SAN JOSE, Calif. — When Alyssa Nakken stepped into the first-base coach’s box in the third inning Tuesday night, it was a moment worth celebrating.
There’s now been a woman in an on-field role in a regular season Major League Baseball game, a glass ceiling-shattering that Nakken and the Giants have been building towards for a few seasons. And now, Nakken’s bright orange City Connect helmet is heading to Cooperstown.
The helmet, as well as other mementos of Nakken’s from the three seasons on staff, are symbols ostensibly to show girls and women that there is a place in this game for them.
But the example that Nakken and the Giants are setting for boys and men is just as important, too. And it’s one that I keep thinking about, given my own baseball upbringing.
My parents have been sports fanatics since long before I was born. My father, Michael, has had Giants season tickets since the 1970s. But his athletic pedigree pales in comparison to my mom, Angie.
Angie was a four-sport athlete in high school and played college softball for Cal Poly in the 1980s, twice making the all-conference team for the then-Division II Mustangs. And ever since their wedding in 1991, they’ve also played adult-league baseball — starting with spending the second week of their honeymoon playing for a week at Giants Fantasy Camp.
Even after she gave birth to me in 1995 and my younger brother three years later, she kept playing baseball, mainly switching between catcher, third base and second base. She was playing in a tournament just three months after I was born when a hot grounder to third broke her wrist — an injury that forced my dad to get really good at changing diapers really quickly.
By the time I could realize what was happening, women playing in baseball didn’t seem out of place to me. I had been watching my mom and other women in their adult league play on most spring and summer weekends my entire life.
And naturally, when she had pointers for me or my brother, they didn’t seem out of place (though I wasn’t really good enough to put them to use). And she was always willing to play catch for me and my younger brother — even when my brother’s fastball started hitting 75 miles per hour or faster.
While my mom’s involvement with baseball never felt out of place to me as a kid, it became clear how unusual it was when I would talk to people as an adult.
I can’t even tell you how many times I have told people, “My mom and dad play baseball” in conversations, only for the return to either be a question — ”Baseball?” — or just an assumption that I misspoke and meant softball.
Seeing women in baseball remains an anomaly, and makes each instance stand out that much more. There was the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that sprung up during World War II and that the movie “A League Of Their Own” is based off of. There was three women who played in the Negro Leagues, most notably Toni Stone.
There’s even been a professional women’s baseball team in the 1990s, the Colorado Silver Bullets. The barnstorming team that played for four seasons even played multiple times in the Bay Area, including in front of 42,082 on May 15, 1994 at Candlestick Park.
There have been women playing baseball in independent leagues at various points since then, most recently with both Stacy Piagno and Kelsie Whitmore playing for the Sonoma Stompers in 2016.
Whitmore, now 23, recently signed with the Atlantic League’s Staten Island FerryHawks for this year, and MLB is hosting its Trailblazer Series for 5th-8th grade girl baseball players this weekend in Miami to try and grow the pipeline for girls and women in baseball.
Yet save for a one-season show on Fox, it seems like we’re still far away from a woman playing in the majors.
But there’s no reason why women’s input on the sport shouldn’t be valued, and the influx of female coaches shows that baseball is finally realizing that.
Both Bay Area teams have led the way in this regard. The A’s had Justine Siegal come in for a two-week stint as a guest coach during their fall Instructional League in 2015, and astrophysicist Samantha Schultz is a pitching analyst. The Giants have had Nakken for three years now and have several more women in various roles with baseball operations.
There are also others throughout the minors, and the Yankees’ Rachel Balkovec is now the manager of their Low-A affiliate after three years as a minor league instructor. There will only be more going forward, with bigger roles and responsibilities. It isn’t hard to see a future with a woman managing a major league team, either.
But a coach is only as effective as the players are receptive to their coaching — no matter their gender, race or anything else.
What the Giants players are showing, day in and day out, is that they will take all the help they can get and they will take it from whoever can provide it.
That example is one that young girls *and* young boys can follow.
