On May 17, 1954, a nervous 45-year-old lawyer named Thurgood Marshall took a seat in the Supreme Court’s gallery. The founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund hoped to learn that he had prevailed in his pivotal case. When Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall could not have known that he had also won what is still widely considered the most significant legal decision in American history. Hearing Warren declare “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” delivered Marshall into a state of euphoria. “I was so happy, I was numb,” he said. After exiting the courtroom, he joyously swung a small boy atop his shoulders and galloped around the austere marble hall. Later, he told reporters, “It is the greatest victory we ever had.”

For Marshall, the “we” who triumphed in Brown surely referred not only, or even primarily, to himself and his Legal Defense Fund colleagues, but to the entire Black race, on whose behalf they’d toiled. And Black Americans did indeed find Brown exhilarating. Harlem’s Amsterdam News, echoing Marshall, called Brown “the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation.” W. E. B. Du Bois stated, “I have seen the impossible happen. It did happen on May 17, 1954.” When Oliver Brown learned of the outcome in the lawsuit bearing his surname, he gathered his family near, and credited divine providence: “Thanks be to God for this.” Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged Montgomery’s activists in 1955 by invoking Brown: “If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.” Many Black people viewed the opinion with such awe and reverence that for years afterward, they threw parties on May 17 to celebrate Brown’s anniversary.

Over time, however, some began questioning what exactly made Brown worthy of celebration. In 1965, Malcolm X in his autobiography voiced an early criticism of Brown: It had yielded precious little school desegregation over the previous decade. Calling the decision “one of the greatest magical feats ever performed in America,” he contended that the Court’s “masters of legal phraseology” had used “trickery and magic that told Negroes they were desegregated—Hooray! Hooray!—and at the same time … told whites ‘Here are your loopholes.’ ”

[Read: The children who desegregated America’s schools]

But that criticism paled in comparison with the anti-Brown denunciation in Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation two years later. They condemned not Brown’s implementation, but its orientation. The fundamental aim of integration must be abandoned because it was driven by the “assumption that there is nothing of value in the black community,” they maintained.

To sprinkle black children among white pupils in outlying schools is at best a stop-gap measure. The goal is not to take black children out of the black community and expose them to white middle-class values; the goal is to build and strengthen the black community.

Although Black skeptics of the integration ideal originated on the far left, Black conservatives—including the economist Thomas Sowell—have more recently ventured related critiques. The most prominent example is Marshall’s successor on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1995, four years after joining the Court, Thomas issued a blistering opinion that opened, “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.”

Desperate efforts to promote school integration, Thomas argued, stemmed from the misperception that identifiably Black schools were somehow doomed to fail because of their racial composition. “There is no reason to think that black students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own race as when they are in an integrated environment,” he wrote. Taking a page from Black Power’s communal emphasis, Thomas argued that “black schools can function as the center and symbol of black communities, and provide examples of independent black leadership, success, and achievement.” In a 2007 opinion, he extolled Washington, D.C.’s all-Black Dunbar High School—which sent dozens of graduates to the Ivy League and its ilk during the early 20th century—as a paragon of Black excellence.

In the 2000s, as Brown crept toward its 50th anniversary, Derrick Bell of the NYU School of Law went so far as to allege that the opinion had been wrongly decided. For Bell, who had sharpened his skills as an LDF lawyer, Brown’s “integration ethic centralizes whiteness. White bodies are represented as somehow exuding an intrinsic value that percolates into the ‘hearts and minds’ of black children.” Warren’s opinion in the case should have affirmed Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” regime, Bell wrote, but it should have insisted on genuine equality of expenditures, rather than permitting the sham equality of yore that consigned Black students to shoddy classrooms in dilapidated buildings. He acknowledged, though, that his jaundiced account put him at odds with dominant American legal and cultural attitudes: “The Brown decision,” he noted, “has become so sacrosanct in law and in the beliefs of most Americans that any critic is deemed wrongheaded, even a traitor to the cause.”

In her New Book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children, Noliwe Rooks adds to a growing literature that challenges the portrayal of the decision as “a significant civil rights–era win.” Rooks, the chair of the Africana-​studies department at Brown University, offers an unusual blend of historical examination and family memoir that generally amplifies the concerns articulated by prior desegregation discontents. The result merits careful attention not for its innovative arguments, but as an impassioned, arresting example of how Brown skepticism, which initially gained traction on the fringes of Black life, has come to hold considerable appeal within the Black intellectual mainstream.

As recently as midway through the first Trump administration, Rooks would have placed herself firmly in the traditional pro-Brown camp, convinced that addressing racial inequality in education could best be pursued through integration. But traveling a few years ago to promote a book that criticized how private schools often thwart meaningful racial integration, she repeatedly encountered audience members who disparaged her core embrace of integration. Again and again, she heard from Black parents that “the trauma their children experienced in predominantly white schools and from white teachers was sometimes more harmful than the undereducation occurring in segregated schools.”

[From the May 2018 issue: The report on race that shook America]

The onslaught dislodged Rooks’s faith in the value of contemporary integration, and even of Brown itself. She now exhibits the convert’s zeal. Brown, she writes, should be viewed as “an attack on Black schools, politics, and communities, which meant it was an attack on the pillars of Black life.” For some Black citizens, the decision acted as “a wrecking ball that crashed through their communities and, like a pendulum, continues to swing.”

Rooks emphasizes the plight of Black educators, who disproportionately lost their positions in Brown’s aftermath because of school consolidations. Before Brown, she argues, “Black teachers did not see themselves as just teaching music, reading, or science, but also as activists, organizers, and freedom fighters who dreamed of and fought for an equitable world for future generations”; they served as models who showed “Black children how to fight for respect and societal change.”

Endorsing one of Black Power’s analogies, she maintains that school integration meant that “as small a number as possible of Black children were, like pepper on popcorn, lightly sprinkled atop wealthy, white school environments, while most others were left behind.” Even for those ostensibly fortunate few flecks of pepper, Rooks insists, providing the white world’s seasoning turned out to be a highly uncertain, dangerous endeavor. She uses her father’s disastrous experiences with integration to examine what she regards as the perils of the entire enterprise. After excelling in all-Black educational environments, including as an undergraduate at Howard University, Milton Rooks became one of a very small number of Black students to enroll at the Golden Gate University School of Law in the early 1960s.

