Replace women with black people and your argument sounds exactly like the enlightened individuals arguing that baseball shouldn’t be integrated even if there were black men out there good enough to play ball with white men.
Jackie Robinson absolutely understood that he would face unyielding discrimination. So did the flood of black ballplayers that followed him in the years to come. Hardship didn’t deter any of them.
I didn’t say anything about ‘shouldn’t.’ I’m explaining why it generally doesn’t happen. If a woman things she can handle all of that discrimination and feels she’s athletically capable, I’m not going to be the one to tell her not to.
I never said those were your words. I’m telling you how it comes across, and I’m letting you you’re wrong about the reason “why it generally doesn’t happen”.
At least in baseball, a sport where intelligence, reaction time, skill, and experience matter a lot more than raw strength, the barriers for little girls who dream of playing in the Majors are a lot more than just the discrimination they might face if they make it that far. It’s the deeply rooted cultural barriers that prevent women from even getting a shot, and in a sport where even 1st round draft picks spend years in the minors getting their reps in, lack of experience is a death sentence no matter how much raw talent you have.
At every level of play, girls are heavily encouraged to switch to softball or outright denied the opportunity to play. They’re excluded from youth travel ball teams because “the boys will be bigger in a few years and need the reps”. A lot of high school teams won’t let them try out because Title IX considers a softball team equivalent. It took a lawsuit for Litttle League to allow girls to play baseball. Young women playing baseball at smaller colleges are often lured away with softball scholarships at big universities (not that there’s anything wrong with pursuing better educational opportunities).
Every woman playing college or minor league baseball says the same thing; they faced far more discrimination as kids just trying to play than they ever have in the locker room once they got the chance.
Okay, so what is your explanation for why there aren’t women playing major league baseball or in the NBA or the NFL?
Plenty of women in shooting sports. Turns out shooting is one of those sports where men don’t seem to have a significant biological advantage. None of them complain about abuse.
So you’re saying all male athletes except in shooting sports have a biological advantage over all female athletes? The worst NBA player is still better than the best WNBA player?
