Making My Pitch

by Ila Jane Borders

  One coach called, extremely upset about having his team play against a girl, but I didn’t see it that way. The nature of our school philosophy was built around how we treated one another. . . . Ila was mild-mannered and carried herself as she needed to, and that helped her do what she needed to do. . . . It was pretty much a shock to the boys because she was so good. When she didn’t pitch, I played her at first. I batted her third because she was the best hitter on the team, with the ability to hit for power and for average. She was also strong on defense.

  Coach Esslinger was all about the team. He allowed the media to focus not on me but only on our team as a whole. And our team was one fine story—we were all about keeping the winning streak alive. In our first game against Paramount Junior High School, it was close. In my first three at bats, I singled, doubled, and had two RBIs. The score was tied when I came to the plate again with a runner on base. I fell into my usual habit of pressing my batting helmet down as far as it would go, muttered, “Gotta get a hit,” and looked to our third base coach for a sign—bunt, swing, or take the pitch? Our team had spent a lot of time learning the signs. Now the coach clapped his hands a couple of times, before pointing his index finger at me. No sign was on. I was on my own. I jammed my helmet down tighter, swung at the first pitch, and lined a single up the middle for the game-winning hit. The streak was alive.

  Our second game was against our big rival, Brethren–La Mirada Christian Junior High School. The two schools are near one another, and we all tended to play up in front of the families and neighbors who showed up to watch. It meant a lot that Mom was in the stands, encouraging baby Randall to let out a yell for his big sister. I had arrived in seventh grade with a two-seamer fastball mph and an effectively loopy 11-5 curve ball. They proved to be enough. Over four innings I struck out seven and gave up one hit. I also went two-for-two at the plate, with three RBIs: The score: 14–0 for Whittier Christian.

  The streak was still going when we faced Pasadena Christian School for the championship. I was the starting pitcher, and we had a pitchers’ duel going until I left after the fourth inning, with seven strikeouts and two hits. Then we broke it open. I went four-for-five with six RBIs. We won the game 21–3, and with it the Christian School League Southern California championship. Infielder Anthony Morales and I shared the MVP award. I’d put the lie to the idea that once I started wearing lipstick, which was a sometime thing for me, I’d be unable to keep up with the boys on the diamond. My batting average was .571, and my ERA was 0.44, with thirty-seven strikeouts.

  Rol Esslinger had been able to play me because the Christian School League of Southern California had no rule against a girl playing baseball. I was the first to do it, and with the numbers I put up, no one could argue that a girl was not up to the challenge. But after the season ended, the league raised the question, Did my presence on the diamond mean that girls should also play boys’ football or basketball? Rol Esslinger was at the meeting. “There were never any faith-based issues raised over whether it was biblical for a girl to play baseball with or against boys,” he recalled. “The discussion was heated, but when it came down to a league vote, it was agreed that baseball’s a different game than softball, so a girl could play boys’ baseball even when there was a girls’ softball team. But that would be the only crossover sport. In the end the right decision was made, and it felt good to be on Ila’s side.”

  I was glad that my season had helped open the door for other girls to play baseball in the league.

  After the Crusaders’ season ended, I kept on with baseball, playing PONY League and Senior League. With a full schedule of games, I often changed jerseys in the car as we traveled from game to game on the Southern California freeways. Dad and I kept the car radio blaring with hard rock music, from Led Zeppelin to Cinderella, which helped channel my nerves into energy. You could say we both just rocked out. Some of my teammates did not like riding with us because the music was so loud or, possibly, because they thought we were nuts—probably the latter. That summer I played up to six games a week, driving myself to build my strength and my skills. I sometimes ran short of energy and conserved it by holding back in a game, knowing that I had to be up for the next one. I became aware that I might not be invincible. No matter how well I pitched—or because I was pitching well—I still heard chants from the stands: “Go back to softball.” Once, when I was pitching a good game in PONY League and notching lots of strikeouts, I came to bat and tripled. It was all too much. A crowd of screaming parents surged into the chain-link fence, and some of the fathers spilled onto the field. The umpire called a forfeit.

