Making My Pitch

by Ila Jane Borders

  Coste likes fastballs and hits for power; he’ll likely be swinging the bat. I start him off with a screwball. He swings: strike one. After Javier throws the ball back, I keep it in my mitt. Dad taught me that the less a batter sees of the ball the better. He considered this a psychological advantage for the pitcher, as a batter is always looking to pick up the ball early. The longer I hide the ball before my release, the faster it makes the pitch look. I figure to keep throwing the screwball until Coste proves he can hit it. It helps that I can go after him a bit more because no one is on base and we have a one-run lead. I know a one-run lead isn’t likely to get me a win against this team, but there’s no use in pitching around him. Given how the entire Fargo lineup is hitting, they should all be walked.

  I peer in at Javier, like we’re pondering what to throw, then offer up another screwball. A little slower and lower this time. Coste swings again: strike two. Javier holds onto the ball and comes to the mound. He tells me that the bottom of my screwgie is falling out—that’s a good thing. “Hey, trust me,” he says. “I’ll block it if you throw in the dirt. I think we keep throwing this until he hits it. What do you think?”

  I place the mitt over my mouth and say, “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Just mix it up and let me shake you off a couple of times.”

  “Got it,” he says, and runs back behind home. As agreed I shake Javier off twice, then hold the ball for a moment while I send up a quick prayer. Dear God, Please help me strike this fucker out. I deliver another screwgie, and Coste swings and misses.

  “Strike three,” the umpire yells and jerks his thumb up.

  Holy crap, two innings and two strikeouts—and I am not a strikeout pitcher.

  Coste takes it like a grown-up. He walks back to the dugout and doesn’t say a word. So far the RedHawks have been very professional, if you discount the glares coming my way from manager Simunic.

  By now you would think the jitters have settled down, but the vein in my neck is still pulsating. So far, though, the adrenaline is working for me. Usually a pitcher catches a break in the lineup at some point but not now, with Forry Wells up to bat. Wells is hitting .368 against the Dukes. He’s another guy with speed. The guys with wheels always make me more nervous than the home run hitters. I stand on the rubber waiting for him to get set. He has one foot in the batter’s box, but the other one is still out. I think, Step in, you stupid fuck. I throw a four-seam fastball inside to back him off the plate. Ball one. Wells really likes to get his hands extended, so I need to work inside and, when I throw away, to keep it down more than usual. Next pitch is a screwball outside; he swings and misses.

  Soon as I get the ball back I step on the rubber, as if to say, Let’s go, I am ready.

  But Wells is outside the box again, stalling. A voice from the stands yells, “Step in the box. You afraid of her?”

  It’s the same old fear that goes back to Little League—a guy of any age doesn’t want to look bad hitting against a woman. I throw Wells a cut fastball and he bites at it, sending a fly ball to right for an easy out. I didn’t think he’d swing at that pitch. It isn’t the greatest, but today I have a little more zip in my fastball. The fastest I have been clocked is eighty miles per hour in Canada and my last year in college with the Whittier Poets. I have never been a hard thrower, because you have to throw a lot faster than that to be effective. So I need to stay out of what they call batting practice range, eighty to eighty-four miles per hour. If I threw that speed all the time, I would be easy to hit; but by slowing it down to seventy-five miles per hour and mixing up the speed, it becomes more difficult for professional hitters. So when I throw the ball at seventy-eight and move it around, it looks like ninety. I throw my next pitch as hard as I can. I’ve been throwing seventy-five miles per hour for the majority of this game, according to Fargo’s radar gun, but that pitch read eighty. Wells swings and flies out to right. Sweet. Two outs and nobody on.

  As Ruben Santana walks to the plate, I check where my outfielders are playing him. So far they have been playing deep. I figure if I can get through the lineup once without many base runners, I can go six or more innings. Then Roberto Giron, our closer, can come in, and he is usually lights out. I look in for Javier’s sign, and on the first pitch Santana hits a shallow fly ball to center. Like I always do, I turn around to make sure he catches it. “Fuck, yeah,” I say, and jog toward my favorite spot on the bench. No runs, no hits, no errors, no one left on base.

