KNUCKLEBALL PRINCESS

 

               I’m retired and, thus, have time to spare. I fill it partly by surfing the internet for interesting stories. I found one the other day on the MLB.com website. Its headline read “Knuckleball Princess.” Couldn’t pass up that one, huh?

               It turned out that the headline was out of date. The story’s subject, Eri Yoshida, is a Japanese woman of 31 years who as a 16-year-old became the first member of her sex to play professional baseball in her homeland.  The “princess” label was appropriate then but not so much 15 years later. But as they say in the newsbiz, if you have a good line you use it every once in a while.

               What was immediately newsy about Ms. Yoshida is that she had taken her act to the U.S. by appearing in something called the Empire Professional Baseball League, a minor league unaffiliated with Major League Baseball that has five teams based in upstate New York, one of which is called the Japanese Islanders. That’s despite the fact that all but six of that team’s rostered players appear to be Americans. The “whys” of those last couple of things are illusive; my attempts at elucidation failed. But I’m satisfied the EPBL is real, so this piece can continue.

               The New York gig represents a comeback of sorts for the woman, a 5-foot-1, 115-pound right-hander with a knuckleball speciality. She learned the pitch in her Yokohama hometown at age 14 from a TV show on Tim Wakefield, who rode the delivery to a 200-win career that spanned 19 MLB seasons (1992-2011), 17 of them with the Boston Red Sox.

She’d pitched in a men’s U.S. minor league before, beginning in 2010 as a dewy eyed 18-year-old with the Chico Outlaws of the California-based Golden Baseball League, also unaffiliated. Her three seasons with that club were interesting, to say the least. It reportedly had high points, including a four-inning stint in which she surrendered but one hit. But if she could be good she also could be horrid, giving up a total of 81 hits, 57 walks and 28 hit-batsmen over 78 innings, with a 7.62 earned-run average. Back to the drawing board she went, pitching for and coaching Japanese women’s teams. Still, she says she has “a dream in [her] heart” to succeed among men in the land of baseball’s birth, so she’s trying again.

The idea of women beating men at sport’s heights has enduring appeal even though it has little grounding in fact. Sexual politics is a cause, as is our love of underdogs of all sorts.  Exceptions are eagerly seized upon-- in 2014 Mo’ne Davis, a 13-year-old girl playing on a Philadelphia team, pitched a shutout in the Little League World Series, busting 70 mph fastballs past bewildered boys. The crowd went wild, and Sports Illustrated put her on a cover, along with a story that revealed her ambition to star in either MLB or the NBA.

But while girls usually mature (i.e., go through puberty) earlier than boys, and in the Little League-eligibility ages of 11 through 13 often are taller and heavier, boys mostly have passed them by the mid-teens and by adulthood have a sizable edge in “lean body mass” (i.e., muscle). That’s the basis of male athletic superiority.

Plenty of women can beat plenty of men in plenty of sports, but at the elite level in which both sexes compete in the same events over the same courses (e.g., track and field and swimming), men’s records are about 15% better than women’s, across the board. That’s also about the difference in average driving distance on the PGA and LPGA tours, which is why the women pros compete on shorter courses than do the men. Yes¸ 29-year-old Billie Jean King beat 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in their hyped Battle of the Sexes in 1973, but a truer tennis test came 19 years later when Jimmy Connors, then aged 40, handily beat 35-year-old Martina Navratilova despite getting only one serve per point in his service games and letting Martina hit into the doubles’ alleys.   

 That said, however, Ms. Yoshida’s continuing experiment bears notice. If a woman ever does play in baseball at a high level it well might be as a knuckleball pitcher, whose soft, no-spin offerings depend on unpredictable air currents for their motion. The delivery is as much an intellectual exercise as a physical one, something that’s rare in sports. It’s hard to hit but not hard to throw; the trick is getting it around the plate consistently. Jocks of both sexes are take-charge types, out to impose their wills on foes. The k-ball requires just the opposite.

Pat Jordan, a pitcher turned writer, explained it best is his excellent autobiography “A False Spring.” He wrote, “A knuckleball pitcher has no control over the peregrinations of the ball. To be successful he [or, uh, she] must first recognize this fact and decide that his destiny lies only with the pitch, and throw it consistently no matter what.”

Getting stats from the obscure Empire League ain’t easy, but early returns on Ms. Yoshida there were not great. In her first three innings she gave up five hits, four walks and two hit-batsmen, and seven earned runs.

 It might help if she were bigger than 5-1, 115. I can think of no man that size who made a splash in the game (“Wee” Willie Keeler stood 5-4 and weighed 140). She’s just 31, though, and that’s young for a knuckleballer. Hall of Famer Phil Niekro, the model for the type, pitched until he was 48 and was just getting started at her age. You go, girl!  

And oh yes, at last sighting Mo’ne Davis was an infielder on the women’s softball team at Hampton U., in Virginia.