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| Melissa Mayeux smiles throws a ball at a baseball camp in Paderborn, Germany, Wednesday, July 1, 2015. The 16-year-old player on the French U-18 junior national team, made history when she became the first woman on Major League Baseball's international registration list, making her eligible to be signed by Major League teams. |
PARIS (AP) -- Simply by playing ball, Melissa Mayeux is busting through barriers.
Becoming
the first ever woman on Major League Baseball's international
registration list, making her eligible to be signed by pro teams, is
just the latest trail blazed by the 16-year-old shortstop from France.
Previously, she successfully got a "no-girls-allowed" rule abolished so
she could keep playing baseball with French boys.
Even
on a scratchy Skype call from the pitching and hitting clinic in
Germany where she's working on her swing this week with two-time
All-Star Steve Finley, Mayeux's drive shines through.
A
baseball pioneer from the land of Tour de France cycling and the 1998
World Cup champions: Who'd have thought it? France saw its first
baseball game played in the shadow of the-then unfinished Eiffel Tower
in 1889 but never grew into a hotbed for the sport.
Mayeux's
baseball ambitions started out simple enough: Her older brother, Dylan,
played and "I just wanted to do everything the same."
"I
followed him everywhere. We're very close, so we did everything
together. He started baseball at age 5. I was 3. When he went to
training, I always wanted to go with him, to play, to run. So I started
training at age 3 and played my first championship at 5," she said in
the Associated Press interview.
Mayeux plays
for the French junior national team in baseball and the national
softball team - with other women - at a senior level.
In
all her youth teams, Mayeux was always the only girl who stuck with
baseball. But a French federation rule barred girls from continuing to
play with boys beyond age 15.
She says people
would remind her and her parents that she'd have to switch to softball.
Their reasoning, she said with an audible snort, was that girls have
slower reflexes than boys and so she would be at greater risk of injury
as pitchers threw increasingly fast with age.
"It's blah-blah," she said. "Just excuses to keep girls out of baseball."
"I
wouldn't listen. It just made me more determined to continue, to change
things," she recalled. "I always wanted to keep on playing because I
knew it was the sport for me and because being a girl was no
justification for me to stop. I couldn't understand that."
Neither
could Didier Seminet, who took over as president of the French
federation in 2010. Mayeux credits him for strongly backing her efforts -
"I wrote letters. My parents helped me a lot," she said - to rescind
the rule. That finally - only - happened last year and would have taken
longer if not for Mayeux, Seminet acknowledged.
"It
takes generations to change generations," he said. "What I really like
about this story is how she is thumbing her nose at the boys. You ask:
`Why this didn't happen 10 years ago?' Because ours is a chauvinist
society."
Every day brings fresh examples of
that in sports: At the Women's World Cup in Canada, played on artificial
turf that would never be inflicted on the men's tournament, or in lack
of discussion about why there is zero chance of Sepp Blatter's successor
at FIFA being a woman. Inequality in sports remains so normalized that
it is often overlooked until athletes like Mayeux remind people of the
obstacles women still face.
Where will
Mayeux's spirit of adventure carry her? Not even she knows for sure. She
hopes to catch team scouts' eyes at an elite MLB European camp in
August where she'll work with Hall of Fame shortstop Barry Larkin. She
dreams, of course, of becoming MLB's first female player but also knows
there are more barriers to overcome.
"I think
there are people who oppose the idea of a girl being signed as a pro one
day," she said. "But they've never seen me play, they don't know me. I
hope I can change their mind."
"All I want is to play at the highest level I can, have fun, and just keep going forward."
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