August 28, 2014, St. Paul, Minnesota. Tonight the Saints play their last game ever at Midway Stadium. Next season the club is moving to a trendy new ballpark in the Lowertown area of St. Paul. I was to throw batting practice and play catch with the Saints co-owner, Bill Murray, before being introduced to the crowd, but plane and weather delays rained out the plan. The game is about to begin as the taxi drops me off at the ballpark, right in front of the mural of Twig and me. My heart rises—I’m home. I drop my bags in Connie Rudolph’s office—she flashes me a thumbs up—continue through the front office and under the stadium behind home plate, where the field equipment is kept and where Mike’s pig hangs out. This year’s ball pig is named Stephen Colboar, after the comedian Stephen Colbert.
I enter the field. The game is a sell-out, with people sitting on the outfield warning track. Besides Connie, the Saints’ longtime groundskeeper who was honored at last night’s game, they’re all here—Mike Veeck and Bill Murray, and Annie Huidekoper, now the Saints’ vice president. Dave Stevens, the guy with no legs who was with the club the year before I came, is coaching first base. It’s a true Mike Veeck homecoming. As I start to jog over to the area behind home plate, a guy grabs my arm, “Ila!”
I look up but don’t recognize the face. “Ila,” he repeats, “I’m really happy to see you. You’ve always been a pro in my book.”
Then I realize it’s Marty Scott, my old manager. He has lost a lot of weight and looks fantastic. Marty now works as vice president of player development for the Florida Marlins. He says that he is proud of me, and that feels good. We talk about my time with the Saints and his work with the Marlins, and exchange phone numbers.
Annie comes over to say that Bill Murray wants to say hello. I make my way to where Bill is talking to Minnesota’s junior U.S. senator, Al Franken. Bill turns, gives me a big smile, and says, “Hello, Ila, good to see you again. Glad you made it.”
He introduces me to Senator Franken and explains to him about my career. We talk baseball and about my work as a firefighter. I always found Bill easy to talk with. After ten minutes or so, I ask if I can take a “selfie” with him, and he says, “Sure.”
I spot Mike Veeck and catch up with him. His son, William “Night Train” Veeck, works in group sales for the Chicago White Sox, the club his grandfather once owned and where Mike once worked. Rebecca, his sweet daughter who mourned my trade to Duluth, is in ill health and lives at home under her parents’ care. Mike asks how this book is going and will it be a movie—questions that call up my old baseball uncertainties, given that the book proposal has yet to sell and no film producers have come calling.
Annie comes over and says, “Okay, it’s your time.”
Mike and I shake hands, and I thank him for all the support he gave me through the years. Annie sends me to stand on top of the third-base dugout, where I wave to the fans and sign autographs. People still remember.
“When Ila finally arrived,” Annie later recalled, “I kept trying to enjoy the moment. I thanked her for coming and gave her a big hug. I finessed the schedule and brought her to the grandstand, where she had a really cool moment. She was going to speak, but the fans’ cheers drowned her out. We had asked Ila for an item for the Saints’ time capsule, which would be buried for fifty years at our new park in downtown St. Paul. She handed me her SSK glove from 1997. I knew it was something special, and thought, No way is this going to be buried in the ground for fifty years. It’s going into the glass case of memorabilia in our front office.
The rain stops, and we get the ball game in. Afterward I stand at home plate with Connie, the players, Mike, and Bill while we watch the fireworks. I continue to sign autographs. It’s been great to return to Midway, where so much is the same. I used to shower and change in the extra umpires room—some still call it Ila’s room. I linger as long as I can, taking it all in.
Later, Annie Huidekoper asks how I am doing. It’s 2014 and at last I can talk honestly about my life, myself. She tells me that before I joined the Saints in 1997, Mike Veeck had sort of pushed her out of the closet. In 1993 Annie left town to take part in the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. After she returned, she was in a front-office meeting when, as she recalled, “[Mike] took a deep breath and said with a big grin, ‘So, Annie, how was the March on Washington?’”
I had always sensed that Mike would’ve been fine with my being gay. In fact, I think he probably would have found a way to lighten up my heart about the issue After all, lots of clubs sponsor bobblehead nights, but only Veeck would think to host a Larry Craig Bobblefoot Night in response to the conservative Republican Senator Craig’s arrest in June 2007 for allegedly soliciting sex with an undercover policeman in a bathroom at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport. But of course, it was not Mike I had worried about; it was the responses from my coaches and teammates. I still wonder whether I could have lasted in baseball had I told the truth of my sexual orientation. I doubt it. But likely I would have pitched more consistently without that burden.
