The Sports section in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times included a feature on Jennifer Ring, author of the new book Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball.

There we sat, up in the cheap seats, chomping on hot dogs, talking shop. By the third inning, with the game already a war of attrition, I’d had the history lesson: how in the early 1900s, a mythic narrative was shaped that echoes to this day. Baseball in America was connected with being aggressive, orderly, religious, militarily strong and, most of all, manly.

Women? As far back as the mid-1800s, they played baseball. Yet, by the 1930s, they had been, for the most part, not so gently excluded from the game.