Sent by his hopeful parents “over that racial wall,” Milton encountered hostility from white professors, who doubted his intellectual capacity, Rooks recounts, and “spit him back up like a piece of meat poorly digested.” She asserts that the ordeal not only prompted him to drop out of law school but also spurred his descent into alcoholism. Rooks extrapolates further, writing:

Milton’s experience reflected the trauma Black students suffered as they desegregated public schools in states above the Mason-Dixon Line, where displays of racism were often mocking, disdainful, pitying, and sword sharp in their ability to cut the unsuspecting into tiny bits. It destroyed confidence, shook will, sowed doubt, murdered souls—quietly, sure, but still as completely as could a mob of white racists setting their cowardice, rage, and anger loose upon the defenseless.

The harms that contemporary integrated educational environments inflict upon Black students can be tantamount, in her view, to the harms imposed upon the many Black students who are forced to attend monoracial, woeful urban high schools. To make this point, Rooks recounts her own struggle to correct the misplacement of her son, Jelani, in a low-level math class in Princeton, New Jersey’s public-school system during the aughts (when she taught at Princeton University). She witnessed other Black parents meet with a similar lack of support in guiding their children to the academically demanding courses that could propel them to elite colleges. In Jelani’s case, she had evidence that teachers’ “feelings were hardening against him.” He led a life of relative safety and economic privilege, and felt at ease among his white classmates and friends, she allows, even as she also stresses that what he “experienced wasn’t the violence of poverty; it was something else equally devastating”:

We knew that poor, working-class, or urban communities were not the only places where Black boys are terrorized and traumatized. We knew that the unfamiliarity of his white friends with any other Black people would one day become an issue in our home. We knew that guns were not the only way to murder a soul.

Frustrated with Princeton’s public schools, Rooks eventually enrolled Jelani in an elite private high school where, she notes, he also endured racial harassment—and from which he graduated before making his way to Amherst College.

seven decades have now elapsed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. Given the stubbornly persistent phenomenon of underperforming predominantly Black schools throughout the nation, arguing that Brown’s potential has been fully realized would be absurd. Regrettably, the Warren Court declined to advance the most powerful conception of Brown when it had the opportunity to do so: Its infamously vague “all deliberate speed” approach allowed state and local implementation to be delayed and opposed for far too long. In its turn, the Burger Court provided an emaciated conception of Brown’s meaning, one that permitted many non-southern jurisdictions to avoid pursuing desegregation programs. Rooks deftly sketches this lamentable, sobering history.

[From the May 2014 issue: Segregation now ...]

Disenchantment with Brown’s educational efficacy is thus entirely understandable. Yet to suggest that the Supreme Court did not go far enough, fast enough in galvanizing racially constructive change in American schools after Brown is one thing. To suggest that Brown somehow took a wrong turn is quite another.

Rooks does not deny that integration succeeded in narrowing the racial achievement gap. But like other Brown critics, she nevertheless idealizes the era of racial segregation. Near Integrated  ’s conclusion, Rooks contends that “too few of us have a memory of segregated Black schools as the beating heart of vibrant Black communities, enabling students to compose lives of harmony, melody, and rhythm and sustained Black life and dignity.” But this claim gets matters exactly backwards. The brave people who bore segregation’s brunt believed that Jim Crow represented an assault on Black life and dignity, and that Brown marked a sea change in Black self-conceptions.

Desegregation’s detractors routinely elevate the glory days of D.C.’s Dunbar High School, but they refuse to heed the lessons of its most distinguished graduates. Charles Hamilton Houston—Dunbar class of 1911, who went on to become valedictorian at Amherst and the Harvard Law Review’s first Black editor—nevertheless dedicated his life to eradicating Jim Crow as an NAACP litigator and Thurgood Marshall’s mentor in his work contesting educational segregation. Sterling A. Brown—Dunbar class of 1918, who graduated from Williams College before becoming a distinguished poet and professor—nevertheless wrote the following in 1944, one decade before Brown:

Negroes recognize that the phrase “equal but separate accommodations” is a myth. They have known Jim Crow a long time, and they know Jim Crow means scorn and not belonging.

Much as they valued having talented, caring teachers, these men understood racial segregation intimately, and they detested it.

In the 1990s, Nelson B. Rivers III, an unheralded NAACP official from South Carolina, memorably heaved buckets of cold water on those who were beginning to wonder, “ Was integration the right thing to do? Was it worth it? Was Brown a good decision?” Rivers dismissed such questions as “asinine,” and continued:

To this day, I can remember bus drivers pulling off and blowing smoke in my mother’s face. I can remember the back of the bus, colored water fountains … I can hear a cop telling me, “Take your black butt back to nigger town.” What I tell folk … is that there are a lot of romanticists now who want to take this trip down Memory Lane, and they want to go back, and I tell the young people that anybody who wants to take you back to segregation, make sure you get a round-trip ticket because you won’t stay.

Nostalgia for the pre-Brown era would not exercise nearly so powerful a grip on Black America today if its adherents focused on its detailed, pervasive inhumanities rather than relying on gauzy glimpses.

No one has pressed this point more vividly than Robert L. Carter, who worked alongside Marshall at the LDF before eventually becoming a distinguished federal judge. He understood that to search for Brown’s impact exclusively in the educational domain is mistaken. Instead, he emphasized that Brown fomented a broad-gauge racial revolution throughout American public life. Despite Chief Justice Warren formally writing the opinion to apply exclusively to education, its attack on segregation has—paradoxically—been most efficacious beyond that original context.

[From the October 1967 issue: Jonathan Kozol’s ‘Where Ghetto Schools Fail’]

“The psychological dimensions of America’s race relations problem were completely recast” by Brown, Carter wrote. “Blacks were no longer supplicants seeking, pleading, begging to be treated as full-fledged members of the human race; no longer were they appealing to morality, to conscience, to white America’s better instincts,” he noted. “They were entitled to equal treatment as a right under the law; when such treatment was denied, they were being deprived—in fact robbed—of what was legally theirs. As a result, the Negro was propelled into a stance of insistent militancy.”