So I tell Annie that I am single and my life is good, but that I would like to find a lifetime partner. Annie has been with her partner for twenty-five years, and I envy her that. As we talk, I realize that throughout my life there have been women like Annie—out-of-the-closet, productive, respected women—but I had been too scared to identify with them or, heaven forbid, to reach out to them. If you’re not living true to yourself, people who are can put you off. So I stayed aloof.
After the last game at Midway, Connie Rudolph and I traveled to the Wisconsin IRONMAN race in Madison. There it was: Madison, another fondly remembered place. During the race we ran right past my old apartment building on Milton Street and inside the football field at Camp Randall Stadium. Because the hotels were pricey, we camped out in Connie’s motor home. My goal was to finish the IRONMAN, and I did.
After the competition was over, we camped out a couple days more and talked. I gave Connie an update on my life. Shannon’s death had sent me back to living like an island, as I had done for most of my life, except during those three magical years with her. But a couple of years ago, my family told me that it was time to start getting out. After reeducating Mom again about why I would not be dating guys—she still prayed for a miracle—I went online and, for the first time, seriously surveyed the dating scene. I found a woman I liked, and we dated for a couple of years until she decided to return to her home in the Midwest. It felt so good to go out in public with my girlfriend—to be honest with the world about who I was.
I wish that being honest about these things always had a happy ending. But then I remember Mike Penner, the Los Angeles Times sportswriter whose work I admired during my college years. In April 2007 Penner published the most honest writing of his life in the Times: “Old Mike, New Christine” began like this: “I am a transsexual sportswriter. It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears, and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words.”
Christine had the support of her editor, Randy Harvey; Christina Kahrl, the cofounder of Baseball Prospectus, the game’s stats bible, who had successfully transitioned from male to female in 2003; and, as it turned out, a substantial number of the column’s readers. But as Christine’s celebrity grew so did others’ expectations of her to be an activist for transgender people. In the end she was unable to maintain her identity as a woman and returned to being Mike. Along the way, he got badly lost. The day after Thanksgiving 2009, Mike Penner took his life. It made me wish I could’ve talked with him honestly back in college. I hope for a time when people like Mike Penner have the freedom to live as they were created, in peace.
But even a few years ago this sort of honesty had yet to seep into all parts of my life. When I began to write about falling in love for the first time for this book, I titled the section “Shane.” After all, I had waited a long time to tell my story and just couldn’t see my way clear to telling an inspirational story for baseball-loving girls without lying about my sexual orientation, as I had to my coaches, managers, and teammates for all those years. Coming out as gay would destroy the book’s chances, I feared. I also wanted this book to be about baseball, not about being gay. So I chose a man’s name, “Shane,” as code for “Shannon.” Then I woke up. Screw it, I thought. To truly honor Shannon, you have to tell the full truth. You can’t be honest about everything else and not this, since she was a huge part of your life.
It felt so good to restore Shannon to her rightful place that I came out to the Gilbert Fire Department. The news that I was gay made barely a ripple. Were times changing or just me? Only a couple of people had a problem with it, one a man who attended the conservative Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church in south Phoenix and came across as being all about “truth” though not so much about “grace.” A year or so after I came out, one of my captains thanked me. He told me that his sixteen-year-old daughter had just told him she was gay. He said he never would have known how to handle it if I hadn’t told him my story.
So maybe the inspirational book that I, masked as the all-American straight girl, had always wanted to write still can inspire, though in a different, more honest way. I can only say that this is who I am now: a Christian who loves the Lord with all her being and happens to be gay. My faith is not about religion; it’s about a personal relationship with Jesus, who loves and accepts me as I am. I still don’t attend church. As a Presbyterian pastor named Mark Davis said, “There’s a process where people have to forgive the church before they can return to it.”
I’m still working on that.
Speaking of forgiveness, in 2011 Dad and I began to repair our relationship. I told him it was time he started to repay the money he took from the SSK contract. “I don’t care if its fifteen dollars a month, but it has to be something,” I said. “You can’t owe me a lot of money and not pay it but then go on vacations all over the world.”
Dad did send money. He would occasionally send a fifty- or hundred-dollar check from his home in Napa, where he lives with his fiancée, but it was to pay off the $2,500 in student debt I still had. My $25,000 share of the SSK money has not been repaid.
