It's time for peeking inside the grapevine with Jimmy the Great Yaw.
Well, thank you, Sam stairs.
Good morning, everyone peeking inside a grapevine today.
My guest today is going to be a good professor, Mr. Bill Sproul.
We'll look at the latest controversy in the WNBA where the race card is being played, and I know a lot of people nationally are getting tired of the drama in this league, and Bill will wrap up his story about Professor Woman's baseball back that had great movie years ago.
as well, and then we'll be back Thursday on Peakin' the Side of the Grapevine, same time right here on Mixed93.
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time to bring in a good professor mister bill scroll good morning bill how you doing hi good morning jimmy always please be with you well bill before you wrap up our uh... our uh... story on uh... or your story to say a professor woman's baseball i know i text you about a hour ago or so here uh... uh... tuesday morning the drama in the w mb a continues
And I know a couple years ago, people were glamoring to watch this product.
But every weekend, it's getting beyond ridiculous.
People want Engelberg to be fired.
They continue to have transgender talks.
Now, the latest incident this weekend, Chicago Sky's Arizona Carrington was assessed to flagrant two and ejected after hard fall across the vacant neck of the area.
Fever, Sophie Cunningham, during the first quarter Saturday.
The play was originally called the Flanger Bomb, but two, but was upgraded.
And afterwards, Karen came to call it white racism, white favoritism.
Bill, I don't know about you, I don't listen to Michelle Tafoya, Skip Bayless, I know the NBA commissars piped in.
When is the people just gonna get that up with this constant drama in the WNBA, which has a good product?
Hey, when Clark gets treated out there, we always know.
But Bill, are they getting dangerous waters, keep playing this race card by certain players doing it?
I mean, and now they've got a transit.
enters a situation going on but when there's a commissioner engelbert maybe the powers of being somebody owners finally step up a guy we were to put a break on this because they know their viewership is gradually going down compared to where it was last year you've been around a lot bill you've been around a lot of people you've been around sports your whole life you're the intellect you're the intellect part of this program but where do you get the point where sooner or later someone got to say okay guys we got to put the brakes on this is getting really out of hand and
We're pushing away a lot of people.
You're quite right.
I think there's the two big controversies right now, the transgender athlete debate and what the league has done, and then the physicality and the encore stuff, say the race card.
It's very unfortunate.
The background on the transgender stuff, there's Sophie Cunningham, a stadium interview.
She wanted to protect young girls from competing against a biological man.
And that's created all kinds of national discourse.
And against Sophie Cunningham, the recent game in Indiana and Seattle, there was demonstrations.
The owner of Seattle Swarm was suspended.
And then the commissioner has formed a task force to review what the League's gender eligibility policy is.
And then a couple of former NBA players have said, well, we'll declare ourselves eligible for...
for the NBA draft, which that has been, that's a tough one.
And then there's the targeting of stars is, and it said Sophie kind of has been targeted a bit.
Caitlin Clark is the kind of the white players have been, and it's just drawing all kinds of media attention to truly some of the finer parts of the game and excitement of women's basketball.
So it's very unfortunate.
I think that the NBA's going to be
WNBA is going to have to really crack down on a few things or just review what they're doing.
So it's kind of ridiculous all the stuff that's going on with the transgender stuff.
Looking at what the legal rules are, it's just that there are no established rules to how to treat transgender athletes and it's now become almost a political debate and kind of an election year.
So it's extremely controversial, the support for
Sophie Cunningham is the conservative.
She's become the darling of their movement.
And then it's just, it's going to, it's going to sour many of the fans on the game because of it.
So I think the NBA, the WNBA is going to have to step up and kind of review what they're doing.
And it really soured a lot already, Bill, but back to the main topic.
Now, this past weekend, the race card, which had been played constantly, where Harrington said, white primacy and white racism, white favoritism.