Even within the educational sphere, though, it is profoundly misguided to claim that Black students who attend solid, meaningfully integrated schools encounter environments as corrosive as, or worse than, those facing students trapped in ghetto schools. This damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t analysis suggests an entire cohort stuck in the same boat, when its many members are not even in the same ocean. The Black student marooned in a poor and violent neighborhood, with reason to fear actual murder, envies the Black student attending a rigorous, integrated school who worries about metaphorical “soul murder.” All struggles are not created equal.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “Was Integration the Wrong Goal?”

Photographs by Zack Wittman

Everybody knows the secret of life. The secret of life is: Keep your eye on the ball.

I’m borrowing that from a 1998 song by America’s sweetheart, Faith Hill, but if you don’t know the song, you still know that simple truth. You also know that to fail is to strike out; to fail valiantly is to go down swinging; to be surprised is to be thrown a curveball; to help a buddy out is to go to bat for him; and to succeed brilliantly is to knock one out of the park. And even if you haven’t seen A League of Their Own, or have somehow missed Jennifer Garner’s Capital One ads, you’ve probably heard the maxim “There’s no crying in baseball.”

In January, I was standing in the locker room of George M. Steinbrenner Field, in Tampa, next to my teammates, whom I had met only the night before. When we heard the immortal words of Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan, the aggrieved manager of the Rockford Peaches women’s baseball team, piping out of a nearby speaker, we recognized them and laughed. Then we clapped (or took out our phones for photos) as Len Milcowitz, the field coordinator and unofficial emcee of the weekend, emerged wearing a full Peaches uniform to drive home the point. He’d worn it in our honor, he said. “You represent the true spirit of baseball in this country, period,” he told us.

By that he meant that we were here only for the love of the game. As women, it was true, we could have no other motive, such as being signed by a team or even reliving high-school glory days. In fact, we had paid about $2,500 for the privilege. There were 87 of us, divided into six teams. This was the first full day of the 2025 Women’s Mini-Fantasy Camp, an annual event advertised with retro panache: “Ladies, opportunity is finally knocking and your chance to experience life as a New York Yankee is here.”

Though many Major League Baseball teams host fantasy camps for men, only the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox have offered them for women. This year’s camp was more immersive than usual. On top of receiving full uniforms (to keep!) and access to ice baths and physical therapists and real Yankees catering (memorably good pot roast), we were technically playing in a major-league stadium: The Tampa Bay Rays will be using the Yankees’ spring-training facility this year for their home games because Hurricane Milton took the roof off Tropicana Field.

[Read: Climate change comes for baseball]

Over the course of two days we would play 35 innings of baseball—five games of seven innings apiece, coached by former Yankees, whom camp employees referred to by the official title of “Legends.” I had several good reasons to be nervous. A friend had encouraged me to read George Plimpton’s 1961 book, Out of My League, which is about him pitching to major-league players at an All-Star exhibition game for a story in Sports Illustrated. I did read it, and that’s how I learned that Plimpton had been “a fanatic about pitching” while in school. I, in contrast, had never played baseball at all, despite being completely obsessed with watching it (at the stadium, on TV, on my phone while at work or at weddings). And I had not trained as much as I’d meant to in the weeks leading up to the camp—I’d gone to the batting cages a few times, played catch with my dad, and done several squats, but it was winter and it got dark at 4 p.m. It had been hard to work baseball into my days.

The other problem was that I don’t like the New York Yankees. When I signed up for the camp, I hadn’t thought this would be much of an issue. But then my favorite team, the New York Mets, signed the Yankees’ superstar Juan Soto out from under them, and my situation became politically sticky. When I tested a reveal of my Mets fandom to a friendly seeming woman on the shuttle bus to the opening dinner, she shushed me sharply, and for my own good.

So I kept quiet. And in this way, it was easy to get along with my assigned teammates, and it was easy to have a good time, even though our team name was the Pinstripes, which really rubbed the Yankees of it all right in a girl’s face. Our roster ranged in age from 24 to 70, and in experience from Division I softball to, well, me. Two women who’d gone to school together in New Jersey were there celebrating their 60th birthdays—Nina Kaplan, a Boca Raton mother of four who had never played baseball before, and Elizabeth Osder, who goes by Bitsy, a Los Angeles media executive who holds a place in baseball history. On April 21, 1974, she appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News when she became one of the first girls legally permitted to join a Little League baseball team, in New Jersey.

Players stretch before a game. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic)

Everyone was there for fun, and so was I, but I was also there because I wanted to briefly see a real-life staging of something that is still mostly a dream and that most people associate only with a 30-year-old Hollywood movie. There’s no crying in baseball, and there are no women in baseball either.

Sure, girls can play on Little League baseball teams, as Bitsy did, with boys. They can play on high-school baseball teams with boys. A scant few of them have even played on college baseball teams with boys. But they don’t get their own teams. There is no such thing as high-school or college baseball for women. There is no such thing as professional baseball for women, apart from a World Cup team that is assembled and disassembled every few years. Not only is this the baffling reality; it’s a baffling reality that hardly anybody talks about.

[From the September 2016 issue: Breaking into baseball’s ultimate boys’ club]

After the World Series ended in October, with nothing to look forward to but the long and empty months before the next baseball season, I settled in to watch Ken Burns’s 1994 documentary, Baseball, which is broken up into nine episodes. “There are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization,” the writer Gerald Early says in the first one. “The Constitution, jazz music, and baseball. They’re the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced.” Well, women aren’t constrained in their enjoyment of jazz, or of the Constitution (for now), but …

Over the nights that I spent being thoroughly entertained by the documentary, I nevertheless felt a pit in my stomach that got deeper and deeper. Burns very explicitly articulates the sport as being foundational to our culture and reflective of our society’s ideals. The game is democratic because it’s fair, egalitarian because it’s simple, and perfectly designed because its creators—energetic, imaginative people—arrived at the measurements for the diamond as if through divine inspiration. Baseball rewards commitment and reveals character; it loves rule-benders but judges cheaters. It has lofty goals and serious expectations, but it allows for theatricality and fun. It glorifies teamwork (double plays, rallies, sacrifices, and even sign-stealing are collaborative) but also reveres the hero (when a man comes up to bat, he comes up alone). It provides a convenient excuse to eat a hot dog.

