008, said: “I never had a teammate who had a problem with me being on a team… I’d say the only people who maybe had problems with it are the opposing teams… especially when you’re pitching.”
Augustine, the Museum’s Assistant Curator and a player in a local men’s wood bat league, said that while pitching during her teenage years, “you heard the bickering, you heard some of the jeering, but when I’m on the mound, I really do tune them out. It’s me, the catcher and the batter.”
But both Sementelli and Augustine agreed that after the first strikeout, the opposing dugout would very quickly get quiet after they stopped seeing gender and began recognizing skill.
Even though attitudes are changing, all members of the panel stated that more needs to be done. Williams said, “Women have been a part of baseball since there’s been baseball and yet there’s this huge divide when you look at quote ‘real baseball’ – Major League Baseball – and women aren’t a part of that. And the only way that’s going to change, first of all, is if women are part of the conversation.”
Siegal is excited that Major League Baseball now has an office devoted to diversity and inclusion because even though it is a work in progress, the existence of this committee is a step in the right direction.
During the Q&A segment, when asked what the “old white guys from academic intuitions” in the audience can do to help, the panelists agreed that some of the best ways to continue progressing is to keep including women in the conversations about baseball.
After the panel’s discussion, John Odell, the Hall of Fame’s Curator of History and Research, accepted Siegal’s donation of the jersey and cap she wore in 2015 as Major League Baseball’s first female coach in the Oakland A’s Instructional League. Siegal highlighted her coaching experience with the team during the panel as a favorite moment saying, “Walking into an A’s locker room and there’s your locker and it says ‘Siegal’, those are kind of these moments of ‘Oh my gosh, you’ve made it.’”
The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American culture examines the impact of baseball on American culture from interdisciplinary perspectives and is co-sponsored by SUNY Oneonta and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
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