Playing hardball

On Opening Day, they lost, 19-0. Next time out, it was 7-0. Then, when interest waned or folks just plain lost track, the score of the next game might have been 14-0, might have been, 15-0, nobody's quite sure.

Well, anyway, you get the point.

Or do you?

If you've looked no further than the linescores, you are probably not really getting the point of the Colorado Silver Bullets. If you think the early showing of this all-women's baseball team playing solely against men only goes to show that women belong in the kitchen and on the softball field, you've probably missed these sights:seeing:

* Second basewoman Michele McAnaney scoops up a center-field-bound shot that has caromed off the the pitcher's glove and crisply turns two, just as the Giants' Robby Thompson would.

* Left fielder Jeanette Amado races into the gap to rob Ozzie Virgil of a double, just as the A's Rickey Henderson once might have.

* Lisa Martinez winds up her right arm and unleashes an underarm fastball that battles her admirer at the plate, in a way no man's pitch has.

The Silver Bullets might not win a game his year. Their first three games created some doubt that they would score a run. But that is not the point.

None of these women is going to play major league baseball, and General Manager Shereen Samonds estimates that no more than a third are even likely to be re-signed for 1995. But that is not the point, either.

The point, is the Silver Bullets take infield as professionally and purposefully as any well-organized team in their game. They execute rundowns and hit the cutoff women. Some of them spit (sunflower) seeds), and some even drink beer (the sponsor's brand, of course).

"They're competitors," says Virgil, the former major league catcher who played against them in Tempe, Ariz. "I got robbed (of base hits) twice!"

The point is, women too can play baseball. And the Silver Bullets are the living, breathing emblem of baseball's official 63-year exclusion of women from the game, just as they are also the throwing, catching omen of baseball's ultimate, inevitable acceptance of the first female major leaguer.

"Maybe by the year 2000 you might see a woman playing major league baseball, if she's good enough to compete," Samonds says.

Samonds knows the Silver Bullets are just plain out of their league. The plan conceived in December for Whittle Communications and Coors by Bob Hope, a former Braves executive whose efforts to found the female-and-male Sun Sox failed in Florida 10 years ago, would pit the barnstorming women against Class-A level teams made up mostly of recent high schoolers.

But the Northern League, to which the Bullets paid dues, filled out its rosters with former Double-A, Triple-A and major league players. When a lineup that included Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd and Leon Durham politely but firmly jogged off with the 19-0 victory in the opener, Samonds dropped the Northern League teams from her fast-filling 50-plus-game schedule and sought less lopsided matchups.

"It was like a Single-A team playing a major league team -- way out of their league," Samonds says. "You want to keep the level of play competitive, not only for us but for the men's team. It's no-win situation for them to blow us out, 22-0. The crowd's 100 percent behind the women."

Everywhere they have gone, the Silver Bullets have drawn autograph-seeking crowds (an estimated 25,000 watched their prelude to a Giants-Reds game May 15 at Candlestick Park) that cheer their tiniest heroics and sit silently as bigger, stronger, more experienced male opponents either resist or succumb to temptations to run up the score. Samonds just wants to schedule watchable games that will allow the women to refresh their muscle memory and provide role models to their admirers, who truly might include that future major leaguer.

"There are several girls on this team who played baseball when they were younger and, because of some chauvinistic guy or whatever, they were never allowed to go very far," pitcher Lee Anne Ketcham says. "We've just got to set the precedents, and there will be little girls coming up through the ranks in the next 5 or 10 years who will have had the baseball background, playing right alongside the guys, with the best coaching.

"They're going to be the ones who will have the best chance, after we change the mentality."

The physicality is that woman's natural inferiority in upperbody strength generally limits her ability to hit the ball hard or far, but her lower-body strength and agility may allow her to pitch adequately and field well. Baseball, more than any other team sport, forgives the physically flawed and embraces the short player, the skinny player, the fat player, even the player born without a hand. Someday, it will open its arms to a woman, and the only legitimate argument on the point today is over who, when and which position.

But that can't happen until the woman player's training and preparation equals that of the men, particularly during her teen years. The mentality that softball is for women and baseball is for men has steered young girls away from their first love, baseball, to the game they think they should play.