Women play basketball, which is almost as old as baseball but has never carried the same level of cultural significance, and they play soccer, which is not predominantly an American game. They play hockey and lacrosse. They don’t play the vulgar, stupid sport of football, but nobody should. Yet they play basically everything else—every sport ever invented, even the weird ones. For no obvious or practical or logical reason, they are allowed to love, but almost never to play, baseball. They don’t get to play America’s game.

Actually, contrary to some of my sweeping statements, in baseball’s earliest days, women were eager to play and sometimes allowed to do so. Several women’s colleges had baseball teams in the mid-to-late 1800s—by 1875, Vassar had a number of them, including the Sure-Pops and the Daisy-Clippers. The all-Black, all-women Dolly Vardens barnstormed in the 1880s as some of the first documented professional women baseball players; their history, largely forgotten, has been revived by the historian Leslie Heaphy, a co-editor of 2006’s Encyclopedia of Women and Baseball (which she is updating).

But doctors were convinced, or so they said, that physical activity could render women infertile or even kill them. In 1867, a nationally syndicated newspaper story blamed baseball-playing for a young woman’s death from typhoid. One of the best-known baseball players in the country at the time, John Montgomery Ward, then of the New York Giants, wrote in his 1888 book, Base-Ball: How to Become a Player, “Base-ball in its mildest form is essentially a robust game, and it would require an elastic imagination to conceive of little girls possessed of physical powers such as its play demands.” When the game became big business at the turn of the 20th century, women were welcomed at the ballpark as spectators. Their presence was thought to help civilize the environs and increase the likelihood of entire families becoming fans and spending money on the sport. But that welcome didn’t extend to the diamond.

[From the May 1928 issue: Women aren’t fans]

A few months ago, I had a long call with the historian Jennifer Ring, the author of the 2009 book Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball. We talked about her work for a while, and then we talked about how much we love baseball. For many years, she said, she’d felt alienated from the game and angry that her daughter, who was an excellent player, had run out of options and was forced to abandon the sport. “There was probably a decade of my life where I was just too pissed off to even watch baseball,” she said. But Ring grew up a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and she’d recently been roped back in by their World Series run and by the otherworldly superstar Shohei Ohtani. “I watched again this year, and it’s still the game I love,” she told me. “It’s brilliant. And the best players are just thrilling to watch.”

Of course, hardly anyone resembles Ohtani, even in Major League Baseball. Mookie Betts, another Dodger great, is nothing like him. He’s seven inches shorter and at least 30 pounds lighter, and plays multiple defensive positions with charisma and flair. Ohtani, one of the best hitters and pitchers to have ever lived, is faintly aloof and carries himself woodenly (and has a fantastic head of hair). “It’s the people’s game because it calls for a variety of different kinds of body types and skills,” Ring pointed out. There are smaller and faster men in the middle infield; bigger guys at the corners; pitchers who look like Gumby dolls and pitchers who look like they belong to the Teamsters. All of this diversity gives the lie to the suggestion that women physically cannot play.

But this is a storied idea that has been repeated across generations. In the mid-1920s, the all-female Philadelphia Bobbies were completing a barnstorming tour of Japan, where they surprised journalists, impressed fans, and received celebrity treatment. Back home, girls were being encouraged to play a version of baseball, with a larger ball and a smaller field, that would be more suitable for them—a game variously known as kitten ball, playground ball, diamond ball, and mush ball, and originally invented in the winter months to be played by men, indoors. The game is now called softball. The details were laid out by Gladys E. Palmer in Baseball for Girls and Women, published in 1929. Palmer was an early advocate for girls’ athletics, but her attitudes were still of their time. She offered advice on how to throw properly (girls “do not have a natural aptitude for throwing, which all boys have from early childhood”) and discouraged girls and women from sliding. As Palmer acknowledged, the version of the game she promoted was meant to be “less strenuous.”

Members of the Rockford Peaches, 1944. The team was part of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, created by the Chicago Cubs owner and chewing-gum mogul Philip K. Wrigley. (Bettmann / Getty)

That word, strenuous, comes up often. It was used by A. G. Spalding, an early baseball executive who also founded the country’s first sporting-goods empire, when he said that a woman was free to wave her handkerchief and root for the home team, but that “neither our wives, our sisters, our daughters, nor our sweethearts, may play Base Ball on the field … Base Ball is too strenuous for womankind.” The same word was used against the 17-year-old pitching phenom Jackie Mitchell, who was signed by the Minor League Chattanooga Lookouts (and who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in a 1931 exhibition game). The baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, reportedly voided Mitchell’s contract, explaining that the baseball life was “too strenuous” for women.

One of my great loyalties, odd though it is for even me to contemplate, is to Brett Baty, a 25-year-old from Texas who was a first-round draft pick for the Mets in 2019 and was supposed to be their third baseman of the future. We have essentially nothing in common, obviously.

But something about his story has grabbed me. Baty hit a home run in his first major-league at-bat, in front of his family and against a hated division rival, but he’s never been able to string enough of those moments together. He has flashes of brilliance, and then he gets rattled by something. He starts making mistakes and looking bewildered. He loses his head. Then he goes down to the minors and plays with such dignity and grace. He wears the ugly promotional jerseys they make you wear at that level, and he hits some more home runs and learns a new defensive position in case that will help his chances of being called back up. Last year, his best friend, Mark Vientos, ended up taking the job that was supposed to be his and has excelled at it. In the playoffs, during which Vientos broke the Mets’ record for postseason runs batted in, the camera cut to Baty, watching from the dugout, whenever his friend did something great, and he was always, with no hesitation, ecstatic.

