As most of you are now aware, recently Rob Dibble of MASN made some comments about women at a baseball game.

Friend of the blog Amanda Rykoff has done a roundup of responses to Dibble’s comments, and it’s well worth a look to understand that this isn’t an issue that affects just female Yankee fans, or female baseball fans, or even just women.

That said, I would like to add a thought of my own.

In March, I went to Florida for a weekend to visit my grandmother and catch some Spring Training. It was the last time I saw her before she suffered a massive stroke, from which she is still recovering, and the last conversation I had while she was still healthy was about how she cut class her senior year–1941–to go see the Brooklyn Dodgers, a roster of which she remembered every. single. name, win the pennant.

This was 1941. Seventy years ago, and it was perfectly acceptable for a young woman to go to a ballpark to, *gasp*, watch baseball.

To ascertain that women only go to a game to shop or chat, however innocent the comments, doesn’t just insult me or my friends, it insults the women of every generation before us that got the idea to take in a baseball game.

I’m used to surprising people with my interests (how many 24 year old women do you know with a sword collection? Like I said…), but baseball isn’t some cultish niche thing or giant underground culture.

Baseball is a part of America’s ethos, so much so that The Natural was assigned reading to English students at my high school and my freshman year, the phys ed teacher greeted the class with “we like the Mets here, not the Yankees,” and no one really cared if you were male or female.

Yeah, I like looking at attractive men. I like going shopping (I have a particular weakness for books). I’ve theoretically planned my wedding down to the exact cut of the gown I want to wear.

I also love baseball.