Dad has always included my girlfriends in the holiday cards he sends. Maybe he has faced up to his own past and is growing more compassionate. I don’t know for sure, because we don’t talk about it. Through family members, I’ve heard that he wonders whether I would have turned out straight if he had not been so strict. Dad and I text occasionally and once a year meet up for a round of golf. I am grateful for the work ethic he instilled in me, the way he taught me to analyze situations, his encouragement to go after anything I wanted to. Never once did he shy me away from anything because I was a girl. That made it possible for me to do what I did both in baseball and in firefighting.
Mom’s life has been financially hard since the divorce in 2004. She, too, has struggled with forgiveness. She lives now in the Phoenix area with Leah and her family. Mom and I often travel the I-10 freeway to visit my brother Randall and his wife Emma in Irvine, California. On the drive back, we stop at mile marker 27.2. My brother Phillip and his family now have a home in Napa, California, where he keeps Dad’s old home plate and the tire swing from our house on Olive Branch Drive.
When I was young I saw baseball as a sort of endless season—easy to do in a sunny place like Southern California. I thought it would go on forever, though it never does. It’s the athlete’s lament. The game itself may be timeless, but the faces of the people on the field inevitably change.
Mike Moschetti, my talented Little League teammate who always loved football more than baseball, is now the head football coach at La Mirada High School . . . Rolland Esslinger, my junior high coach, serves as the athletic director at Whittier Christian High School . . . Charlie Phillips, who gave me a college scholarship, teaches pitching and hitting at Lifeletics and works as pitching coach for a travel team called the OC Sun Devils . . . Pat Guillen, Southern California College’s sports information director, is now the athletic director at the University of Hawaii. He says that he still has the ball I threw for my first pitch at Southern California College . . . Barry Moss works as a sports agent specializing in baseball operations for Group Management . . . Dave Glick works as a pitching coach in Long Beach, California . . . I’m glad that these people, who meant so much to me, have found ways to stay connected to sports and work with young athletes. I recently worked again at the World Children’s Baseball Fair (WCBF) and remembered all over again how much I love teaching kids. No surprise then that in my spare time I coach young pitchers. Coincidentally they are all males—no females. I throw batting practice to some of the high school players to give them some tips on their swings and serve as catcher for the pitchers. I work on developing arm strength with the college players.
It’s with the kids out there in mind that I argue that the institutions of baseball, from Little League and other youth leagues, and collegiate baseball, to Organized Baseball, must welcome more girls and women into the game. The attention paid to Little League pitcher Mo’ne Davis in 2014 was encouraging—though it’s interesting that Mo’ne doesn’t seem to have the deep need for baseball that I did; she says she’s headed toward basketball, which offers the possibility of a college scholarship and a professional career. That’s a loss for baseball, where progress for women historically has been glacially slow and too often just a footnote to the “real” game—all the women who played for an inning or a game before leaving the field of play. That continues to be the case. On May 29, 2016, the Bridgeport Bluefish of the Atlantic League invited Jennie Finch—my softball playing neighbor in La Mirada—to serve as guest manager. Jennie did well, strategizing a neat 3–1 win over the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs, but once again, it was a one-time shot, another footnote in the history of women in baseball.
If there is hope for women to make headway into Organized Baseball, it will come about because of women like Justine Siegal. I first became aware of Justine when she was playing women’s baseball against my sister’s team in San Diego late in the 1990s. I got to know her better in 2011 when we served as coaches for the WCBF in Taiwan. I found out she dedicated the past two decades to the cause of girls’ and women’s baseball. Siegal is the founder and director of Baseball for All, which strives to bridge the gap between the approximately one hundred thousand girls who play youth baseball and the one thousand girls who play at the high school level. Her nonprofit organization teaches girls to play baseball, coach, and umpire while educating the media and the public that girls indeed play this game. In September of 2015, the Oakland A’s announced that they had hired Siegal as MLB’s first ever female coach. (A check with the Hall of Fame Library revealed no data on any earlier women who might have done this.) So Siegal got a toehold in Organized Baseball’s coaching fraternity: a two-week gig as guest instructor in the Arizona instructional league in Mesa, Arizona. While it’s gratifying to see Siegal get this opportunity, like her, I want more. Girls, and the women they grow up to be, deserve the freedom to seek a continuing presence on the field. It’s my hope that the story told here encourages the institutions of baseball at all levels to open the door wider to those of us who want into the game—and that more women will walk through that door. So I was glad to hear that the Sonoma Stompers signed two women, pitcher Stacy Piagno and outfielder Kelsie Whitmore, to their team in July 2016. (It was Justine Siegal who recommended Whitmore to the Stompers, having known her as a Baseball for All player and coach). The Stompers are part of the Pacific Association, an independent league. Oh that Organized Baseball would take such a step.