Then, in the offseason, another insult and injury: His jersey number, 22, just happened to be the one that the superstar Juan Soto wanted, and the Mets reportedly had promised it to him in his $765 million contract. Soto may have gone through the ceremony of offering Baty a fancy present, such as a watch or a car, in exchange for the number, as players typically do in these situations, but it wasn’t immediately clear that he had. I took exception to this even though hardly anybody else—just a few other fans on social media—seemed to care. Are we not owed dignity even when we’re kind of a flop?

That’s a long way of explaining how my career as third baseman (baseperson?) for the Pinstripes began and ended. Though I had no experience, I reasoned that I was young and fairly coordinated, and I wanted to try my hand at the hot corner.

Our first game was on one of the Yankees’ many practice fields, against another fantasy-camp team, the Bombers. When I walked out in my uniform, I felt like a ballplayer. I thought I’d watched enough of the game on television—almost every night for half of the year—to know what to do, at least basically. I quickly handled the first ball that a Bomber hit down the line to me, and I stood up with plenty of time to throw the runner out. But when I heaved the ball across the infield, it fell far short of the first baseman and way off line. The same thing happened with the next ball that came to me. And the next. My team was down by two runs at the end of the first inning.

Then came my time to bat, which was my true fear. I had to be called back and reminded to put on a batting helmet. I panicked and momentarily forgot which side of the plate I was supposed to stand on. It came to me just in time, but I struck out on three pitches. Our coaches were throwing to us, and they were not trying to strike us out. They were “trying to hit your bats,” as they put it.

The author at bat, George M. Steinbrenner Field (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic)

After this, I sat in the dugout and watched the other women watch the Yankees shortstop, Anthony Volpe, who was working out on a field behind us. (“He wasn’t very friendly,” one of them complained mildly, after admitting that she had more or less been catcalling him.) I moved to center field after a few more wild throws, and Kaley Sullivan, a 30-year-old police officer from California, took over third base. One ball slipped past her, and I scooped it up and threw it back to her; she stepped on the base and made the out. This was a highlight of my life, but in my next at-bat, I managed only two foul tips before striking out again. We lost the game 9–4 and mollified ourselves by saying we would work out the kinks in the afternoon.

At lunch, I sat next to Leslie Konsig, a 42-year-old insurance representative and plainly the best athlete on our team, who had been making plays at shortstop as reliably as I had seen the guys do it on TV. It was difficult to look anywhere other than at her on the field. She wore her dark hair in a single braid, smiled easily at everyone, and moved with the ease that comes with total competence. She treated us all like real ballplayers—meaning she was a bit more specific and direct at times than our actual coaches.

Leslie was there with her friend Lainey Archenault, 43, an animated woman with a strong Jersey accent. They are both moms, and they play together on a New Jersey softball team called the Sluggers; Lainey conspired with Leslie’s wife to sign her up for the camp as a surprise. Lainey, I learned, is a die-hard Yankees fan who has been watching almost every single game for as long as she can remember. She clocked immediately that I’d chosen the jersey number 0 in reference to the somewhat random relief pitcher Adam Ottavino, who grew up in Brooklyn near where I live and who played for the Yankees in 2019 and 2020. (More recently, he played for the Mets.) Though she has coached her son’s 10-and-under travel baseball team, this was the first time she’d played a game of baseball instead of softball. Growing up, she told me, she’d been obsessed with Don Mattingly—she was left-handed, as he is, so she’d hoped to be a first baseman, as he was. But she’s petite, so that wasn’t in the cards. Instead, she was put in the outfield, which she now prefers, because you get to watch a whole game unfold in front of you.

By contrast, Leslie didn’t care much about the Yankees. She was wearing the number 22 and had no idea that it was a sore spot for Yankees fans who were mourning Soto’s betrayal. “I’m more here to play,” she told me. “To feel, like, what it is to be on the field, wear these uniforms, use the amenities.” She’d been the only girl on her Little League team, and she’d played until high school, when she had to switch to softball. But Leslie still had a Yankees-fan story: She’d gone to the 1996 World Series with her dad and his friends, and they were so overcome by giddiness that they’d even included her, at age 14, in the celebratory cigars.

This set off some table-wide chatter about the most recent World Series, which the Yankees lost to the Dodgers in somewhat humiliating fashion, capped off by a disastrous error-riddled inning that saw a five-run lead evaporate in the decisive Game 5. “We played better than they did, today,” Bitsy Osder said.

High on camaraderie, I went into the afternoon games confident that I could improve my performance. For the second game, we were on the main field—an intimidating change of venue, as this meant music blaring over the loudspeakers while we warmed up, use of the giant scoreboard, and an announcer to read off our names as we went up to bat.

We were quickly down by three, but my teammates rallied for five runs in the fourth inning, and we ended up winning 7–3. The rally was exhilarating—I was Brett Baty in the dugout. Again, I contributed no hits. I had been dropped to the bottom of the batting order. But I pinch-ran for a teammate and accepted my status as role player. This time, at least, I hit a grounder and was thrown out, rather than just flailing at the plate.

Before our third and final game of the day, back on the practice fields, we got a pep talk. One of our coaches, or Legends, was Ray Burris, a journeyman pitcher who played with the Yankees in 1979. (At dinner, he let us each hold the American League Championship ring he’d been awarded in 2012 as a pitching coach in the Detroit Tigers organization.) He sat us down and said: “You’re as good as your last game, and you’re as bad as your first game.” We were not to get big heads.

In the third game, we scored four in the top of the first, but the other team, the Captains, scored five in the bottom. I misplayed a ball in the outfield and then stepped on it, shooting it into foul territory, where it skidded away across the dirt. I made a base-running error (as a pinch runner) and I twisted myself up underneath a fly ball and felt my back wrench as it dropped behind me.

Then Leslie hit an inside-the-park home run—assisted by two, or possibly four, defensive errors by the other team—and we went wild. But the Captains rallied again in the bottom of the sixth for another five runs and then we were down again, 10–6. My teammates worked a gritty top of the seventh, in our final chance to score. They brought in two runs, making it 10–8. I stared at the lineup card in horror as what was about to happen came together in my mind: I was going to be the last woman up. Two outs, bases loaded. If I hit the ball, we could tie the game—or even win, if there were two, or possibly four, defensive errors.

