Where Will You Be?

I love the new AT&T commercial in the series, "Where Will You Be?" The premier ad depicted people watching on their smartphones as the first people land on Mars. The new commercial portrays people watching on their smartphones as the first female pitcher in major league baseball goes into her windup. They imagine that she's a right-handed power pitcher, and it looks like they used some CGI to make her overhand motion seem faster.

At first I thought it was a ludicrous concept, and an attempt at memetic programming and conditioning by our thought generators in the media. I thought the idea of a female major league pitcher was beyond conception. Well, I was wrong.

There is currently a woman playing baseball at the junior college level. Her name is Sarah Hudek, and she is the daughter of former all-star John Hudek. She is described as a 5-10 lefthander who throws 82-mph. That's not bad. That's John Tudor territory. I could envision someone like her on a major league roster. Her role would be situational: working out of the bullpen, called in to face left-handed batters, making forty appearances per season.

There may be some baseball terminology that the media will need to avoid. It's too problematic to describe her straddling the rubber. The telecasters would never be able to complement her splitter. It would be problematic to say that a batter got to first base against her, and forget about saying a team scored against her. They will need to find a different way to say that a team batted around against her.

I could go on and on about other problematic terminology, like backdoor sliders, but I think I will just take one for the team on that thread.

Wikipedia states that Jackie Mitchell was signed to a professional contract in 1931. She played for the Chattanooga Lookouts of the Class AA minor leagues. In other words, she was a bush leaguer.

She did strike out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game.

I know that radical feminists are angry that sports is not a level playing field. Male athletes draw bigger audiences, who are in turn targeted by advertisers. Some feminists come right out and say that the only way to ensure women athletes can achieve equality of outcomes is to shut down the men. That's what Melissa Harris-Perry said on MS-NBC, and she was being serious.

I love how the same feminists who want to overhaul men's sports and have inept commissioners fired are utterly silent on the pathological behavior of female athletes. Hope Solo was arrested on domestic violence charges, and although the charges were dropped on procedural grounds, prosecutors plan to re-file. After the Women's World Cup, naturally.

Female athletes routinely come up on charges of domestic violence, intimate partner abuse, and the like. Nobody hears about that, because it violates the narrative.

Well, I have another narrative. Domestic violence is at epidemic levels in the lesbian community.

So, where will I be when the first female pitcher makes it to the majors? Watching a different station. I will make every effort to catch the highlights. I wouldn't want to miss the replay of someone charging the mound.