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On March 17 in Providence, Olivia Pichardo of the Brown Bears became the first woman to play in a Division I college baseball game, hitting the first pitch she saw on the ground to first base for an out. Up the road in Pawtucket, the swing is inspiring a generation of girls to follow in her footsteps.
by Linus Lawrence
Just 115 fans filled the bleachers of Murray Stadium in Providence for the Bears' home opener on Friday, March 17. The event may have drawn a bigger crowd were it not rescheduled at the last minute from a sunny Saturday morning to a cold, gray Friday afternoon, with a chance of rain in the forecast.
The 115 in attendance didn’t have much to cheer about. Brown had surrendered 10 runs to the Bryant University Bulldogs, scoring just one of their own.
But in the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out and no men on, all 115 witnessed history.
“And now batting for Brown, number 19: Olivia Pichardo.”
It was the first — and only — ovation of the game.
The 18-year-old freshman didn’t take a dramatic walk from the on-deck circle; she had run onto the field after the previous hitter was retired to retrieve his bat and toss it towards the Bears dugout. Meanwhile, the sound of her walk-up music, the song “Mi Gente,” accompanied the PA announcement of her entrance into the game.
Pichardo eyed the pitcher, Bryant’s M.T. Morrissey. She took a couple of practice swings, stretched her bat up over her head, and hit the barrel against her cleats.
Later she’d say that she had tried to treat it like any other at-bat. It wasn’t.
When Pichardo’s name was spoken over the loudspeakers, she had officially become the first female player to appear in a Division I college baseball game. And when — after her preparation was complete — she finally stepped into the batter’s box, she was taking a leap forward for the future of women in baseball.
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“A great moment in history”
A voice shouted: ‘Olivia is going to bat!’
The second Payton Roman heard those words, she instinctively ran to the railing to watch Pichardo take practice swings in the on-deck circle from the front row.
“I wanted her to know we were all there for her,” Roman wrote. “I wanted to be as close as I could be so she could hear us cheering for her.”
Roman – a 6th Grader at Riverside Middle School – is a member of the Pawtucket Slaterettes’ 12U Travel Team. She was one of about a dozen players, parents, and board members of varying ages from the league who made the trip in the hopes of witnessing the historic moment.
“I felt like a kid in a candy store,” said Ally Zagroski, the Slatteretes’ Youth Divisions Director, now wearing a black and white shirt donned by all the group’s board members. “When I was in college, I didn’t even dare to try to go play for my college. To see (a female) actually finally be a part of a college baseball team, it was a great moment in history to go witness with the kids.”
As Zagroski spoke, sounds of cheering and clapping chorused from the field next to her, where — one month and three miles apart from Olivia’s debut at Brown — the Slaterettes were making history of their own with the commencement of a new season of baseball, marking the league’s fiftieth anniversary.
The league’s story begins in 1973, when Alison “Pookie” Fortin was told she couldn’t play in the local Darlington Little League her brother was in solely because she was a girl. At this point, her parents and others started the Darlington Pioneers, a league with a couple of all-girls teams which a few years later was renamed the Pawtucket Slaterettes.
In the decades since, the Slaterettes have sustained and survived, expanding to include five age-based divisions — tee-ball, instructional, juniors, seniors, and women’s — as well as competitive travel teams which compete in tournaments across the country. Members of the league have also participated in the MLB Breakthrough Series, an annual event to showcase and develop young women in baseball.
According to President Bethanie Rado, last year the Slaterettes had almost 200 girls and women playing in their leagues, the most in their history.
“I think a lot of that is the exposure and the opportunity that women are being given at the semi-pro and professional level, both as players and administrators, and the acceptance that women can and are playing baseball,” Rado said.
On the picturesque morning of Saturday, April 15th, before the first games of the season began, parents, players, and community members filled the main field’s diamond and spilled onto the outfield grass to witness a star-studded ceremony commemorating the remarkable milestone.
Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee and Secretary of State Gregg Amore each spoke, with the former presenting a certificate of special recognition for “fifty years of developing baseball players and offering the opportunity to play baseball to women and girls in a safe and fun environment.” The speeches were followed by a video featuring congratulatory messages from an array of accomplished figures, including Rachel Balkovec, manager of the Yankees’ single-A affiliate Tampa Tarpons, Kim Ng, General Manager of the Miami Marlins, documentarian Ken Burns, former Red Sox players Mo Vaughn and Fred Lynn, and many, many more. Two ceremonial first pitches were then thrown out by Justine Siegal, the founder of the leading national girls’ baseball organization Baseball for All, and an original member of the Pawtucket Slaterettes. Also presented, and later displayed with pride near the window of the league's snack stand, were letters from Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush.