I swung at the first pitch and missed. I let the second pitch go by—ball. I swung and missed at a third pitch. I could feel humiliation a breath away. Then I nicked a foul ball. I could hardly believe the moment was still happening. Then, on the next pitch, I heard what was not quite a crack but was still the perfect sound of bat on ball. We were playing with wooden bats, not the metal ones they have at batting cages, which sound tinny and awful and jangle your hands. I ran in a dead sprint, made it to first base, and didn’t see the ball anywhere. I was safe!

But then I turned around and saw that the pitcher had fielded the ball, which had been nothing more than an infield roller, and had thrown it to the catcher for the force play at home.

I’d made the last out and the game was over.

In the early ’70s, several Major League teams hosted Hot Pants Days, which offered free admission to women who came to the stadium wearing short-shorts. Also at that time, Little League teams that allowed girls to play could be threatened with revocation of their charters.

Maria Pepe grew up in an apartment complex in Hoboken, New Jersey, that was full of children, mostly boys. Whenever she was done with her homework, she would join them in playing slap ball, stickball, Wiffle ball, and any other variation of baseball they could make work. “From a young age, maybe 7 years old, I just started playing, and I loved it,” she told me. In 1972, she tried out for Little League and made the Young Democrats team. She pitched three games before angry parents reported her team to Little League’s national office; the league threatened to take away the charter that covered all Hoboken teams, so Pepe’s coach came over to her house and took back her uniform. He let her keep her cap.

The National Organization for Women picked up her case in the spring of 1972, filing a complaint with the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights. This caused a big to-do, and newspapers and radio followed the case closely, though Pepe’s parents helped her tune a lot of it out. She did vaguely know that a court was hearing arguments regarding the density of her bones as compared with boys’ bones, presented by Creighton J. Hale, Little League’s executive vice president and director of research. (This argument was based on a Japanese study of cadavers and another about skiing accidents, both of which included only adult bones.) Hale also presented a hypothesis that being hit by a ball could cause breast cancer in girls. Little League’s other arguments were impressively circular. One was that there was no sense in allowing girls to play baseball, because they would not have future opportunities to play it professionally. Another was that the Little League national charter, which specified its purpose as developing “qualities of citizenship, sportsmanship, and manhood,” would be contradicted by the inclusion of girls.

Nina Kaplan, a Boca Raton mother of four who had never played baseball before, hustles to first. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic)

Judge Sylvia Pressler found these arguments uncompelling. “Little League is as American as hot dogs and apple pie,” she wrote in her ruling. There was no good reason why “that piece of public Americana should be withheld from girls.” Little League did not acquiesce easily. The organization filed an appeal, which it lost. But by this time, Pepe was too old to play.

My teammate Bitsy said that Pepe “took the arrows” for her. Bitsy was one of the first sign-ups, and so news of her first game for the Englewood Orioles was printed in papers across the country. She struck out in her first at-bat, but then drew a walk and scored a run. She was described by the Daily News as “all mouth,” challenging the umpires and instructing her teammates on what to do. She jokes that she thinks her fly was open in one of the newspaper photos.

Now easing into retirement, Bitsy plays in two L.A. leagues just for fun. Like many young kids, she fantasized about playing for the New York Yankees. “By the grace of Maria Pepe and the New Jersey Supreme Court,” she told me, “I was able to sustain that fantasy a little longer.” She considers her Little League experience a blessing. She was accepted by her teammates and she had a blast. “I am a very positive, glass-half-full person,” she told me. “I just think my whole outlook in life would have been different if they had said no to me.”

For the past 50 years, Little League hasn’t said no to girls who love baseball, but it has set them up to be a minority. Instead of encouraging girls to play baseball after the court decision, Little League encouraged softball for girls and made that their primary option. This example was followed by high schools and colleges, which offer only softball teams for girls and young women. And even if you’re good enough to play with the boys in high school, how do you stick it out, knowing that you could get a college scholarship for softball if you switched?

“Anybody who knows the two games knows they are not equivalent,” Leslie Heaphy, the historian, told me. Softball has a bigger ball and underhand pitching, as well as a smaller diamond, a closer fence, and a different style of play that is both faster and simpler. Both are great games, but our culture has accepted a false equivalency, she argued. It’s “just a way of never having to address the issue that women want to play baseball [and] should be allowed to. It should be open to anybody.”

Jennifer Ring pointed out that the number of girls playing on boys’ high-school baseball teams hasn’t changed for decades—it hovers between 1,000 and 2,000 out of a total of nearly half a million. In recent years, Little League has held events to honor “Girls With Game,” as they call girls who play baseball or softball. But when I wrote to ask how many girls currently play baseball in Little League International, Kevin Fountain, the organization’s senior director of communications, wrote back to say that the information wasn’t available. He could only say that 32 percent of Little League participants—across baseball and softball—are female.

Thinking it might be a matter of a statistic being difficult to calculate for some reason, I wrote back and asked for a couple of alternatives. Could he tell me how many baseball teams have girls on them? Could he tell me whether any Little League baseball teams are girls-only? He could not.

In an earlier email, he’d sent me a link to an article about the Maria Pepe Little League Baseball Legacy Series, which was played for the first time in 2024, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. I noticed that the visiting girls stayed in dorms in the Dr. Creighton J. Hale International Grove—a complex named for the man who’d once argued that they would ruin the sport if they ever picked up a bat. He eventually regretted this position, and when he met Pepe later in life, he told her that his granddaughter had begun playing ball.

Throughout the weekend, I had several conversations with women about a new Women’s Pro Baseball League, which was announced in October and is set to debut in 2026. “If it’s within driving distance, I’m going to every game,” Vicky Leone, a retired 58-year-old mother of two, told me.