Yet there is still much work to be done and many minds to transform. In 2012 the priests (members of the very conservative Society of Pope Pius X) who run Our Lady of Sorrows Academy decided to forfeit a state championship baseball game rather than let the school’s team compete against an opponent whose second baseman, Paige Sultzbach, was female. The school explained: “Teaching our boys to treat ladies with deference, we choose not to place them in an athletic competition where proper boundaries can only be respected with difficulty. . . . Our school aims to instill in our boys a profound respect for women and girls.”
Wow! Does the school’s statement mean that any woman in a powerful or nontraditional position is going to make a man treat his wife or girlfriend with less respect? Please! Not one time at Whittier Christian High School did anyone suggest that my playing negatively affected the way guys would treat women down the road. If anything, it opened their eyes to the idea that women can play, too.
I had always wondered whether the magic I had with Shannon could happen again. For the past several years, I had known a friend of a friend named Jenni Westphal. In 2014 I took a chance and asked Jenni out on a date. She said yes. I was smitten right off the bat. Jenni is athletic, smart, and beautiful, and the funniest person I have ever met. Her smile and eyes mesmerized me. Even so, we took it slow. I came to find out that while I was playing for Madison in 1998, she was finishing up her degree in wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She had played basketball there and was also a standout athlete in track and field. We even lived a block away from each other.
Jenni lived in Portland, Oregon, where she worked as a senior footwear analyst for Nike. I racked up many airline miles flying to see her. The forests and mountains of the Northwest, its changing seasons, the Pacific Ocean, the year-round outdoor sports, the wineries, its diverse culture, and its political moderation drew me. Every day I spent there felt like a vacation. I had found my kind of people, a whole lot of them. I had also found in Jenni the woman I wanted to share my life with. Despite my dream job at the Gilbert Fire Department, I decided to move to Portland to be with her.
In July 2015 the Cornelius Fire Department hired me as a firefighter and paramedic. As in Gilbert, I landed with a great department. So here I am in Oregon in a new job, far from family and friends, who I miss dearly. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been running all of my life—to get to first base, to pitch in the game I love, to make it as a firefighter, to find love. As Ron Shelton, who played minor league baseball before writing the baseball movie Bull Durham, put it, “Even when you’re home, you’re on the road.”
I know what he means. After looking for love and baseball, though not always in that order, since I first planted my foot on Dad’s home plate in our front yard, I believe I have landed safe at home. On June 4, 2016, Jenni and I married. We gathered with friends on a ridge above Cape Lookout State Park on the Oregon coast. Before Bridget Schwarting, who served as minister, and with Jenni’s identical twin Janet Westphal and Olivia Dukes as witnesses, we said our marriage vows. Being outdoor enthusiasts, we didn’t want a traditional wedding, so I guess you could say that we did not so much step into our new life together as hike in.
Fully committed to the most important person in my life, I have begun to rethink my old commitment to another love, baseball. A couple of years ago I played a sandlot game and hit two home runs, a triple, and a double, and turned two double plays—as a left-handed shortstop. I came off the field as excited as a kid, remembering all over again how much I love being on the diamond. My career may have ended in 2000, but I’ve never really let go of the game. I wanted to share that excitement with Jenni.
There’s a magical place in New York’s Greenwich Village called the Bergino Baseball Clubhouse, filled with baseball art, memorabilia, and gift items. It’s owned by Jay Goldberg. Prominent on the wall is a large work of art—a cherry-sprigged tablecloth with a quotation on it—that was created by Jay’s now-deceased business partner, Tony Palladino. It is not for sale. Years ago, as Goldberg tells it, Tony was walking down a street in New York when he passed a boy, about eight years old, with his mother. He overheard the boy say a few words that stayed in Tony’s memory. “Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too.”
Later Tony came across an old tablecloth with cherries on it. “That’s my canvas,’ Tony said. “And that eight-year-old’s comment is my quote.”
Tony and Jay had no idea who the boy was, of course, but felt he needed a name. Somehow they settled on “Gregg,” which you will find in the bottom corner of Tony’s art, along with Gregg’s quote.
“Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good, too.” These words of an eight-year-old pretty much sum up the message of this book. So I want to show Jenni the Bergino Baseball Clubhouse—and introduce her to other great baseball people and places in our country, like the Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, Mike Veeck and the St. Paul Saints, and a ballgame at Wrigley Field in Chicago. And I want to meet all the Greggs out there—girls and boys—and teach them about the best game ever.