And she's sure as hell not a painting.
Treating her as anything but what she is, a 13-year-old, is the height
of objectification, making her a symbol instead of a kid playing a kid's
game. Her future can wait until it arrives.
It's too easy to
talk about Mo'ne Davis the wrong way, or at least in a way that puts a
burden on a 13-year-old girl that her performance does not require. The
Little League World Series is mostly just a fun chance to watch kids
play baseball at a precociously high level. It is also, perhaps as
often, a chance for us to completely lose our perspective.
The LLWS brought us Reds All-Star third baseman Todd Frazier, sure, but it also gave us Sean Burroughs
and pitcher Danny Almonte, a ringer who was actually old enough to have
served in President Franklin Pierce's cabinet when he threw a perfect
game in the 2001 edition of the tournament. Now it has given us Davis,
the right-handed Philadelphian that has been the sensation of this
year's LLWS. This is a good thing, but also one we should handle with
care.
She's a fascinating and talented kid, but despite her being on television, she's really none of our damned business.
It's so easy to forget the
"little" in Little League, especially when we're watching alpha-children
who are already nearly adult height. Because they are so good, and
because of the reflexes we build up as baseball-watching humans, it's
easy to lose sight of the fact that these are kids, and forget
that word is shorthand for "not fully formed." You can put anything on
LLWS players in terms of projecting a future, but any and all of it will
be both flatly irresponsible and wrong, not because some of them won't
be major leaguers, but because most of them won't be. Most of them won't
even come close. In this way, they're like most everyone else their
age.
A lot of them won't even want
to be major leaguers, as Davis reportedly does not want to be, and
that's good. It may even be the best part. In an age in which ever more
people aren't born serfs or slaves and can choose how they spend this
one life they've been given, every time someone decides their own
destiny it's a new monument to human progress. Mo'ne Davis will be able
to decide what and who she wants to be. It's likely that it will have
little to do with baseball, and that's just fine.
There's an old saying, "You can
look for me when you see me coming." We should take that kind of
attitude towards these Little Leaguers, regardless of gender. Let them
be children now. Scout them when they're in high school, for gosh sakes,
or college, but accept that today they are protoplasmic, inchoate,
evolving youngsters who have not asked to have their futures projected
by self-appointed professional soothsayers. They get to make that
choice, or to grow out of their present abilities, or anything,
without anyone having the right to look back at what any outsider wrote
when they were 13 and saying, "Tch tch, woulda coulda shoulda."
Back on Mother's Day, I speculated about the day, sometime in the hazy future, when the female Jackie Robinson will arrive
to shatter baseball's gender barrier. It would be oh so easy to look at
Ms. Davis and her 70-mph fastball and big curve and use her as an
excuse to say, "Ah, maybe she's arrived ahead of schedule" as some writers have done.
That is not only spectacularly premature, but also an unwarranted bit
of objectification for a girl barely into her teens. We don't need to
ask if Davis' fastball will add more velocity as she grows, if she
grows because women don't gain as much height and weight as men as they
go through adolescence to adulthood. We don't have to look at her
precocious offspeed stuff and ask if that gives her an advantage against
inexperienced competition that will fade with time. We can watch,
because it's fun to watch baseball and because Davis is great fun to
watch, but we might as well leave it there, if only for her sake and
because it's the only sensible thing to do.
Important: That is not the
same as denying that a female major leaguer is something that many of
us look forward to seeing. Hell, I spent that whole Mother's Day piece
hoping for it to happen in my lifetime, and I hope you want it to happen
as much as I do. But it's not yet time to say if Davis is The Chosen
One, and it may never be. You'll know it's her when you see her coming.
Until then, she's not, for all practical purposes, a female prospect.
She is not a prospect at all. She's a Little Leaguer, full stop.