To me, that oversattles a transgender, and this race card is constantly getting played, and people don't want to hear this anymore, and then on top of the transgender, but again, Bill, correct me if I'm wrong, they're really getting into some dangerous waters here, aren't
they?
Exactly right, Jimmy.
They sure are.
The politicians are jumping into it, the media is jumping into it, and it's just hard to know what exactly is going to happen.
to do on that
day.
One thing, one columnist said this weekend, I can't recall.
He said, next time you go to a three-ring circus, the WMB will be all three of them.
And I'm starting to believe it.
And I don't watch it like I used to, Bill.
And not to never watch it that much.
I'll be at first that mid.
I enjoy high-end leverage sports, competition, elimination sports.
But a lot of this stuff, the last couple of years, has totally pushed me away.
Well, enough on that, Bill.
We got about 10 minutes left, 10 and a half.
Let's wrap up your new story on professional women's baseball, going back to the movie years ago, a league of their own.
And we talked on this last week.
But it's trying to make back ladies, as I mentioned, as a very modest league going.
But wrap up your little segment on that before we reset her.
OK, well, basically a couple of weekends ago, the first team to play in probably the newest professional sports league in the women's baseball league.
It's the kind of building on the excitement of the WNPA and the women's hockey.
This league was founded by Justine Fiegel and Keith Stein.
And Justine Fiegel, she's the first female to coach pro-men.
basketball or baseball.
She coached for the Oakland A's, got her Ph.D.
She's been a coach in Canada for several semi-pro teams.
She's coached in Mexico and Japan.
She's actually named on 100 most powerful people in major league baseball by USA Today.
And Keith Stein, he's a Canadian lawyer and entrepreneur.
He was vice president of Magna, an auto parts manufacturer in Canada and other Canadian companies.
He's owner of a semi-pro
baseball team in Toronto, and we've got a few others involved.
Rob Godfrey, he was the son of the former Blue Jays president and general president, and he was kind of the important person in Toronto.
And former Blue Jays manager, he's still a guest on when they won the World Series.
So the league has 14, the New York Heights of Boston.
Others, the LA Booms and San Francisco Firebots.
They're fireballs.
Now, this year, all of the lead games are played in Springfield, Illinois on a neutral venue.
It seats a little over 5,000 fans, and they've had Deloach the first couple weekends.
They, um, why someone asked, well, why is it in, in Schoolfield, Illinois?
Well, apparently that's where the first two women's teams were paid to play baseball in Springfield, Illinois.
Uh, each, there are 50 games, uh, pre-team over several weekends, uh, August and into September, and then they have the playoffs.
Um, they had a trial last year and.
in Washington, DC, and they had 600 players registered.
There was a draft, and each team selected 30 players.
And then they had the 50 of the teams, they had their spring training in Port Myers at the Boston Red Sox scan.
And the games actually get screened on ESPN+.
There is a team salary budget.
They do a number of things.
The most famous players are Mone Davis.
She played in the Little League World Series over 10 years ago.
And last this year, she was pitching a few balloons for the Savannah bananas.
And there's a legendary picture from Japan.
And then there's a picture that's in a couple of semi pro leagues.
So there's some names there.
It's going to take a while, but it's kind of an interesting venture.
Now, to tie it into the old story of the Tom Hanks movie, it's not
the first league probably the first professional baseball league for women formed in the late 40s or in the 40s 1940s and ran for about 10 years.
It was the most famous league was the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
It was founded in 1943 by Philip Ridney.
He's the Virginia gum and Ridney field thing.
There were several other Major League executives that were involved.
They wanted to maintain baseball in the public eye during World War II.
And they were, because they'd lost a lot of the talented players, they just wanted another venue.
And the league listed lasted for 10 years.
It started with four teams, all from the midway.
West, the regional four teams were the Rockford Peaches, the South Bend Blue Sox, the Kenosha Comets, and the Racine Bells.
It grew to 10 teams in the late 1940s, and there were actually 15 different cities because some of them went out of business.