The celebration was the result of months of planning by the league’s eleven-member board. The effort was spearheaded by Rado and Secretary Camille Carino, with “hundreds of emails and letters” sent out, according to Zagroski.
“It was so much fun to see (the messages) come in,” Carino recalled. “It’s like, ‘oh my gosh, Rachel Balkovec sent a video!’”
“It’s huge to think that there’s a GM in Florida right now who took time out of her day to send us a video, or a secretary of state writing a personal letter,” said Travel Program Director Jenn Rado. “Some of these girls will know what that means, and some of them not yet.”
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“I want to be like her”
When the time came to throw her first pitch, Justine Siegal did not disappoint.
“Strike down the middle. Had some speed on it.”
That characterization was provided by Siegal’s catcher, 14-year-old McKenna Mare. The other ceremonial first pitch was “a little bit outside — but I like them outside,” she said.
Mare, who joined the league when she was four years old, is now a player for the Senior Division, and spent the festive day coaching the younger girls in their games.
“It means a lot to me,” Mare said of the anniversary. “I’ve been playing since I was very young.”
McKenna and her mother, Player Agent Michaela Connors Mare, missed Olivia Pichardo’s debut, instead attending the originally scheduled home opener on Saturday, March 18; but that didn’t stop Pichardo’s accomplishments from having an effect, motivating McKenna to try out for her high school baseball team.
It’s a story echoed by many of the girls in the Slaterettes’ leagues, for whom Pichardo has already become a role model and source of inspiration.
“I’ve heard about her. I want to be like her,” said Ava TK, a pitcher and first-baseman who, while on a break from coaching younger players, fired balls with precision at a mat with an image of a catcher on it — one of many carnival-style games set up in the complex’s parking lot for the event.
Ava recently tried out for — and made — her school’s eighth-grade baseball team.
“A number of our Slaterettes have made their high school baseball teams. That didn’t happen, even just a few years ago,” Camille said.
“They fell in love with the idea of (Pichardo)” Zagroski said. “Now they’re like, ‘I’m gonna do that when I go to college.’ She’s a huge inspiration to them right now. Huge.”
“It changes my point of view,” said LC Collins, a player on the Slaterettes’ 14U Travel Team who was in Providence to see Pichardo’s debut. Collins is currently the starting centerfielder on their middle school baseball team. “It makes me think there is a real chance that I can go somewhere with baseball and I don’t have to switch to softball in high school and college.”
Even with Pichardo’s blazed trail, that path isn’t without resistance. Fifty years after Alison “Pookie” Fortin’s exclusion from a boys’ little league, girls still find themselves confronted with an increasing pressure to switch from baseball to softball.
“Some of the kids on the baseball team are not okay with me playing,” Ava said. “They’re like, ‘how come you just didn’t try out for softball?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to. I’ve never played it.’”
“All of our girls get to a certain age where the infamous, ‘So when are you switching to softball?’ question comes about,” said Rado. In seeing Pichardo take her first swing, “right in front of you was the answer that you don’t have to.”
This was a question which Pichardo herself, along with her father and little league coach, Max, have had to confront throughout their journey.
“Every time I got to the next level, parents and coaches would just come up to me and ask, ‘oh, when are you going to switch to softball,’ as if it was this … inevitable thing that must happen because of biological differences,” Olivia Pichardo said in an interview in November.
“When she was little, I never saw a reason why she should do softball,” Max Pichardo said. “Every year, it was always the same kind of pushback.”
“Now that I’ve opened this door, these girls know that they can dream bigger and turn some of the dreams that they may have into more tangible goals,” Olivia Pichardo reflected.
“It’s motivating … and inspiring for me to know that there are a lot of girls who may be looking up to me because I’m in this position.”
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“This is where we are, this is where we’re from, and this is where we’re gonna grow”
The first pitch of the Slaterettes’ season was, in fact, not a pitch at all. Instead, at the “John E. (Jack) Carney T-Ball Field,” as parents and kids sat lining the stoop-level outfield wall, Rado placed a ball atop a short tee sitting on home plate.
