New League of Their Own : Coach Pitches for Off-Season Return of Women’s Pro Baseball

Mike Boyd can murder a baseball. With a cruel crack of his bat, the taut 39-year-old can send the spheroid spiraling into earthly orbit--bound for the moon, it seems, never to return.

But just ask the older brother of former major league pitcher Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd and he will tell you his batting idols are not Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio or even Hank Aaron.

It is a woman named Girtharee (Sweetie) Boyd--his late mother.

“To this day, I can still hear that smack when my mother hit a baseball,” said the Glendale resident, one of six baseball-crazy Boyd brothers born in Meridian, Miss. “If you saw her, you wouldn’t care about (Roger) Maris or (Mickey) Mantle.

“She’d hit the ball a mile and then walk out a single--because she had big breasts and didn’t want people to laugh when they saw her run. But man oh man, could my mama hit a baseball.”

These days, as coach Boyd takes to a Burbank playing field for an afternoon practice, the image of his mother lives on in the throwing and fielding exploits of his players--an all-woman squad Boyd hopes to soon turn into seasoned pros.

Something like the girls of winter.

Call it Mike Boyd’s field of improbable dreams. He wants to start a woman’s professional baseball league--complete with head-on slides, 80-m.p.h. fastballs and double plays turned like clockwork.

And, of course, child care in the dugouts.

For too long, Boyd said, professional baseball has been a rarefied realm of chest-beating, tobacco-chewing men. It is time, he insists, to give women another run at the sport.

Women briefly held the spotlight during World War II when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League cheered up a battle-weary nation with teams such as the Grand Rapids Chicks, Springfield Sallies and the Battle Creek Belles--an era captured in the film “A League of Their Own.”

But since the 14-team league folded in 1953, Boyd said, women have been shunted into a ghetto of amateur slow- and fast-pitch softball leagues.

By this fall, he wants to launch a league of six to eight all-women teams in California or Hawaii. If he is successful, games could be played during the usually baseball-barren winter months when the men are off renegotiating contracts or playing golf.

“Baseball is more than brute strength,” he said. “It’s technique and intelligence. Baseball needs more hugs. Baseball needs women.”

Boyd is emphatic about giving his girls a chance to play because he knows the frustration of being a baseball outcast. As the first African-American to play baseball for his hometown Meridian high school in 1971, his pitching helped lead the team to a state championship.

But this was seven years before his youngest brother, Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd, made his big league splash with the Boston Red Sox. In the legacy of the segregated South, Mike Boyd said, it was the color of his skin and not any lack of talent that kept him out of baseball.

He was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1973 but never signed. A tryout with the Oakland A’s also failed to land him a major league contract.

But his heart stayed true to his sport.

Using a technique he calls “Step, Hip, Hands,” Boyd has taught private batting lessons, as well as fielding and throwing techniques, to aspiring baseball players from 2 to 67--charging up to $100 an hour.

With his women, he said, it is a labor of love.

It was two years ago when, like a single lashed into left field, a light flashed on in Boyd’s mind: A revival of women’s professional baseball. At parks throughout Los Angeles, he had seen women who could hit the ball like his mother, Sweetie, and wondered if there were more where they came from.

Before long, Boyd had founded two teams--the Prophettes and Gatekeepers--composed of more than two dozen players: working women, managers, attorneys and students, each of whom would give their right arm to drop their briefcases or book bags and play professional ball.

A league of their own.

Since then, Boyd has sought corporate money to fund his new league. But after contacting more than 50 possible sponsors, he admits he has yet to collect even the first dime of the $1 million he says is needed for the league’s first year.

That fact has not stopped Boyd or his girls.

Three nights a week, they practice at George Izay Park in Burbank, waiting for their new league to get its legs.

Karen Kenney, 24, an outfielder from Boston, slapped a fist into her mitt and summed up the attitude around this infield. “I’m definitely ready to play ball,” she said. “I can do anything that a guy can do.”

Meanwhile, Boyd has seen the highs and lows of baseball.

He has seen beefy power hitters jump back from an inside fast ball and scream bloody murder, “just like they saw a mouse.” And he has seen players beaned in the forehead by a speeding baseball, only to to rejoin the practice minutes later.

But Boyd treats them all the same, insisting that with the right instruction they are all potential major leaguers. For most, Boyd is more than just a baseball coach. Indeed, his practices often take on the guise of a personal counseling session.

“Sometimes I feel like God led me to this man,” Kenney said. “He teaches us to think of ourselves as human beings, not men or women, black or white.”

But some players believe that Boyd has become a false god, one who has made promises about salaries and free travel he cannot keep. Other have felt pressured to forsake jobs and careers for the playing field--a tactic that has driven women from the team.

“There are a lot of demands,” said Margaret Christopher, a San Fernando florist who brought her 6-year-old son to practice. “But I’m a single parent with a child to support. And baseball isn’t paying the bills.”

Dottie Collins has her own doubts about women taking a full swing at baseball.

“I’m one of those women who believes that women can’t invade the men’s game,” said the 69-year-old veteran of the Ft. Wayne Daisies of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. “We have our own place. These aren’t the war years. I think we should concentrate on fast-pitch softball before taking on any baseballs.”

Boyd will not listen to such reasoning. He is too busy coaching his women and looking for sponsors. If none are found, he will take his league to Hawaii.

Come hell or beaned batter, Boyd plans to see his women’s baseball league become reality.