The Jeff Passan piece linked
above is well-reported, with quotes from Julie Croteau and all the usual
sources who get called when a woman plays baseball at a high level. And
yes, Croteau was an outlier back then and still is, but, "Twenty-five
years ago, when Croteau walked on to the St. Mary's College baseball
team in Maryland, the gender barrier extended beyond the appropriateness
of sport for each sex. It was a time when boys and men wouldn't dare
dress in an objectionable color - purple or, egads, pink -- lest their
manliness come under fire" is a non-factual non-sequitur -- when Croteau
was playing, "Miami Vice" was on the air and men's fashion went jarringly pastel
for awhile. More to the point, traditional gender barriers have nothing
to do with Davis right now. Girls have played Little League before.
There is another female in this tournament. Croteau sees Davis
representing a "beautiful arc of progress." She doesn't. Not yet.
And maybe "not yet" should be
"never," regardless of her future. It will be a great day for Davis and
everyone else when we stop treating everything a female athlete does as
an outlier or a surprise (or, for that matter, female mathematicians).
Passan quotes former college ballplayer Susan Perabo to this effect,
pointing out that Davis would be less of an isolated case in the LLWS if
girls weren't steered to softball, and observes of Davis, "she's only
13. The best thing personally that could happen to her is everyone
forgets her for a while. It's overwhelming to be in the spotlight."
Ideally, the story could start and end there, but it does not. People
are watching Davis, Passan writes,
Because she's a she -- because the novelty of a girl who can throw a baseball 70 mph and hurl a shutout against the elite of her age group's elite is a match made in zeitgeist heaven -- it's more because of who she is than what she does. Mo'ne, like her namesake, traffics in beauty. Her achievements are of one variety, her comportment of an entirely different sort. And the latter is the luminescent part, the one that makes everyone wonder what, exactly, Mo'ne Davis might be when she's not a kid anymore."
See how subject changes there,
how Davis's athleticism is de-emphasized in favor of novelty and
femininity? Would anyone write that about Mike Trout's luminescence as
if he was some kind of angler fish? Then comes the nonsensical big
finish: "It is baseball in 2014. It is a big and vibrant, a Mo'ne for
the modern set, capturing all of our feelings as great impressionism was
meant to."
Mo'ne Davis dances with mascot Dugout. (Evan Habeeb-USA TODAY Sports )
Davis is a girl, not a painting. She's a kid athlete, not a Barry Bonds
to be analyzed and given a thumbs up or a thumbs down, to love or hate
or really anything at all. She's a fascinating and talented kid, but
despite her being on television, she's really none of our damned
business.
I don't mean to pick on
Passan, who does some very fine work, but if a writer has one obligation
in this world, just one, it's to say, "Fuck the zeitgeist." You
don't pick up a banner and march. To do the job well is to resist that
urge, to rail against cliché and conventional wisdom. Instead of joining
the parade, you light a torch that leads in some other, heretofore
unsuspected direction. Otherwise, why bother saying anything at all?
I'm not saying I do
that every time, or often enough, or that I've ever even done it once.
But I do know that readers do not need to be told what they're already
thinking. We might be wrong for thinking it, right, Galileo? Right,
Darwin? To very slightly paraphrase an uncited quote from John Gray's
philosophical tract, "Straw Dogs,"
"Without chaos, no knowledge. Without a frequent dismissal of reason,
no progress. Ideas which today form the very basis of [knowledge] exist
because there were such things as prejudice, conceit, passion; because
these things opposed reason and because they were permitted to have their way."
As applied to Mo'ne Davis, that means there's a lot more value in not exploring
the possibilities inherent in a female child-pitcher. Everyone is doing
that already. Far better to give her time and not reinforce a line of
errant thinking. She is a baseball player, not a female baseball player.
We view the world through any number of prejudicial lenses, many of
which we simply can't help but put on. If you view Davis through that
one you're going to miss the great things you would have seen otherwise,
which is simultaneously so much more and so much less than "female
pitcher" or "female prospect." It's simply this: she's a kid playing a
kids' version of the game and doing it excellently. That's wonderful,
and it should be enough for now.
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