“Remember what ready position is?” Rado had exclaimed to the fielders. To varying degrees, the kids then proceeded to bend their knees and face towards the batter. Rado commended them. “I’m so proud of you!” You look Opening Day ready!”
A girl in a bright pink jersey was at the plate, missing two of her first three swings and dribbling one ball foul down the line. On her fourth attempt, she knocked the ball straight down in front of the plate, and after being pointed in the direction in which to run, she reached first base safely.
In three years, this young slugger might play in the Instructional league, whose red and neon jerseys would begin squaring off on a backfield within the hour. In six years, she might play in the Juniors league, where light blue and orange jerseys served as the morning’s marquee matchup. One day, she might even help run the whole operation.
Zagroski first joined the Slaterettes in the instructional age range. Nineteen years later, she leads the youth divisions. Mare, “born and raised in Pawtucket,” played for the Slaterettes as a child. Now, her two daughters play while she leads the league’s recruitment efforts. Back in the 1970s, Katherine Murphy played with the Slaterettes before switching over to softball “because there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for baseball for girls back then.” Almost fifty years later, she’s the league’s Vice President, with a 14-year-old daughter who’s been a Slaterette for seven seasons.
For Bethanie, this journey started at five years old, as a player in the tee-ball league she was now orchestrating. She played until the age of eighteen, and when the women’s league began in 2003, she soon became a coach. It was about ten years ago that she drafted Jenn, herself a former Slaterette who’d known Bethanie from back in their youth playing days, to be a teammate. Today, the two are married.
Their story is a testament to the tight community at the heart of the Slaterettes, forming connections between generations and throughout the larger Pawtucket region. As much as its long, enduring history is responsible for this strong community, so too is the community the secret weapon behind its improbable successful story.
“Fifty years is just an incredible accomplishment for any league, no less a girls baseball league in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where, you know, it’s not a wealthy community. To be able to keep this going for so long, I’m really proud to be part of that,” Carino said.
“We’re close to the point where, if one of the kids needs a ride, they just holler and be like, ‘hey, can you come pick up a kid and take him to the game,’ and we’re like, ‘yeah, sure,’” Zagroski said. “We never want the kid not to be able to play.”
In 2022, the Slaterettes strengthened their connection to the Pawtucket community by moving into a three-field complex on the edge of Fairlawn Veterans Memorial Park.
“Over the years, the Slaterettes kind of never really had a home,” said Bethanie Rado. “We got the fields that were left over from the other leagues.”
When another local little league was forced to dissolve due to COVID, the Slaterettes swept in to occupy the space.
“To put up a large sign, for the first time ever, that just said “Home of the Slaterettes”...that gave us some roots and a home, so everybody could know: this is where we are, this is where we’re from, and this is where we’re gonna grow.”
The Slaterettes are also drawing in local community members, thanks in part to the new food bar in the center of the complex, which at the 50th anniversary celebration was staffed by a combination of hard-working board members and players.
“We actually attract neighborhood kids and other people,” said Murphy. “Other families that come to the park, they smell the food, they see the activity, and they’re like, ‘oh, what’s going on here?’”
With the departure of the Boston Red Sox triple-a minor league affiliate Pawtucket Red Sox in 2020, the Slaterettes now offer the premiere baseball attraction in town.
“We do have the diehards that would go to McCoy (Stadium) and watch a game,” Rado said. “That’s really the nostalgia we’re looking for is that it’s not just a family-based league, it’s a community-based league.”
Fostering this sense of community was part of Rado’s hope in crafting the 50th Anniversary ceremony: “to celebrate today’s Slaterettes, and yesterday’s Slaterettes, and everybody who may become a Slaterette the next few seasons.”
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“It hasn’t yet, but hopefully…”
Some within the Slaterettes were already familiar with Olivia Pichardo before her debut with Brown — not as a pioneer, but as an opponent.
Sophie Schacht, Player Development Director for the Slaterettes, recalled one game while managing the Boston Slammers travel team in a championship game. It was the bottom of the seventh inning, and Pichardo stepped up to the plate: “She was like, ‘you guys are gonna just walk me right?’ And we were like, ‘no, we’re gonna pitch to you…’ and we pitched to her, and we got her out.”
“It’s almost like one of us made it,” said Michaela Connors Mare. “She might not be a Slaterette, but she’s part of that whole entire group of girls that come together and play against each other.”