  The chatter in the stands has changed. From “Go home—you don’t belong here” to “Please sign my ball.” Fans send their balls into the dugout and ask my teammates to hand them to me for an autograph. And after I’ve thrown two scoreless innings, the guys on the bench are leaving me alone. They know I’m in a groove and don’t want to mess it up. They’re also staying put in the dugout. Usually they perch near the fence, so they can get a good view of the girls in the stands. One of the guys’ biggest perks in pro ball is finding women to sleep with. It’s funny—baseball’s such an orderly game, the way the diamond lays out, the fundamentals pure and clear—and then there’s the other side of it, the unruliness of the guys’ hunt for sex. When this subject comes up, writers love to quote Casey Stengel, the New York Yankees manager of the 1950s, who said, “Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.”

  From what I’ve seen, the players don’t have to look very hard. The women are so available. It’s a game for both sides, and they act like teenagers about it. It’s not limited to baseball, though—lots of people seem to act like kids about sex. Like Dad, whose midlife crisis collided with my teenage years, when I was crushed with guilt over what I saw as my abnormal attraction to girls.

  1987, La Mirada, California. A lipstick adolescence. I wasn’t aware of it then, but looking back I can see what a rocky path I was on at age thirteen: a born-again, closeted gay girl in a Christian school who lived to play baseball. I had only to look at two other La Mirada girls to see how simple my life could have been. For one there was Janine Lindemulder, my old friend Alyse’s role model, who had just graduated from La Mirada High School. Janine was blonde and beautiful, and the sort of natural athlete who makes the game she plays look easy. A few years later, as I watched Ken Griffey Jr.’s effortless grace, he reminded me of Janine’s style in softball. All the boys were crazy about her, but she was very much her own person, which caused a lot of girls to resent her and gossip about her, the only flaw I could see in her perfect life.

  Then there was Jennie Finch, five years younger than I was. Her family lived nearby, and Dad took me to their home sometimes to develop arm strength on the machine that Jennie’s father had invented. Like Dad, Mr. Finch devoted himself to his daughter’s sport, in her case, softball. The family was devoutly Christian. Like Janine, Jennie was blonde and pretty. She tended to wear pink ribbons in her hair when she played ball. Sandwiched between Janine and Jennie was my baseball-loving self. At puberty my own silky hair had turned dark, curly, and unruly. I did not wear pink bows; I was immune to boys chasing me; the only place I fit in was on the baseball diamond—and the odds were not in my favor that I could continue with the game I loved best. No stats exist as to how many girls are strongly encouraged to leave baseball for softball when they reach puberty and start to wear lipstick. Instead you have to rely on the stories you hear. Whole books have been written about it: when Jennifer Ring, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, saw what her daughter Lily went through to keep playing baseball past Little League, she began to collect her daughter’s and other young women’s stories and published Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball and, later, A Game of Their Own. “What happens,” Ring asks in the latter book, “when a baseball-playing girl is made to understand that she should not feel at home where she has felt most at home her entire life?”

  I was about to find out.

  Whittier Christian Junior High Schoo
l sits on a hill in the tree-shaded town of Whittier, which was settled by Quakers in the late 1800s. Calvary Baptist Church of Whittier founded the school. Chapel in the auditorium was mandatory. The campus is in a peaceful setting, but that didn’t help my spirits on my first day of school. Mom had warned me how strict the school would be. I looked down at the plaid skirt the girls were required to wear—no more jeans and sweatshirts for me—and bit my lipstick-free mouth. This is not me, I thought. This isn’t happening. But it was happening. Mom dropped me off with a hug and a cheery “Have a great day.”

