Two women will join the starting lineup of an independent minor league baseball team on Friday, making the Sonoma Stompers the first professional baseball team to employ multiple women since three women played in the Negro Leagues in the 1950s.
The California-based Stompers nabbed 17-year-old Kelsie Whitmore and 25-year-old Stacy Piagno for the team; they’ll start off as a left fielder and pitcher, respectively. Stompers general manager Theo Fightmaster recruited the two after a push from Stompers investor Virginia Dare, a nearby winery owned by Francis Ford Coppola.
“My family would play co-ed baseball games and inevitably the star player would always be an aunt who could run and hit and that made the games so much more fun,” Coppola said in a statement on the team’s website. “When watching Major League Baseball, I always wondered why there couldn’t be a co-ed team. It’s the one major sport in which weight and strength come less into play. So when my Sonoma winery became involved with the Stompers, I had the opportunity to turn this thought into a reality and recruit these amazing women capable of playing alongside men.”
Past efforts to get women on the pro baseball field have been characterized as part talent recruitment, part publicity stunt. When Toni Stone replaced second baseman Hank Aaron on the Indianapolis Clowns, a Negro League team, in 1953, team owners thought a female player would be a good draw to keep the interest of fans who were starting to follow their favorite black players to the increasingly racially integrated major leagues. “Truly, the incentive was to get fans,” Negro Leagues Museum curator Ray Doswell told MLB.com. A generation later, when Ila Borders joined the minor league St. Paul Saints as a pitcher, coach Charlie Phillips griped, “People think I took her for the publicity—I don’t need all this.” Indeed, reports of Borders’ first game still claim that she was hired as a bid for exposure.
That doesn’t mean Stone and Borders didn’t deserve their positions—by all accounts, they were extraordinary players and boons to their teams—but that audiences are unwilling to believe that a woman could be capable of outplaying the hundreds or thousands of men vying for a spot in the pros. The Stompers are trying to fight that narrative. “This isn’t a one-day event. That’s been done a dozen times. Let’s give women a chance to be part of a team, let’s give women a chance to play against men,” Fightmaster told MLB.com. “They are not going to be in the starting lineup every night so we can sell more tickets. It’s a big game on July 1 and they’ll both be in the lineup, and after that we’ll see what their performance dictates.”
Then again, the Stompers’ promo page announcing the news beseeches fans to “GET YOUR TICKETS FOR THIS HISTORIC EVENT!” The statement also says the team hired Piagno and Whitmore “in an effort to promote the recruitment, development and advancement of women in baseball.” That’s a noble goal, but framing the team’s recruitment of two world-class baseball players as an advocacy move is a good way to get fans to doubt their actual impressive qualifications.
But the Stompers are doing more than any other team to bring diversity to baseball without sacrificing top-notch talent. Last year, the team became the first in pro baseball to employ an openly gay man: pitcher Sean Conroy, hired based on cold, hard sabermetrics. There’s nothing like an unemotional spreadsheet to quell fears of a hire based on politics rather than skill.