Vicky was a regular at the camp—one of its pillars. Her team, the Bombers, which went undefeated over the weekend, was largely made up of women who had been playing together for years. When I ran into her at dinner one night, she was wearing a onesie covered in the face of her team’s coach, the former Yankees second baseman Homer Bush. She told me that in 2017, during her third year at the camp, she’d asked one of the Legends, Orlando Hernández, a former Yankees pitcher otherwise known as El Duque, to throw her a real fastball. She has no idea how fast he threw it, but she somehow made contact, and hit it out of George M. Steinbrenner Field.

“I guess I timed it just right,” Vicky told me. “I didn’t even realize it went over the fence.” A player on the opposing team had to yell at her to stop sprinting as she rounded second, and when she got back to the dugout, her own teammates were losing their minds. A camp employee went and found the ball, and Hernández signed it for her. She still doesn’t know how it happened—“the baseball gods” intervened.

Vicky plays in three different softball leagues all year round, but playing baseball at camp for one weekend a year is important to her. “We’re like a sisterhood,” she said. Her teammates, many of whom are roughly her age, are all part of a generation of women who were snubbed by baseball. She grew up wanting to play and would often be dismissed with an Isn’t that cute? When she got older, she would talk about baseball, and boys would ignore her. When she started coaching baseball, parents didn’t want their sons to be assigned to her team.

The author loosens up before a game. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic)

Now she sees girls playing in the Little League World Series and has heard about the professional women’s league starting next year. “Sometimes I feel—I wish I was born now and not then, just so I could be a part of that.” But she has more enthusiasm than regret. “I would love to be a coach there, even an assistant coach, keeping book, whatever; I would love to do that,” she told me. “Am I going to? Probably not. But, you know, it’s a dream, and everybody’s got a dream.”

The idea for the Women’s Pro Baseball League was announced with a bare-bones press release. It revealed that the league would start next year with six teams “predominantly in the Northeast,” and that it had been co-founded by a lawyer, Keith Stein, alongside Justine Siegal, a well-known figure in the world of women’s baseball. Siegal grew up playing and then became a coach. She’s best known as the first woman to have pitched a major-league batting practice and for creating the nonprofit Baseball for All, which promotes girls’ participation in the sport.

[Jemele Hill: Women’s college basketball is a worthy investment]

“My whole life has been about getting girls involved in baseball,” Siegal told me when we spoke in December. She is a co-owner of the new league, in charge of baseball operations, and will likely be its first commissioner. She rattled off part of her to-do list: The WPBL will need scouts, tryouts, contracts, stadiums. It will need to create a culture of girls’ baseball from scratch. And so, most important, it will need time and serious backing. Even with the patronage of the NBA, it took decades for the WNBA to reach the levels of interest it has today. The Professional Women’s Hockey League, which also started with six teams just last year, is wholly owned by the chairman of the Dodgers and his wife; they can afford to wait while it finds its footing. A new baseball league will similarly need team owners who are able to front huge costs and are willing to commit to something that might not be profitable for the foreseeable future.

Siegal described her vision for the league by comparing it to Angel City FC, the women’s soccer team in Los Angeles. The fan base isn’t enormous, but it’s big enough. “The place is packed; it’s electric. And the athletes are being treated well, making money. They don’t need a second job. And girls know that it’s possible that they, too, could become a professional player.”

The only real precedent for a women’s baseball league is the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the subject of A League of Their Own. The league was created by the Chicago Cubs owner and chewing-gum mogul Philip K. Wrigley in 1943 to keep baseball alive as an entertainment industry while many of its brightest stars went to fight in World War II. He was initially the sole owner of the entire league, which was based in the Midwest and rostered only white women.

The Racine Belles and South Bend Blue Sox, both of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, face off in 1947. (Bettmann / Getty)

The league gave hundreds of women the opportunity to play baseball, and it put on some great games that impressed even seasoned baseball professionals and sportswriters. But there was always a tension, as depicted in the movie, between the gimmick and the game. The league had strict rules about feminine appearance and behavior—players wore skirts, went to charm school, and were taught to scratch at bars of soap to remove the dirt under their fingernails. The league was disbanded in 1954, and the idea was largely forgotten until the release of A League of Their Own.

The movie inspired a very brief period of trial and error. A women’s league based on the West Coast played a season and a half before its owner pulled the plug over low attendance, and the Coors Brewing Company sponsored the Colorado Silver Bullets, a barnstorming team managed by the beloved knuckleball pitcher Phil Niekro. “Give them the time all the men have had in this country to play, and you’re going to find a lot of good baseball players,” Niekro told The New York Times after the team’s first year (they went 6–38). The Bullets put on some great games and improved to a winning record in their fourth year. But marketing stunts are not meant for longevity and the Bullets, too, did not last.

The U.S. does have a national women’s baseball team, which was featured in the 2024 documentary See Her Be Her. That team competes every two to three years in a Women’s Baseball World Cup, which the U.S. last won in 2006; Japan, which dominates in women’s baseball, has been the champion in the past seven contests. Americans are far behind.

See Her Be Her, which aired on the MLB Network the week of the World Series, demonstrated the support that women’s baseball has been able to garner among former major-league stars, including Ichiro Suzuki and Cal Ripken Jr. Ripken, whose 21-year playing career with the Baltimore Orioles ended in 2001, is a member of one of the most famous baseball families in American history. During his own Hall of Fame career, he played alongside his brother Billy and was managed by his father, Cal Ripken Sr. His sister, Ellie, never got to play, though he describes her as throwing harder than he did as a child and growing into a massively talented athlete in other sports.

Ripken told me that he and his teammates had watched the Silver Bullets play exhibition games. “I always looked out there and saw my sister and thought, Wouldn’t my sister love to do this? ” I didn’t sense that he was putting on a show—more like it was flatly obvious to someone whose whole life is baseball that everyone should get a chance to enjoy playing it. “I wouldn’t say we were surprised, but our eyes would open, saying, ‘Man, these girls are really good,’ ” he said. “To try to figure out why that didn’t blossom at that time—sometimes they say good ideas, it’s a matter of timing. Maybe this is the right timing now.”

