Kid gloves do grow up

Why we want what we want is often a mystery created by forces not so much known as felt. Why would a girl 8 years old walk into Fenway Park and on seeing the field say t6 her mother and father, "I want to be a professional baseball player" She carried a glove that day in 1979. And on a summery day in 1994, another time, she talked about walking to Fenway's right-field bleachers where she sat behind the bullpen, maybe 10 rows up.

Julie Croteau isn't sure why she said what she said. But she remembers the words and remembers this: Her parents didn't tell her that girls can't be baseball players, and it would be a while before she learned, with some pain, that what she wanted was something she couldn't have.

Throughout her childhood she had played in leagues that accommodated boys and girls. Then one day she noticed an odd thing. "The girls started disappearing," she says. In time, Croteau was the only girl who wanted to play for her high school team in Manassas, Va.

Each spring she went to tryouts and each spring, when the cut list was posted, she found her name there. "Each year I really, truly, in my heart believed they would see I could play," she says. Her senior year she was a 5-foot-8, 130-pound first baseman who knew the game. That spring she found it "unbelievable" that she had been cut again.

She then decided she hadn't been cut because she wasn't good enough; she'd been cut because she was a girl. Julie Croteau called her parents that day and said, "I don't want them to get away with it."

So the family filed a discrimination suit -- in vain. "The judge said a woman had no constitutional right to play baseball," Julie Croteau says.

Well, time passes. Things happen. That was 1988. This is 1994. If that judge could only see Julie Croteau now ...

She is a professional baseball player, one of 20 women who are the Colorado Silver Bullets, the first women's team to compete only against men.

This summer the Silver Bullets played 44 games in 3 1/2 months on a 25,000-mile trip through 27 states and Canada. They played against low-classification pros and recreational league amateurs. Mostly they lost. When their record was 1-22, they had been shut out 13 times and outscored, 162-24.

The Silver Bullets won five of their next 20 games, but the numbers mean little. What's important is the team's existence as a symbol of possibilities. Even more important, the Silver Bullets moved beyond symbolism to real athleticism. These women can play the game.

They don't have the size and strength to produce the leverage necessary for explosive power. But the Silver Bullets are strong enough and quick enough with good enough hands and arms to make every infield play that needs to be made. What they feared would be their greatest liability, pitching, became their greatest asset. As for hitting, they still have miles and miles to go, much as Michael Jordan has miles to go if he wants to rise above Birmingham.

"I wasn't going to have anything to do with a circus," says Phil Niekro, the should-be Hall of Fame pitcher who won 318 major league games in 24 seasons and this spring became the Silver Bullets' manager. "Everything was going to be professional -- and it has been."

Few pitchers worked with a greater competitive ferocity than Niekro. With the Silver Bullets, he has been a teacher of surpassing patience and kindness. In the spring a pitcher. asked, "How do you hold a baseball?" She had played softball, jamming the ball against her palm and wrapping four fingers around it; the little baseball didn't feel right. Niekro said, "Do whatever's comfortable and then he moved the ball from her palm out onto her fingers.

Five weeks into the season, Rickey Henderson of the Oakland A's picked up a Bullets bat and declared it too heavy, even for him. "Here's a guy with muscles up to his ears," says outfielder Keri Kropke, "and, he uses a bat lighter than mine. We never knew ours were too heavy. We just thought we weren't strong enough."

The Henderson lesson was one of many. Only Croteau, who went on to play college baseball without controversy, and pitcher Gina Satriano, the daughter of a major league player, Tom Satriano, came to e team from exclusively baseball backgrounds; everyone else came from softball. So they had to learn baseball's mechanics on a playing field 50 percent larger than softball's.

Because their frenetic travel left no time for practice, the Bullets learned mechanics during games in front of paying customers against players who knew how to hold a baseball from the time their daddies dropped one into the crib. And some players came spiced with resentment; one said to Kropke, "I can't believe you're getting paid more than us. That's (barnyard expletive)."

To which Kropke, making $20,000 instead of the Double-A's $10,000, said, "Now you know how it feels to be a woman making 65 cents to a man's dollar." After that, she says, the fellow became a gentleman.