  That was the year my brother Randall fell ill with spinal meningitis. My parents had me watch Leah and Phillip while they rushed Randall to Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. His temperature shot up to 106 degrees, and for forty-five minutes he went into seizures. The doctors didn’t think he would survive, but he did. Dad’s medical insurance didn’t begin to cover Randall’s large medical bills, and my parents fell deeply in debt. Dad had to sell his champagne Mercedes 300 SD and the red Porsche 924 that Mom drove. He replaced them with a 1985 Chevrolet orange truck with white side panels and a bench seat. Mom would drive Dad to work in it and then use it to drive all of us kids wherever we had to be.

  Our cars were only the outer sign of our changing fortunes. For years Dad had run a lucrative auto painting and body shop business. Then the insurance industry changed its policies, making it much less profitable for shops like Dad’s. To help out, Mom started A Child’s Place, a Christian preschool in nearby La Habra. After Randall got sick, she had to hire a director to run it. She would stay home with Randall for three years, a time when she wasn’t able to run her business properly. The preschool barely broke even. I learned to cook and look after my sister and brothers when Mom ran errands. By now she called me the “second Mom.” I also tended to the household chores and repairs: fixing leaky toilets and pilot lights that went out and setting traps underneath the house for rats.

  Our family had always enjoyed sitting together in front of the television as we watched baseball, including my favorite teams, the local Los Angeles Dodgers and the Kansas City Royals—me staring at Brett Saberhagen and George Brett and mentally analyzing various batters’ swings. Now I saw how financial stress changed the climate of our home. Dad was often depressed. When he did lash out, much of the anger that used to come my way was directed at Mom, who couldn’t defend herself. But I had learned to fight back, and some nights it came down to fighting him off with my fists. It was Mom’s habit to serve as family peacemaker—and after all, she had the history on all of us. She knew that Dad had come from a difficult background. She had been told that when he was a boy, he was playing with the neighbor kids and took his shirt off when it got too warm. His parents had gone out and the neighbor who was watching him saw welts all over his back. He had been beaten. The neighbor called Child Services. Mom’s own parents, Delores and Theron Carter, feared Dad’s background would rear up and had opposed their marriage. They had not even attended the wedding. The estrangement lasted until I was three months old. After that, Mom said that Grandma had dedicated herself to using love to try to coach Dad into the goodness of life. She also used love to introduce me to the world. Grandma and I would climb trees, catch bugs—grasshoppers were her favorite—take tea, and garden. She taught me how to ride a bike. I would never put on a dress for Mom or Dad, but I did for Grandma. As Dad liked to tell Mom, “I think Grandma is raising Ila instead of us.”

  Which made what happened to Grandma when I was five such a loss for our whole family. My parents had just bought their first home in Whittier, and it came with a swimming pool. Growing up in Duluth, Minnesota, Grandma had never learned to swim; now she quickly took lessons. Every day we swam to our hearts’ content. She would throw rings into the water, then both of us would dive for them, or we would race to see who could swim the length of the pool the fastest. She was forty-nine years old, but in the water she was like a little k
id.

  One day, Grandma and I were swimming laps when Mom called out to say that she had to run an errand. She would be right back.

  “Okay,” we said. “See you soon.”

  Grandma and I were on our tenth lap when we bumped up against each other. I came up laughing, but she sank to the bottom of the deep end. I thought she was joking. Sometimes we stayed under water to see how long we could hold our breath. But I saw no movement and suddenly realized this was no joke—she was drowning. I dove to the bottom and pulled at her with all of my might. Three times I tried to lift her but failed. Then I raced down our street, screaming for help.

  A neighbor came back to the house with me, pulled my grandmother onto the diving board and started cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Just then the fire department showed up and took over. But somehow I knew that she was dead. I remember feeling responsible, weak, scared, and beyond sad. When Mom came home she fell apart. At the funeral, I stood by Grandma’s casket. I told myself right then, You will not be weak. You will be responsible and strong. And you will honor her by packing two lives into one.