  Some of the kids I used to beat up, like Jason of the Halloween mask incident in fifth grade, were my classmates again. When Jason and I first saw each other, we both sort of paused and then walked on by. Nothing said, no connection. Some of my rowdy old friends were here, too. To them, seeing me in a skirt was hilarious. Our skirts had to be long enough to cover the top part of the knees, or else you were sent to the office to be measured. If it was short by an inch, you were given a huge, flowery skirt that went down to your ankles. It was as ugly as a skirt could get, so most of the girls would not test the length rule. Rebel that I was, I sometimes rolled my waistband up to make the skirt length just a little too short. They always called me on it.

  Why was having to wear a skirt such a big deal? I felt like my freedom to move freely had been taken away. During recess I felt uncomfortable playing in a skirt. It made me feel awkward and shy. I was also ashamed because I liked girls. And Dad was sending a strong message to me to look like a girl. One afternoon he was at the field, and as the players walked off, he pointed out that on the field in our uniforms we were a team. But away from the field, each player was an individual. And so was I.

  “Be a girl,” he advised me. “Off the field wear high heels. Look like a girl.”

  Add to this list of grievances and anxieties a serious case of acne. Dad told me that I didn’t clean my face enough. He had me scrub my face with bar soap and then apply ice cubes to seal the pores from dirt. My skin began to scar, so Mom told me to wear foundation, but I hated the sticky feel of makeup on my skin. I obsessed over my hair, going through can after can of Aqua Net hair spray as I tried to blow-dry my bangs straight. There are no photographs of me during middle school—I ran from the camera, though that’s probably just as well. I had really big hair. Adolescence may be the beginning of a whole new world, but it’s also the end of so much. I often wished I could go back in time to the happy days of elementary school when I had self-confidence to burn.

  I took to eating lunch alone by a tree or behind one of the school buildings. One day my math teacher, Janet Thomas, saw me. She didn’t ask me to explain, just started inviting me to have lunch with her in her classroom. My grades began to improve—I was pulling A’s in everything except English.

  Salvation also came through sports. I played girls’ basketball and helped the team win our school’s first-ever league championship. We played hard, and in one game I was smacked in the mouth with the basketball. People rushed over because they thought I was bleeding, but the ball had just smeared my lipstick. Maybe wearing lipstick wasn’t such a good idea. I was named MVP. The following year we went undefeated, and I was named co-MVP. I treasured Coach Susan Johnson’s pride in our team’s winning the sportsmanship award. At our end-of-the-season dinner, Coach Johnson mentioned something that I held dear—our team’s closeness and the great fun we had together: “Remember . . . Ila’s ‘round the back’ layup at the Globetrotter game? When backing up on the press, Denise [Huizing] and Ila fell over each other? The game where our goal for the quarter was to get the parents to quit laughing? Remember the things we learned about teamwork and friendship.”

  I also ran track, anchored the mile race, and set a school record in the shot put. For these competitions, of course, I didn’t have to wear the dreaded plaid skirt. I felt more like myself in uniform. And sometimes, when Mrs. Thomas, Mrs. Johnson, and Coach Esslinger went golfing, I was invited in as the fourth. At a time when I sorely needed it, these three teachers offered me companionship and acceptance. As much as I enjoyed competing in track and field, basketball, and golf, these other sports could not take the place that baseball held in my heart. In different ways, they just contributed to the game I loved best: The shot put strengthened my throwing arm. Basketball and golf improved my hand-eye coordination, so important to hitting a baseball. And running cross-country built up my legs for pitching.

  The weather was chilly and rainy that winter, as if spring and baseball would never come. Suddenly it was the end of February. Soon our lemon tree would be filled with fragrant white blossoms. It was time for baseball tryouts. Dad sat me down and explained that he was not going to plead with the coach to give me a chance to try out—it was up to me to take the next step and approach the coach, if I wanted to. If I wanted to? The Whittier Christian Crusaders were an awesome baseball team; they had gone undefeated the previous season. The next day I lasted until lunch before I approached the office of the baseball coach, Rolland Esslinger. If playing baseball was going to be taken from me, you might as well kill me now, I thought. When I walked into Coach Esslinger’s office, I could barely whisper the words: “Coach, is it okay if I try out for the team?”

