A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball by Jennifer Ring (review)

Despite USA Baseball’s seemingly contradictory strategy of fielding a Women’s National Team without developing an infrastructure for a female baseball program at the grassroots level of play, girls and young women still embrace the sport, work hard—often at great personal sacrifice—to develop their talents, and aspire to play the game at the highest levels of competition. Every two years, the most promising players in the country are invited to try out for a spot on the U.S. Women’s National Team, usually at their own expense, with the hope of playing in the Women’s World Cup Tournament. Some of the invitees have played baseball since childhood, while others converted to the sport after years of competitive fast-pitch softball experience. Some even managed to play both baseball and softball while growing up, but one experience common to many of these players is persistence in the face of active discouragement to play baseball. In A Game of Their Own, Jennifer Ring profiles the young women of the 2010 Women’s Team USA and chronicles the challenges these athletes have faced throughout their athletic careers. She details their personal experiences against the backdrop of the gendered politics of baseball.

Ring, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, was inspired to write about women’s baseball by her daughter, a Team USA member in 2006, 2008, and 2010. She introduces her second book on this topic (following 2009’s Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball) with a brief discussion of baseball’s gendered cultural history and the corresponding invention of softball. Ring identifies baseball’s cultural associations with masculinity, nationalism, and capitalism as barriers to women’s entry into the sport. As softball grew to be viewed as the feminized equivalent of baseball, girls and women were increasingly segregated into that sport. As Ring argues, “The creation of organized softball for girls preempted any impetus to organize baseball and helped to cement the post–Title IX segregated masculinity of baseball” (xxxiii). This gender barrier, well established by the early twentieth century, continues to influence the competitive sport choice of girls in the twenty-first century—an influence apparent in Ring’s ethnographic biographies of Team USA members.

In Chapter 1, Ring chronicles her daughter’s experiences in high school, college, and international competition. The next two chapters are devoted to tryouts for the 2010 Women’s National Team in Cary, North Carolina, and the team’s experience at the 2010 World Cup in Caracas, Venezuela. The next eleven chapters present profiles of the members of Team USA 2010. Ring organizes the chapters into three sections: The Veterans, Softball and Baseball Players, and Baseball Girls. Her biographical sketches, based on in-depth interviews and player statistics, provide readers with a rich sense of each player’s personality, family background, and athletic accomplishments. The final three chapters of the book present more of a scattershot discussion of the players’ collective experiences, the undersupported attempts of women’s baseball advocates at grassroots program development, and the governance of USA Baseball.

A Game of Their Own is an engaging and well-written chronicle of women’s baseball in the United States. Ring places the women of Team USA at the center of the book and allows them to speak in their own voices about their poignant experiences with America’s national pastime.