  Grandma’s death had brought the first traumatic change in our family. Mom turned from outgoing and fun-loving to shy, without self-confidence. Dad became the ruler of the house, a dictator. According to my parents, I grew stone-faced and stopped talking about my feelings and emotions. When Mom was pregnant with me, they had looked through a book of names and saw the name “Ida.” But Dad, wanting something that seemed softer and more feminine, changed the consonant to “l.” Later he was told that “Ila” means “island dweller.” After Grandma’s death, I think that in my heart I really did become a sort of island dweller.

  One night Leah ran into my bedroom and said there was a man outside her window. I looked—she was right, and I ran into Mom and Dad’s bedroom. I remember telling Dad there was a prowler, but he thought I was crazy, so I grabbed the hunting rifle, loaded it, and told Leah to call 911 if things went bad. I went out the back door and pointed the rifle at the intruder, who was in our carport. “I have a gun,” I said. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

  He ran down our hill. For the rest of the night I stayed with Leah in her room, the rifle nearby. When Dad went outside the next morning, he found that some tools were missing. Despite all of Dad’s bluster, I had become the defender of the family.

  That summer something in our relationship turned sour. Dad still drove me to baseball games and coached, sharing everything he knew about the game, but he could also be downright cruel. I didn’t understand his despair or that he was working his ass off for our family’s financial survival. I did know that emotionally he just disappeared. He began an affair. What made me so mad about it was his lying. He had always said to save yourself for sex until marriage. And now this? Everyone in the family knew about the affair, though he denied it. This woman would sit in the living room and flirt with him; other nights Dad would come home late. We called her the Hot Pants Lady because her shorts barely covered her butt. How ironic that we lived on a street called Olive Branch Drive. There wasn’t much peace at our house.

  Eighth grade came, and everyone wondered whether our team could keep the streak going. I think the pressure brought the team closer. Coach Esslinger counseled balance. He told us the streak was important and that we should work hard to keep it alive, but we all knew it would someday end. “God doesn’t expect us to win every game on the scoreboard,” he said. “But I do believe that He wants us to do our best and play for His glory (not our own).”

  Most of our wins that season were lopsided. I faced Bethany, giving up one hit with ten strikeouts. Against Paramount I threw a six-inning shutout, with another ten strikeouts. In addition to my two-seam fastball and curve, I was working on a change-up but had yet to perfect it. Batting third in the lineup, I had a great season at the plate. There was no cockiness about this—Coach Esslinger didn’t allow that; I was thrilled that we’d added another win to the streak. When we faced Brethren in the playoffs, I went four-for-four with four RBIs. For the championship game against Pasadena I was the starting pitcher. I always felt that I get the edge by arriving at the field early, and Mom drove me over to Los Coyotes Field ahead of time. As I paced the outfield alone, shaking my arm to loosen it up, I could hear the rush of traffic on nearby Rosecrans Boulevard. Could we win one more game for a perfect season? I pitched shutout ball for six innings, striking out twelve. The score: Whittier 6, Pasadena 1. Coach Esslinger explained why I was named MVP:

  Ila was a key member of an excellent team, but she also taught the boys a great lesson about life. She showed them what hard work and determination could do. Also, she was not out to prove girls were better than boys. The lesson was: here was someone a little bit different—in this case, a girl—who was a worthy teammate. I think the boys grew up a lot.

  I grew up, too. I knew where I belonged—on the diamond—and I prayed that wherever baseball took me I would be able to find an advocate like Rol Esslinger. I’m still listed in the school’s top-ten record book: first in innings pitched (forty) and first in strikeouts (seventy); fourth in ERA (0.44); sixth in batting average (.613); eighth in total hits (nineteen); and ninth in doubles (five). The years as a Whittier Christian Junior High Crusader would be the time I truly felt part of a team.

