Bernice Gera, the first woman to umpire a professional baseball game in the modern era, broke on through to the other side for one game in 1972, but since then there has been such a paltry, hypocritical effort on the part of both professional as well as amateur baseball to encourage our participation as either players or umpires that her triumph has been largely forgotten and ignored. In the thirty-seven years since her groundbreaking feat, there has been a pathetically grand total of exactly six women who have followed in her footsteps. (Eight, if you include two others, of which I am one, who have worked independent ball.) And baseball claims to embrace the idea of women as equals in this arena? Baloney! It’s easy to disguise intolerance in the form of passive acceptance, when what is actually needed is a sustained, concerted effort to find, recruit, train, and nurture the careers of women umpires. There is currently no infrastructure in place to foster this kind of pro-active support, and the longer baseball “waits” for women to magically appear, clamoring to be on the field with the guys, the longer it will take for this to happen. There is no energy being directed towards this undertaking, so our numbers have stagnated and even regressed in the last thirty-seven years rather than grown and prospered. Until baseball wakes up and realizes that women on the fields of play are something to be welcomed as an asset rather than to be spurned and rejected as unsuitable for so many absurd, obsolete reasons, your daughter will have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever earning a job as a professional umpire. She may even be discouraged and ridiculed for wanting to be an amateur umpire who works high school or college baseball, even little league.

Good for you, Douglas Gladstone, for dreaming of the possibilities in your young daughter’s life. But if she chooses to become an umpire, you better be ready to have a constant shoulder for her to lean on, because it is indeed a long, hard road. One that I personally would not trade for all the world; I’ve been umpiring for almost thirty years, and my life would have been a lot different and a lot less happy if I had been discouraged from following my dream by all the naysayers, doubters, bigots, and idiots who still, in this day and age, believe we should be doing something else. My mother Jaqueline is the reason I umpire; she was the one who suggested it to me as something I might enjoy and be good at. She discerned something in me I could not see in myself at the time, and because of her love and fearlessness I have walked a path few women have trod and emerged a better, stronger person for it. Perhaps your daughter will find her rock in you, and will be strong, happy, and healthy enough to be the one to change things at last. Believe in her, Douglas, and your love and support will see her through the worst of times as well as the best. That is all a parent can do, really.