The ladies had won it. With pen and pad they’d done it — they’re talkin’ baseball.
Greenpoint author Caryn Rose will celebrate the release of her novel “A Whole New Ballgame” with an all-female talk on all things baseball at Word bookstore on March 12.
Author Joan Walsh (“Splash Hit! Pac Bell Park and the San Francisco Giants”), and bloggers Taryn Cooper (A Gal for All Seasons), Amanda Rykoff (Awful Announcing), and Diane Firstman (Value Over Replacement Grit) will chow down on peanuts and Cracker Jack while joining Rose in a discussion titled “You Sure Know A Lot About Baseball For A Girl” — a name that pokes fun at the misconception that women are sports-illiterate, Rose said.
“That’s a thing that women who write about sports are still hearing today,” said Rose, who has been writing about America’s pastime on her site MetsGrrl.com for nearly a decade. “It is a silly thing, but we still hear it.”
Rose said she was not raised as a baseball fanatic, but she fell love with the Mets while dating a fan, and subsequently began blogging about her new passion.
“I knew saying ‘You can’t go to baseball games’ was like saying ‘You have to change the color of your eyes,’ so I started going to games with him,” she said.
Even in the year 2014, the female sports-writing specialists say they still have to deal with backlash from misogynistic readers — hence the idea behind the Word event.
“They’re almost floored that a female could rattle off stats and not just enjoy a sport for the visuals,” Taryn Cooper said.
To counterbalance working in such a male-dominated field, Cooper said she seeks out fellow female sports writers. She befriended Rose in 2007, and the pair started going on road trips to baseball games together.
These trips provided some of the inspiration for Rose’s new novel, which follows a girl traveling cross-country to visit America’s great baseball stadiums, while trying to forget about her crumbling personal and professional lives.
“The whole notion of her book is something that hits home with me as somebody who went through relationship issues and immersed herself in baseball as a form of escapism,” said Cooper.
“You Sure Know A Lot About Baseball For A Girl” at Word Bookstore [126 Franklin St. between Noble and Milton streets, (718) 383–0096, www.wordbrooklyn.com] Mar. 12 at 7 pm. Free.