  After my junior high championship season, I took the summer off from PONY League and Senior League. The problem was the different distances from the mound to the plate. In Little League and junior high I had thrown from forty-six feet. Senior League and PONY League were fifty-four feet. It would have been a huge challenge to adapt, just as it is in changing from the aluminum bats used in college ball to the wooden bats in pro ball. My pitches had to get a tighter spin on the ball, which gives a quick last-minute break. And my release point had to shift with the new distances.

  Instead I spent the summer before high school in a very different sort of baseball climate. Dad signed me up on his semipro adult men’s team. He wanted me to understand what the adult baseball life was truly like—the men’s culture of the locker room and the dugout. Would I want to continue? And could I adapt to pitching on a mound that was now sixty feet six inches from home? You had to be at least eighteen years old to play, so Dad fudged on my birth certificate. The manager knew I was underage but kept quiet about it. The games were played on Sunday mornings, which put an end to our church attendance. Dad rationalized this by arguing that I could reach a lot more people as a Christian ballplayer than by sitting in church. Mom saw it differently. “I was very much opposed,” she recalled. “I even went to someone at the church about it. It was a tough one. I also worried about the exposure she’d get, being around adult ballplayers. It’s hard to see your daughter go up against that.”

  But by now baseball was keeping me much too busy to make time for God, though I’d revert back when loneliness got the best of me. The first time I came into the dugout, the guys were kind of surprised to see me. One guy, a former minor leaguer, walked out. Another team picked him up, and the first time I faced him, he struck out. All that summer, Dad and I drove to games from San Bernardino to San Diego and in between. I quickly saw that my opponents were all better and stronger than I was. This was a first for me. I was not going to be able to overpower them, as I had in kids’ baseball, but I could outsmart them. I learned to pitch with my brain that summer: to keep the ball low, to pitch inside, and watch for weaknesses. With a count of 3-and-2 or 1-and-2 on the batter and two outs, a runner on first base will usually break for second base. So I developed a neat pick-off move for that situation. I learned to change the rhythm of my motion, making it more difficult for batters to guess my pitches. I was also learning how to change the tempo of the game and slide step to the plate in my stretch. My teammates helped me out with tips on pitching, but they also treated me like just another ballplayer, as did our opponents. Going into second base, it wasn’t Excuse me but I’m gonna hurt you. Nobody backed off because I was a girl.

  Sometimes when Dad was on
the mound, the manager would come out and say, “You’re done. I’m bringing Ila in.”

  When he handed over the ball, Dad liked to say to me, “Give ’em hell.”

  He got a laugh out of this—“Hey, Ila, your Dad’s outta gas. Close this thing out, will ya?”

  Nobody else kidded about it, though. Our team was competitive and wanted to win ball games—and if I could get outs, then great. Sometimes the intensity boiled over. After a game in which I struck out an opposing player, I looked up to see the player’s girlfriend coming at me, swearing. Suddenly I saw sunlight flash off something metal in her hand. It was a knife. As the woman broke into a run, I turned and fled. I’m hazy on what happened next. Somebody managed to stop her. Dad was there. An umpire or a security guard escorted us to the car, and we got out of there. During another game, I was sitting on the bench between innings when a fight between two players broke out. The violence scared me. Back on the mound for the next inning, I realized that in the long run, this summer was going to help me. I think when you’re thrown into a situation over your head, there’s only one way out. You have to rise above it. That summer brought out my determination. I started throwing harder. I also learned to look out for myself. Sometimes I’d be dropped off at a field at night, when it was dark. I learned to look over my shoulder; I’d check around before I went into the restroom. I figured this was how kids in New York City lived.

  While I came out stronger physically and mentally, playing semipro baseball opened my eyes in other ways, too. Some of the men were disrespectful toward women. They’d be reading Playboy or Hustler and joking about it in the dugout. I was still pretty naïve, and here I was in an adult world. Sometimes I wondered what I was doing there. Dad understood and stayed close by. When asked why he encouraged me to play in the semipros at age fourteen, he liked to say, “I exposed her to the real world when she was not alone—and I think that made a difference. I was there to advise her when she felt uncomfortable. I told her, ‘You can play with them on the same team, but you don’t have to associate with them or be like them.’”