And so there's some Michigan cities in here.
There was the Paddle Creek Bells, the Kalamazoo Lassies.
There was a team in Muskegon.
Milwaukee had a team called the Hicks, and then they moved to Grand Rapids, but they're all the Midwest teams.
The most successful team was the Rockford Peaches.
They won the championship four times and run her up three times.
In the 1992 movie, a league of their own starred Tom Hanks.
He played, it was a fictional movie based on the league, but the kind of interesting,
They were not permitted to have short hair.
They could not smoke or drink in public places.
They were not allowed to wear pants.
They were required to wear lipstick at all times.
And during the spring train, they required to take evening classes at the Helena Rubenstein Charm School.
And then each girl received a healthy kit.
an instruction, a beauty kit, and then how to use it.
So it's kind of a fascinating story.
There's a great, fascinating display at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooper's Tower.
It has their uniforms and the whole story there.
So whenever there, a few weeks ago, it was kind of fun to read the story.
And since I'm back and take a look at the movie, kind of a fun one to see now that you know somebody hits the obituary.
Another amazing
history for our audience today
when you go back to some of those uh... the original uh... movie was uh... again i want to find me to smoothies and movies i ever seen tom hanks was phenomenal actually that exactly build up firstly you mentioned in the forties how long did that last what was the longevity of it up top
here it it was founded in the fifth forty three and the last it was nineteen fifty four
So a little less, 12 years basically, or 11 years.
In NBA the popular squad, most of the, all of your teams are in the Midwest here, so it's a really fascinating story.
In relative, we speak in those, since that league folded, there's been nothing in between the then and what we have going on now, correct, as far as the league?
There were a few others, a couple have tried it for a year, but no standing power.
So it's going to be interesting to see this experiment.
They've already been talking even before just a few weekends into the series.
You can start to see them thinking, well, maybe if we expand it, you could almost, yes, because as the Canadians involved, there's going to be a couple franchises in Canada.
Within a couple of years, they may be playing games at their home fields rather than just in the one location.
But they're going to try it out and see how it goes.
But there seem to be quite a bit of interest in the fields when they did last year.
And there may be an itch for it, depending on how things go over in a couple of years of experimenting here.
And this league, the Noon Bay
All the teams are owned by one major owner, right?
Yes, they're owned by kind of a group.
There's Justin Siegel and Keith Stein as the major owners, and they're not going to get paid much.
The players, the team salary is less than $100,000.
The team provides accommodations and meals for their weekends, and they cover the travel expenses.
And if there's any revenues, the players share them.
So you can imagine it's almost like a semi-pro league.
They'd better have some other job.
But there seems to be quite a bit of interest in the first couple of weekends anyways.
And it may build.
And so we'll see what happens to me, but kind of an exciting to ties back to almost 70 years ago, 75 years ago, only 80 years ago, I guess.
The interest in the C2 is they got the Athletic United Fast Pitch League, which I love that league.
And I think that's going to gravitate more into hardball league because the popularity of fast women's fast pitch at the NCAA level.
The interest in the C of both those two can coexist, be honest with you.
Exactly right, Jimmy.
The NCAA softball tournament is just outstanding and generally a lot of interest.
But we'll see what happens.
You know, they may attract some of the players out of that.
They've played in CA softball, and that's probably some of those are playing in this league, in the baseball league.
Well, Bill, great info as usual.
We're going to reset here, and I'll keep you posted what we've got going forward here.
But again, Bill, great insight, and thanks for sharing that neat information.
on the ins and outs of how a professional woman's baseball and how fast pitch got started, and how they're trying to get after ground.
It's been fun again, Bill.
Oh, good.
Have a great week, Jimmy.
OK, Bill, we'll talk you later in house.
Professor Mr. Bill Sproul peeking aside the grapevine.
We'll be back Thursday right here on MIX 93.
We're going to send it back to Sam in the morning.
Thanks, Sam.