But a key factor which distinguishes the Slaterettes from other all-star travel teams such as the Slammers or New York Wonders or D.C. Force is the fact that they also provide an opportunity for girls to play in — for lack of a more apt phrase — a league of their own.
“I don’t think I ever realized how special the Slaterettes were until we’d meet all these girls that are on these other teams, and when you talk to them you find out that they were the only girl on their baseball team,” Mare said. “And they’re just fascinated with, like, ‘wait, you play in a league that has all girls?’”
“Our travel girls…they’re like, ‘What do you mean, you just come together as a team for tournaments? You don’t play together? You don’t practice?’" echoed Jenn Rado.
As women begin to break into men’s baseball at higher levels — such as Olivia Pichardo’s Team U.S.A. teammate, Kelsie Whitmore, who last April became the first woman to play in the Atlantic League — members of the Slaterettes’ board emphasized the importance of also developing spaces for girls to play against each other.
“It’s really cool to see girls and women playing with boys and playing against boys on their high school and college teams, but I think more important to me is just finding a community of other girls and women who want to play together at a competitive level and also at a friendly community level,” said Schacht.
“They don’t get passed over on a position because there’s a boy that might be the same caliber, but because it’s a boys team that the boys get to play,” Murphy said. “This is just their league. They get to play.”
The Slaterettes hope to see others follow their lead in creating such a unique environment. “It’s really lonely being the only league,” Behanie Rado said.
“I don’t know if Pawtucket realizes that we have something that no one else in the country has,” said Carino. “These girls can play a whole season with each other, and that’s terrific. Hopefully it will proliferate. I mean, it’s been fifty years, and it hasn’t yet, but hopefully…”
Pichardo’s historic debut in Providence and the Slaterettes’ fiftieth anniversary celebration in Pawtucket, for as much as they were monumental milestones themselves, are both significant steps towards the hope of eventually acheiving something greater — even if, as any baseball player could attest to, the game appears to be a marathon rather than a sprint.
It’s the hope that the Slaterettes grow and influence the formation of other leagues like it.
“I really hope that this event gets noticed…and that next year it’s an even more robust league with even more participation,” said Carino.
It’s the hope that Pichardo’s debut inspires a generation of girls to walk the trail she’s blazed.
“I do hope to still be playing baseball when I am as old as Olivia,” Roman wrote, “not only so I can do what I love to do but to follow in her footsteps.”
It’s the hope that organizations like the Slaterettes and figures like Pichardo can work together as part of a growing national movement to send a shockwave of change through America’s Pastime, and achieve what Rado stated as the ultimate goal: “That there’s either an established Major League Baseball for women, or that they’ve infiltrated MLB. And we’re there. And we’re powerful. And we’re a presence.”
Linus Lawrence is a sophomore, concentrating in English, whose hopes and dreams rest entirely on whether or not the Mets win.
Commentary:
What happens when you write a 3000-word story and still have pages upon pages of quotes and notes you can’t believe you excluded? That’s the position I find myself in with this piece, which I view as both the centerpiece of my work in this class but also of my work covering Olivia Pichardo’s incredible story for the Brown Daily Herald over the past six months. It was through the latter that I first learned of the Pawtucket Slaterettes after seeing a post on the organization Baseball for All’s instagram with a photo of a girl (who I later found out to be Payton Roman) watching Pichardo’s first at-bat from the front row of the bleachers. As I began researching the Slaterettes more, I couldn’t pinpoint which was more surprising: that the oldest (and perhaps only) all-girls baseball league in America was located in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, or that, being the mega-baseball fan I am, I hadn’t yet encountered them in my year and a half at college. In this story, I hoped to outline the synergistic connection between these two historic events, as well as present a portrait of the remarkable community the Slaterettes have built as they celebrate their past and look towards their future.
Source List:
Phone interview with Bethanie Rado (3/30)
In-person interview with Katherine Murphy (4/15)
In-person interview with Michaela Connors Mare, McKenna Mare, and Ava (4/15)
In-person interview with Sophie Schacht & Camille Carino (4/15)
In-person interview with Jenn Rado (4/15)
In-person interview with Ally Zagroski (4/15)
In-person interview with LC Collins (4/15)
Zoom interview with Olivia Pichardo (11/23)
In-person interview with Max Pichardo (3/18)
Quotes from Peyton Roman, LC Collins, and Quinn Faria sent by Bethanie Rado (4/19)
Videos and other information sent via email by Bethanie Rado
For reference:
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