Too Much Pink Has Baseball Fans Seeing Red
Instead of using pink umpire masks, how about hiring a female umpire?
Baseball Should Celebrate Mother's Day By Having More Women In Prominent Roles
Leave it to the officials at Major League Baseball to reinforce stereotypes, all in the guise of an idea to promote equality. Commissioner Rob Manfred and his staff did just that last Sunday, using Mother's Day to expose what they really think about the roles of women.
From one p.m. Eastern time to after ten that night, baseball fans were bombarded with the color pink. Every player, no matter which team, was required to wave pink baseball bats, as well as wear pink belts, pink socks, and pink shirts under their jerseys. The umpires, for crying out loud, even had to wear pink masks while behind the plate.
Pink of course has traditionally been the color of little girls who, as the children's rhyme espouses, are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Because it is the lighter shade of red, pink has also long been associated with the adjective sweet.
Those in charge of baseball obviously want it to stay that way, insisting that females are somehow more fragile and tender than the opposite gender. Neanderthal logic like that, one would have hoped, had stayed in the twentieth century.
Apparently not, as America's Pastime is trying to prove with its shameful tribute to Mother's Day. Female parents, for the most part, are depicted as chauffeurs, cooks, or alarm clocks, stereotypes that ignore the traditionally male roles that women have assumed throughout the past forty years.
Announcer after announcer during the telecasts paid homage to his mom, thanking her for feeding him or washing his dusty uniform. Even Commissioner Rob Manfred perpetuated the stereotype, based on his quote for the MLB website.
"My mom was the one who got us to every Little League game," he recalled. "She was the one who made sure we woke up in the morning."
His implication is clear, and it pretty much sums up baseball's entire pink theme for Mother's Day: women are responsible for getting their kids out of bed and driving them to games, while the man is out earning the family income.
This assumption, like most everything about baseball itself, is embarrassingly outdated. In a sport obsessed with statistics, it somehow has ignored the numbers regarding the modern role of women.
At this moment, almost 47 percent of all workers in the United States are women. A whopping 70 percent of women with children work, three-fourths of them holding full-time jobs.
Consider the fact that thirty percent of American households, according to the most recent census, have a woman as their primary or sole wage earner. That statistic was just eleven percent way back in 1960, which seems to be about the era in which MLB is currently existing or perhaps wishes to return to.
