One, I Love This Game and Two, I Want to Continue Playing It

May 20, 2022 10:00 AM

Her baseball journey has just begun. Stay tuned [MLB.com]

Kelsie Whitmore makes history [MLB.com]
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posted by chavenet (5 comments total)

She is an inspiration to not just young girls, but to all including this old man who used to dream of playing in the big leagues. She has that 80 plus attitude. There are a lot of people with a lot of talent that don't work hard. Very few like Kelsie Whitmore who work as hard as she does. I need to get a FerryHawks jersey with her number on it.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 11:56 AM on May 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Good for her! I'll have to get to a game there, now that they've replaced the SI Yankees...
posted by AJaffe at 12:01 PM on May 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

A dive into the Atlantic League led me to discover the WIld Health Genomes, a currently extant "filler" team created to round out the number of teams after the admittance of the FerryHawks, which in addition to having a delighfully strange team name, also was the first team to draft a woman, Alexis "Scrappy" Hopkins. (Though Kelsie Whitmore was the first woman to take the mound or be in a team's starting lineup.)
posted by Navelgazer at 12:06 PM on May 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

People who've been paying more attention than me... has she made it further than Ila Borders or did the MLB throw some cash at the independent minor leagues (presumably saving them from collapse) and therefore feel entitled to pat themselves on the back?

“All signs were that she’s the hardest-working person that’s out there playing,” Perone said in a phone conversation

This guy had apparently never spoken to a woman in baseball before.
posted by hoyland at 1:24 PM on May 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Congratulations to Kelsie! I look forward to following her career...I was a horrible athlete but as a kid I wanted to be a play-by-play radio announcer. It seemed totally unattainable for me as a kid, but now I can hear Melanie Newman and Jessica Mendoza call games. It's great to see Kelsie (and more...) Take the field for MLB.

This reminds me, though, that I should do a fpp on Minnesota's own Toni Stone one of these days...another trailblazer worth mention.
posted by Gray Duck at 4:38 PM on May 20, 2022 [4 favorites]