On Saturday morning at baseball camp, my beautiful Pinstripes took the lead quickly in our first game, which we won 6–2; again, I did not contribute a single hit.

My worst fear was realized as my teammates began to notice—or, probably, they had already noticed, and it just became impossible for them to credibly ignore—that I was by far the worst baseball player on our team. This inspired them to acts of kindness, such as high fives when I had done nothing to earn them and vociferous cheering whenever I was at the plate.

In the buffet line at lunch, Ray, our coach, tried to get at the root of my problem, which he diagnosed as mental. I told him about Brett Baty and his many struggles, and though he clearly had no idea who I was talking about or why I was so fixated on him, he seemed to agree that Baty and I had a similar problem, and it was in our brains. “What are you thinking when you’re up there?” he asked me. “I’m thinking, I hope I don’t miss the ball, ” I told him in the spirit of honesty, even though I was already 100 percent sure that this was not the correct thing to be thinking. Ray kindly told me that this was not the correct thing to be thinking.

I never wanted to be a baseball player and my performance at baseball camp doesn’t matter. These games, however, were meaningful to women who, by playing them, were making peace with their childhood fantasies after many, many years. One such person was my teammate Susie McNamara, who at 53 years old was attending her third camp. One evening, she told me that she was doing so this time to mark the end of chemo treatments, which she’d finished two months prior. But the first time she came, in 2011, she’d wanted to prove something.

Susie grew up in a baseball family. Her grandfather played for the Yankees’ farm team the Newark Bears. Her father was a police officer but also owned a baseball-card shop in Lambertville, New Jersey. He convinced everyone that it would be safe for her to start playing T-ball when she was 4 years old, and, later, that she could play Little League baseball with the boys. She was teased in school, she remembered, for wearing a baseball cap all the time (“It wasn’t, like, a fashion statement,” the way it is now) and for dreaming of being a Yankee.

She had to give that up when she was 12, and her primary option was softball. She would go on to play for Mount St. Mary’s, a Division I school in Maryland, but the coaching was terrible and the experience was miserable. Her sophomore year, the team’s record was one win, 31 losses. “I bet that one felt really good, though,” I suggested, but I was wrong. “That one broke my heart,” she said.

When she showed up at camp the first time, she thought of it as her opportunity to demonstrate what she could do. The Legends that year included one of her heroes, Bucky Dent, who stopped and stared theatrically when she made an impressive play at third base. She also remembers Darryl Strawberry standing over her after she made a diving backhanded catch in foul territory and screaming, “That was outstanding!” She thought that weekend was probably the best she’d ever played in her life.

In our final game, against the Bambinos, the Pinstripes were on fire. The other women had perfected the team’s defense over the course of the weekend—it didn’t hurt that I didn’t touch the ball once—and the only thing left for us to accomplish was a hit from me. I was not the only one who felt this way. Others said it, including Leslie, who told me, “I’m committed to you getting a hit.” (And Lainey, who said, “Let’s go, Ottavino!”)

In my first at-bat, I swung on the first pitch and something happened. The ball dribbled up the first-base line and the first baseman scooped it up easily, tagging me as I passed. But a run scored! No hits, but one RBI!

The Pinstripes celebrate a victory in their last game of the weekend. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic)

After taking the lead in that inning, we were winning for the entire game, so the pressure on me—from that angle—was quite low. In my second at-bat, my team cheered wildly for me on every pitch. I hit the ball just foul down the first-base line, felt a momentary jolt of hope because of the hard contact, and then struck out. In my third and final at-bat, my team cheered wildly for me again, and I struck out again. “Next year!” I announced, in a voice that was supposed to be playful and make everybody feel less awkward, but actually sounded childish and a bit unhinged.

It was ridiculous how upset I was. I was shocked at myself. I hadn’t been expecting it, but the admonition of “no crying in baseball” became suddenly relevant—I had to duck into the tunnel for a few seconds to regain my composure. My teammates, who were geniuses, politely ignored me for five minutes. And then our careers as New York Yankees were over. We had won our final game and went home with a record of three wins and two losses, which you might notice is a .600 winning percentage, higher than that of the actual Yankees last year. We drank Miller Lite in the locker room and swapped phone numbers.

I texted my college roommate from Staten Island that I would mail her all the Yankees merchandise that had been included in the price of admission. I texted my boyfriend that I had a new appreciation for the game and was humbled. I texted my dad, “One RBI!” There’s no crying in baseball, and the other thing they’re always saying is that baseball is a game of failure. If you have a really good batting average, you’re failing about 70 percent of the time. Most women, like most men who try the game of baseball, aren’t up to it. They crumble, like me, and like Brett Baty has in the past, though I am confident he will not do so this year.

At the start of her book, Jennifer Ring mentions the Burns baseball documentary, noting that it is more than 18 hours long but spends just a few minutes on women playing baseball in the 1800s, and then another few on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in the 1940s and ’50s.

This is particularly strange because the episode about the ’60s and ’70s touches on other issues of the day—Vietnam, civil rights, social unrest—but makes no mention of NOW’s involvement in the Little League legal battle, which would seem to fit in fairly naturally. Baseball  is the definitive story of the game in this country, which is why Ring brings it up. “He’s including it in his history, but he’s giving it the position that he thinks it deserves.”

Baseball is for the fastidious—a game in which everything matters. Reflecting in 1981 on the past 50 years of his life as a fan, Roger Angell wrote: “All of us who have followed the game with intensity have found ourselves transformed into walking memory banks, humming with games won, games lost, batting averages and earned-run averages, games started and games saved, ‘magic numbers,’ final standings, lifetime marks, Series, seasons, decades, epochs.”

Every play is recorded. Every pitch is remembered. It all counts. Every mistake. Every miracle. You can hear the delight and shock in an announcer’s voice when they see something that has somehow never happened before in the history of millions of plays. If you watch enough baseball, you can just feel when something is really something. (Baty’s three-run homer at Tropicana Field, which disappeared into the late, great ceiling and never came down?) In a game in which everything matters, in which we who love it wish to see every possible outcome unfold, how can we stomach the absence of women’s baseball?

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Girls of Summer.”  When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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