Baseball Heroes by Glenn Stout

Author:Glenn Stout
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

For Love of the Game

ALL ILA BORDERS EVER WANTED TO DO was play baseball.

When her father, Phil Borders, was a young man, he dreamed of pitching in the major leagues. His wife Marianne shared his love of the game. Their daughter Ila was born in 1975. There was nothing Ila enjoyed more than cuddling with her parents on the couch watching baseball on television, or going into the backyard with them and playing with a wiffle ball and bat.

When Ila was about five years old, she began playing softball in the local girls’ league. From the very beginning, Phil sensed that his daughter was special. Unlike most children—including most boys—Ila was never afraid of the ball, and when her father showed her how to grip the bat or field a ground ball, she imitated him almost exactly.

A left-handed thrower like her dad, Ila could already throw the ball accurately all the way across the diamond by the time she was seven. She was big for her age, and a good player, but Ila knew that softball wasn’t the same as baseball. Still, she never really wondered why she wasn’t playing baseball. That was a game that seemed to be for boys only.

Then, one day when Ila was ten years old, her dad took her to see the Dodgers play.

Watching a major league game in person is much better than watching it on television. As Ila watched the Dodgers play, she found herself imagining that she was on the mound in front of a big crowd that cheered every pitch. On the way home, as she daydreamed about playing in the major leagues, she told her dad that she didn’t want to play softball anymore. She wanted to play baseball, and she really wanted to be a pitcher, just like her dad.

Most fathers probably would have explained to their daughter that baseball is a boys’ game and that women are not strong enough to play. But Phil Borders could think of no reason why Ila could not, or should not, play baseball and try to pitch. She already had a good arm, and she was left-handed, which Phil knew is a real advantage for a pitcher, because hitters see so few pitchers throwing with their left hand. He thought that “left-handed pitchers don’t grow on trees,” and that Ila might actually have a chance to be pretty good. Like him, she had big hands that would make it easy to hold a baseball.

“Okay,” her father told her, “if you want to play baseball, you can, and if you want to pitch, I’ll teach you how.”

The rest of the way home, Ila’s daydreams got even bigger.

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