I’ve always loved sports. Baseball in particular. As a kid, I’d sit on the couch and take notes during Yankee games, and I dreamt about one day covering the team for The New York Times, or about being the next Suzyn Waldman and broadcasting games on the radio. I constantly checked the children’s book Lou Gehrig: The Luckiest Man out of the Alexander Elementary School library as a student there. My nickname, as a pre-teen, was Sammy Sosa.
In college, my friend Dan and I often went out into the courtyard of my apartment with our gloves and a ball to have a catch when we felt overwhelmed during finals week, or when we needed to talk something through. Sometimes we’d be out there at night, barely able to see, but something about the pop of the ball hitting the glove always helped us focus.
Both of my grandfathers were Yankee fans, and so is my mom. My dad is a Red Sox fan—2004 was a bad time for us—and he took me to my first MLB game on a bus trip to the Bronx with my brother and pop pop. It was May 26, 2001, a 12-5 Yankee win over the Indians. I stepped off the bus before the game, saucer-eyed, staring at the bright blue letters I had only seen in pictures, gawking at the famous outfield façade, watching my pop pop tear up touching Joe DiMaggio’s plaque in Monument Park. Sixteen years later, I still feel like the soon-to-be 11-year-old version of myself when I walk up the stairs from the D train and see the new-ish stadium, cavernous and sterile but cathedral-like. I hope it never gets old.
Baseball has been the highlight of every March to September—and sometimes October and November—as long as I can remember. But to a Hamilton dad who saw me for the first time during an American Legion game in the summer of 2010, I was just another girl who needed help understanding sports.
I was covering a Post 31-Broad Street Park game in June 2010—my second month covering sports with the Hamilton Post. A player’s dad approached me and asked what paper I was with, mentioning that he hadn’t seen me around before. Fine. Mildly uncomfortable, but fine. What he said next stuck with me ever since: “So, do you know how to keep score?” I’m still thinking of responses better than the “Yes, I’ve been watching baseball since I was six” I squeaked out as I stood there, stunned, with my pen, notepad and voice recorder clenched in my hands.
I was just about to turn 20 at the time, and that was the first time anyone ever questioned what I knew about sports. I truly couldn’t understand what would have led him to think that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Clearly, I was there to work. Maybe I looked suspicious because I left my actual scorebook at home and was using a notebook instead? Was it because of my age? I looked a little younger than I was.
But then I asked myself, “Hey, wait a minute, would he have ever asked a man that question?” If he saw a man taking notes during a game, would he have strutted on up to him and asked if he knew what he was doing? If he understood some of the most basic tenets of the game? Probably not.
Then, there was the older reporter—still a mainstay for one of the daily papers—who approached me anytime we were covering the same game for about a year in 2011. Most games, I’d go right to the ballfield from the newsroom or from my second job at the mall, so I’d often wear a dress or a skirt. He made more than a few comments on my clothes—“Cute dress” while giving me a once-over, that kind of thing—and it happened often enough that I stopped dressing up when I knew I’d be going to a game later that day. I still do this, by the way. I’d rather sweat on a hot day than give anyone reason to comment on my clothing.
‘Those are vulgar, hateful and abusive comments, but it’s what these women face every time they log into Twitter or check their email.’
But, as it turns out, changing my clothes doesn’t help sometimes. A couple years ago, I was sitting on the bleachers next to the Notre Dame High School baseball field with my camera waiting for a game to start. It was a bright spring day, and I was wearing a plaid shirt buttoned up to my neck. That wasn’t enough to keep a player’s father from walking up directly in front of me, stopping less than a foot in front of my face and staring at my chest for a solid 30 seconds without saying a word.
I wasn’t sure what to do. “There’s no way this is actually happening,” I kept thinking. It was exactly as strange as it sounds. I was so confused, and I froze—when he finally walked away, I got up and left. I got in my car, and drove straight home. I was only there to take pictures of one player. I could get the shots another day, I thought. It really shook me up.
Over the course of a few years, these interactions were enough to knock me on my back. I started questioning who I was, whether or not I really knew as much as I thought I did, whether I was really cut out to cover sports. Before, I often questioned myself, but almost never about sports. All it took were a few subtle digs to send me on a spiral of self doubt.
But it could have been much worse, and I consider myself lucky. Women in sports on the national level face daily social media harassment, from comments like “Make me a sandwich” to death and rape threats—things that male reporters might never hear directed at them in a lifetime. ESPN’s Sarah Spain and Jemele Hill, Chicago sports radio anchor Julie DiCaro, television host Katie Nolan, ESPN baseball analyst Jessica Mendoza—they all face abuse every time they write a piece, mention social justice or appear on television.
Spain and DiCaro took part in a video last year where men read tweets about the pair written by other men. Some examples: “One of the players should beat you to death with their hockey stick like the whore you are.” “This is why we don’t hire any females unless we need our d——s sucked or our food cooked.” “Hopefully this skank Julie DiCaro is Bill Cosby’s next victim. That would be classic.”
Those are vulgar, hateful and abusive comments, but it’s what these women face every time they log into Twitter or check their email.
Women like Robin Herman—the first female reporters allowed in a men’s locker room—and Melissa Ludtke, who sued Major League Baseball after she was barred from the Yankees’ locker room in the ’70s, paved the way for women in sports. Herman was the New York Times’ first female sportswriter, and she constantly had to fight for the right just to do her job, defending herself against intimidation, harrassment and naysayers. The girl in the locker room became the story, instead of the hockey game Herman was there to cover. She and her peers, like Ludtke and fellow reporter Marcel St. Cyr, were called bimbos and sluts who just wanted to catch a glimpse of a nude athlete—and they still filed their stories game after game in the face of all of this.
I’m no longer the sports editor here, but I do still go to games and practices for interviews or to take photos. And I sometimes find myself thinking about what those women went through, and what those in the public eye still go through today. My experiences are nowhere near the level of what Herman and her peers stood in the face of, and I might never face that level of vitriol, but so many reporters have and still do. Reflecting on that is a necessity of the job, to me.
Sports careers and fandom are not as male dominated as they were 40 years ago, and I doubt they will ever be again. Once leagues, teams, athletes—and yes, even reporters and fans—acknowledge that, only then will real progress have been made.
Hamilton Post assistant editor Samantha Sciarrotta is a lifelong Hamilton resident, and a graduate of Steinert High School. Her columns will appear in the Post several times a year.
She Said, She Said is Samantha Sciarrotta’s monthly column for the Hamilton Post.,