  His response blew me away. With one of the biggest smiles I had ever seen, he said, “Sure.” He had not even hesitated.

  Wow.

  Whittier Christian Junior High School had 240 kids, and fifty or so of the boys wanted to play baseball. When I showed up for the first day of tryouts, it felt like all eyes were staring at me. We were competing for the fifteen spots available on the team. Coach Esslinger began by telling us to form two lines and start warming up. No one wanted to take a chance and warm up with me. I could see the boys watching out of the corner of their eyes, wondering, How does she throw? But the familiar smell of the field’s freshly cut grass calmed my nerves, and after my first throws landed in another guy’s mitt with loud smacks, I overheard someone say, “Oh, my gosh. She can throw.”

  Next came batting practice. Trees beyond the field’s chain-link shaded the traffic on Telegraph Road. It was 200 feet to the right-field fence and 250 feet to left. When my turn came, I saw the pines and sycamores as my target. It reminded me of my first Little League tryout. After I launched a few balls into the trees, the mood of the guys improved even more: I sensed I would be welcome if I made the team. After two days of tryouts and an intrasquad game, the roster was posted on the window outside the boys’ locker room. I read the list and walked away with a big grin on my face. Big hair and all, I was on the team.

  Coach Esslinger quickly called me to his office. I listened as he spoke about how it was going to be. To avoid embarrassment in the locker room, the team would dress ahead of time for away games. Other than that, I would be treated like anyone else on the team. “We’ll try to do things to deemphasize your being a girl,” he said. “You’ll have to prove yourself by your performance and attitude. But I want to know about any problems you run into.”

  Rol Esslinger was the first person outside my family to go to bat for me. He was a religious guy with good morals, and I respected that. He was powerful—built solid, like a brick house—and athletic, and I felt that leadership came naturally to him. He was one of those coaches who instinctively knew how to get the best out of his players. He constantly encouraged me, pushing me at the same time. I wanted to do everything possible to play my best for him. After Dad, Coach Esslinger turned out to be the best coach I ever had.

  My teammates never gave me any crud on the field, and I always got a friendly hello from them off the field, but that’s as far as it went. They were popular on campus and hung out with the girls who liked them. But it wasn’t quite so cool at a Christian school for a girl to be a jock in a perceived boys’ game. I didn’t fit in with the Goth group either and was too much of an athlete for the nerds. I was too different to fit in with the popular athletic girls. And I refused to try to conform just to fit in. While everyone else was
figuring out this boy-girl stuff, I was dreaming of playing ball in the major leagues. Which is why I gravitated to my old friend, Alyse. Because she would do anything for a laugh, Alyse drew me out of my shyness—and was a nice counterbalance to the self-discipline and perfectionism that I practiced in baseball. Sometimes we let down too much. Alyse remembers thinking how cool we were: “We still liked to sneak out at night. Once we borrowed the Borders family car and practiced driving around the parking lot of a nearby school. I’m the type that says, ‘Let’s have fun—why not,’ while Ila was always a little nervous about things.”

  My high times with Alyse also brought me into an odd triangle. Alyse had stayed in touch with her softball heroine, Janine Lindemulder, and some nights we rode around town in Janine’s car, listening to elevator music on KOST 103.5 FM. Janine was graduating from high school, but she still liked to hang out with Alyse and advise her about boys and sex. (Janine seemed like a good source of information. In 1987 she had posed for Penthouse; for December she was named the magazine’s Pet of the Month.) I’d sit in the backseat, with absolutely no interest in the boring music or the subject of heterosexual love. Sometimes they’d remember I was there and call out, “Hey, you still back there?”

  Well, physically I was, though some nights, when I tired of their conversation about boys, I’d leave the car and walk home alone. In 1987 in La Mirada, California, I was thirteen and had not a soul to talk with about finding my kind of love. Even if I had, could I have found the words to explain myself or frame a question? I doubt it.

  To my surprise when baseball season started, the teams we played against did not hassle me, nor did the coaches. I didn’t know that Coach Esslinger was taking the flak for playing me. As he later said: