Lexee was still organizing for the WNABA, and Paine signed up as a team sponsor.
"I wasn't really looking to go out and start a national association for women to play baseball," she says. "I was just backing a team. But when I saw the conditions, I thought, 'If we are going to have decent venues to play, then we are going to have to create them.'"
Paine set aside her minor league dreams and threw herself into the considerably less expensive task of founding a women's league.
Paine and Lexee staged the coup with the 1995 season; most of the WNABA players followed them to the newly formed NWBA. Christina Paine set up an advisory board with some impressive baseball names: Jackie Autry; Dusty Baker, who played for the Dodgers and managed the Giants; and John McNamara and Buck Rodgers, who managed the Angels. She got Rod Carew to give hitting clinics to the women. This year she invited 1964 Cy Young Award winner Dean Chance to throw out the first ball of the season. She used her connections with the Angels and the Phoenix Firebirds to get good deals on uniforms and equipment.
Jim Glennie, the Michigan connection, pulled some strings of his own. He approached Jim Cooper of the American Amateur Baseball Congress, who once managed one of the original 1940s teams in the All American Girls Baseball League, and Cooper connected him with USA Baseball.
"I've always wanted to have one highly competitive team to develop skilled players and coaches so that we can reach down to the younger girls and offer baseball from an early age up," says Glennie.
And that thinking fit into goals set by USA Baseball.
"As a governing body, one of the things that's in our bylaws is that we're supposed to provide opportunity for women," says Wanda Rutledge of USA Baseball, "and we haven't done a very good job of that in the past. Our goal is to drop it down below this adult level. We'd like to see girls playing at other levels."
USA Baseball and the American Amateur Baseball Congress then agreed to put up money so that Glennie and the NWBA could establish a competitive pilot league in the Midwest. There will be teams in Chicago; South Bend and Fort Wayne, Indiana; and in Lansing, Battle Creek and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The NWBA will hold tryouts in those cities. In August, the three organizations will host an invitational tournament in Battle Creek with teams from the Midwestern league, Phoenix, California, Pennsylvania and Florida.
USA Baseball is hoping that the pilot program will lead to bigger things.
"My goal is that by next year, there will be at least one open tournament where everybody comes into it and we can really see what everyone is doing," says Wanda Rutledge. "The adult level is where the interest is. If we can get them involved and they become mentors, then we can have programs for younger women. That's the idea."
Things are hotly involved at Cholla Park. After a long and disastrous first inning, the Firebirds are finally beating their way back into the game,
Steve Emineth is pacing the dugout. He wants very badly to win.
The Angels are at bat, and one player bloops a little grounder to the shortstop, who fields it on the hop and fires it to first base for a photo finish.
"Safe!" calls the infield umpire.
Steve kicks the dugout fence in disgust.
"Why would I expect anything different out of you?" he shouts, a little too loudly.
The ump is not pleased. He walks over quietly.
"Coach, the game won't go on until you're in your car and out of the parking lot," he tells Emineth.
Steve later confides how proud he is at being thrown out of a game for the first time. But he won't let on just yet.
"Get your glasses prescription filled on your way back to first base," he calls out on his own way off the field.
Seconds later, the shortstop catches a pop fly that leaves a runner stranded in a pickle between first and second base. The second baseman runs her down and then flips the ball to the first baseman, a big blonde. The blonde drops her glove like a guillotine into the runner's shoulder, inadvertently crumpling her to the ground with the tag.
The Angels bench erupts.
"Blue, you going to allow that?" the Angels coach shouts.
This is baseball . . .
