Breaking baseball”s barriers

MONTCLAIR, N.J. – In the annals of baseball, pioneers are rare.

Jackie Robinson broke the major-league color barrier. Curt Flood opened the door to free agency and its eye-popping salaries.

And Maria Pepe shattered the gender barrier in Little League.

For three games in 1972, Pepe – then a 12-year-old with a deep passion for the game and a mean fastball – donned the colors of the Hoboken Young Democrats and stepped out of the dugout in the New Jersey city, known as one of the alleged birthplaces of baseball.

Then it was over.

“I think the hardest part was when they took my uniform away,” Pepe said this week, her voice breaking as she recalled that dark moment in her Hoboken childhood. “I didn’t feel I was doing anything harmful.”

Her Little League career didn’t last long, but it propelled a “shy kid” into the national limelight and forever changed the role of girls in the national pastime.

“They would ask me, ‘Why do you want to play baseball?’ I still remember the headlines, ‘Maria Pepe kicked off team.’ “

Thirty-two years and 5 million female Little Leaguers later, Pepe told her pioneering story to a room full of Montclair, N.J., seventh-graders at the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center on the campus of Montclair State University.

“Part of my healing,” she said of one of her rare public appearances.

In 1972, Pepe’s friends told their Little League coach, Jimmy Farina, that there was a girl who could not only pitch, but hit and field, too.

“He said, ‘Why aren’t you signing up?’ ” she remembered. “Because I’m a girl,” was the response. “He said, ‘Can you play?’ “

Play she could, beating out a crop of boys and securing a spot as a starting pitcher and left fielder.

Soon, the letter came from Little League national headquarters, threatening to revoke the team’s charter for breaking the league’s ban on girls. After getting the news from the coach, Pepe turned in her uniform. The case attracted national attention and the New York Yankees honored her and her family with a special day at Yankee Stadium.

It also attracted some unwelcome attention.

She told of riding in an elevator in the 10-story Hoboken apartment building her family lived in when she was confronted by a “gentleman” with an opinion. “He was really yelling at me in the elevator, ‘You’re causing all this trouble in town,’ ” she recalled. “I’d never tell anybody.”

Soon, the National Organization for Women approached her family about championing her cause, and they agreed. It would take two years – by then Pepe was too old for Little League – but the courts sided with her.

“The institution of Little League is as American as the hot dog and apple pie,” Sylvia Pressler, then a hearing examiner for the state Division of Civil Rights, said in her ruling. “There is no reason that part of Americana should be withheld from girls.” The ruling was later upheld in Superior Court, and the dugout gates were opened.

Her brief Little League career was enough to make ESPN’s Top 10 list of the greatest moments in U.S. women’s sports history, coming in at No. 5.

Pepe said she’s come “full circle,” attending last year’s Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. There, she got to meet Creighton Hale, who as president of the Little League had appeared in court to oppose girls playing in the league.

“When he shook my hand, he said, ‘I just wanted to say my granddaughter plays.’ … It was very heartwarming.”

In Montclair, she was like a kid again, briefly getting to meet the museum’s namesake, Yankee great Yogi Berra, and snapping a picture of her “YD” uniform-clad self in the museum’s “Jersey Girls” display. “It brings back a lot of memories.”

She proudly notes she still has all her old baseball cards.

After Little League, Pepe went on to play basketball and softball in high school and varsity baseball at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City.

Today, at 45, she still calls Hoboken home and is an accountant at Hackensack University Medical Center. She occasionally plays in company games pitting managers against administrators, sometimes batting against hospital CEO John Ferguson.

“I did get a good hit off of him,” she said.

She doesn’t discount the coming of a day when there will be a professional women’s baseball league. “Hopefully, I’ll be young enough I can play.”

Pepe, who said she tends to be quiet and sentimental about her story, clearly enjoyed speaking with the seventh-graders from Montclair’s Renaissance School. She, too, opened the eyes of some of the girls who today are doing what she was forbidden to do.

“It inspires me to keep going on with baseball,” said Maggie Regan, a 13-year-old who plays second base with the Renaissance Raptors.