After 41 Shots In The Dark, Silver Bullets Hit 6Th Victim

There are two sides to every invasion of our traditional gender preserves or at least two we shared Saturday at the old ballyard with America’s Role Benders, the Colorado Silver Bullets.

Side one: the in-your-face side.

With the sun setting on their Summer of Love of the Game Tour, the Bullets - the Silvers? - braked at Seafirst Stadium for another brief interlude with a team of mostly 30-and-over males with wildly disparate baseball pedigrees, generously billed as the Spokane All-Stars. Standing on second with his team already ahead 2-0, Jim Fitzgerald breaks for third as the 2-2 pitch is delivered to Dave Cohen. Bullets catcher Elizabeth Burnham draws up to her full height of 5-foot7 to gun a throw to third, only to run into Cohen standing impassively in the batter’s box. She checks her throw and instead body checks a startled Cohen to the ground.

Side two: the pinch-me side.

The Bullets have won for only the sixth time in 41 tries this summer, outlasting the Stars 6-5 in five innings. The players are hurriedly collecting their gear to make an evening plane to Seattle. Winning pitcher Lee Anne Ketcham is stuffing ice packs inside her uniform when she is handed a pocket camera. Teammates Shannan Mitchem and Pam Schaffrath want a snapshot of themselves in the Seafirst dugout - presumably the 41st of a series.

That’s right, the Bullets won. Is it any wonder our town’s slipped to 218th on the best-places list?

Only kidding. Shame is stupid. If anything, being a victim of the Bullets can be a reason to feel good, if only for resisting the temptation to load the dice.

“We’ve played against some teams we had no business playing against,” reported Bullets manager Phil Niekro, who at this rate will need to manage 53 years to equal the 318 wins he collected as a majorleague pitcher. “We’re supposed to be playing the 30-and-overs, but someone always seems to figure they’d better make sure they don’t lose. You get some 23-, 24-year-old guy who’s all gung-ho and trying to get signed and thinks there’s 10 scouts in the stands.

“And all of a sudden, we’re done. We can’t compete with that.”

Therein lies the conundrum of the Silver Bullets: they’re testing the limits of what they can do, knowing all too well what they can’t do.

Unable to even score against the minor-league teams they’d scheduled early on, they stepped down in class to semipros and senior leaguers. Still, the shutouts mount 18 so far. The team batting average is .137. So the first season of the Silver Bullets long since stopped being about wins and losses even when they do win.

“When you lose the game but play good and there’s 500 or 600 people still hanging around, that’s what means something to me,” said Michele McAnany, a 30-year-old gym teacher who plays second base. “Then a little girl will come up and say, `I play second base, too,’ or a parent will say how they weren’t sure they wanted their daughter to play baseball and now they want her to. That just gives me the willies, goose bumps. It really does.”

The marketeers at Coors Light have done it up major league for their expansion team. The players will make $20,000 each for their six-month investments, and with Niekro and his brother Joe on the coaching staff “it’s never going to be a sideshow,” as McAnany put it.

“The respect they deserve,” she said, “we get.”

And yet it’s reasonable to question whether the Bullets are a sideshow, just off the media midway made popular by Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, who settled absolutely nothing two decades ago but did it loudly. Coors’ media savvy created opportunities for 20 women - not for hundreds of others who could have benefited by the creation of women’s leagues at the local level, where daughters could emulate Mom instead of a stranger who doesn’t even stay the night.

“There are women playing women, someplace,” said Niekro - unaware that such a league exists in Seattle, where he’s spent the week. “But I think what people have been wondering - I’ve been wondering - is whether women can compete against men, head to head, with no favors and no gimmes.”

No gimme, that is, except time.

“If the women in this country had as much time to play and learn the game as the men - from tee leagues on up, high school, Legion, college, the minors - you could find some pretty good baseball players,” Niekro said. “The fact is, we don’t have the 20 best - just the 20 best we found.”

He’ll have to look far to find a better ace for his pitching staff than Ketcham, who has five of the Bullets’ six victories and mechanics that betray a baseball career that dates back to the age of 8. She pitched for her high school baseball varsity in Alabama, winning 12 games in two years for a team that won the 6-A - big schools - regionals both seasons.

“Well, she got me out three times so she’s a major leaguer, right?” joked Don Santos, a onetime city home run champ at Shadle Park whose baseball talents got him as high as Double-A ball. “But I’d say she’s the equivalent of an NAIA pitcher. She had a good little curveball and mixed things up well.

“They can definitely play.”

Ventured McAnany, “I don’t know if a female team could beat an all-male team consistently, but we have some players who could be slotted into minor league organizations now if given the opportunity.”

That’s trying to stretch a single into a triple, but no matter. The Silver Bullets are still learning the fundamentals.