Baseball's Real Exclusion of Women Problem

Last week Bradley Woodrum wrote a very interesting article on The Hardball Times called The Physical Obstacle for Women in Baseball. Unsurprisingly, it's a well-researched and thorough analysis of why it's going to be very, very hard for there ever to be a woman playing in Major League Baseball, even though (as the author and I agree) it would be very, very awesome if one ever did. There is, of course, a lot to say on this subject, much of which he said and much of which other people have said. The main thought I had, however, wasn't about players at all, because the thing about players is that there really are physical limitations that mean that the pool of MLB players will never be any less than about 99.9% male, if it will ever be less than 100.0% male. But, uhhhh, not everyone in baseball is a player, and the people who aren't players are not being paid to take part in a physical competition against the world's best men at said competition. They're being paid to coach those people, or to assemble teams of those people. (Or to do various lower-level jobs within the organization, but let's focus on the coaches and front office people for now.) As to all of these people, there is no particular reason why having lesser physical strength should be a particularly strong disadvantage, or even any disadvantage whatsoever. So you'd think that women could maybe do these jobs. Nope. Or at least, they aren't doing these jobs. Thirty MLB teams, thirty male managers, thirty male general managers (actually a bit more; some teams have divided general manager positions), and to the best of my knowledge, zero female coaches.

This is inexcusable. Not the managers and coaches thing--that I'm skeptical of, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it "inexcusable," necessarily. There might be some genuine social problems with having female managers, although I'm not sure. Some of that might be the kind of thing the correct attitude toward which is just to trample over it and insist that it change, e.g. the resistance of a certain type of man to take orders from a woman. Get over it, guys. Other stuff about, like, locker room issues and the like might be a bit less repugnant on its own terms, but might also be the kind of thing that isn't or shouldn't ultimately be a big deal. But there might be some real problems, here in the all-too-terrible real world, problems that will also confront any woman who tries to play in MLB or in any other male professional baseball league but which should be less theoretically intractable than the basic physical differences.

But let's talk about general managers. They head the front office. That is to say, they do not travel with the team, they are not constantly in the clubhouse, they probably don't spend a lot of time in the locker rooms or the showers or slapping the players on their asses. Oh, and unlike the players' job, which is famously ninety-percent half-mental, the GM's job is one-hundred percent mental, full stop. At root a GM is a combination of an information processor and a merchant. There's sod all reason why a woman couldn't be exactly as good a GM as any man. I don't see how an ideal world wouldn't have 15 male and 15 female GMs, plus or minus some margin for random deviations any given year. We have none. It's obscene. Now, people will say that a GM should have experience in the game. Maybe, but Sandy Alderson, commonly considered one of the best front office-type baseball minds alive, never played professional baseball, while Ruben Amaro, Jr., commonly considered one of baseball's worst GMs, spent eight years in MLB. Of course, Billy Beane, another of the best GMs out there, did have a Major League career, while Dayton Moore, another of the worst, did not. It looks to me like there's not a whole lot of correlation there, that stuff other than whether you have experience as a baseball player determines who's a good GM. This might be particularly true given the whole trend toward statistically-inclined GMs: certain sexist beliefs to the contrary notwithstanding, women can actually do statistical analysis just about as well as men can. They can also probably hire equally good scouting directors, and utilize the information those scouting directors give them equally well.

So again, we're left with precisely zero reason why a woman shouldn't be the GM of some team. None whatsoever. And yet, "none whatsoever" is also the number of female MLB GMs. There's just no justification for this. We'll never change the fact that all or virtually all MLB players are gonna be men; that's basically a fact of life. The lack of female executives in baseball isn't. We can change that, and we should.