Is baseball’s glass ceiling ready to be broken?

For those of us who adore the game, baseball is glorious and intoxicating experience–a joy to play and behold.

Baseball has a way of creeping into our collective DNA, at least in places where it’s played, the U.S., Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean, Korea and Japan.

Watching the Little League World Series last week in Williamsport, Pennsylvania was an extraordinary experience: kids displaying the mannerisms–to a tee–of major league ballplayers as they competed with verve, skill and discipline.

But baseball has a gender problem, For far too long, half the human race has been excluded, unable to experience the inherent joy and lessons of the game.

I refer to the female half of our species.

Watching last week’s Little League World Series one might be forgiven for thinking that it all might be changing.

All of a sudden, baseball and girls were being used in the same sentence, and it was making a lot of news.

Americans and a healthy portion of Canadians couldn’t get enough of this year’s LLWS.

Games involving a team from Philadelphia drew record crowds and record television audiences.

The reason? A 13-year-old girl named Mo’ne Davis, a terrific athlete, was sensational on the pitcher’s mound.

Throw in a hot-shot named Emma March playing for Canada’s Vancouver-based team and you’ve got the makings of a media boomlet.

Newspapers in both the U.S and Canada afforded Davis and March, especially Davis an extraordinary amount of coverage.

So much, that one might be forgiven for thinking that baseball’s glass ceiling was on the verge of being shattered

It’s a pretty high–and hard–ceiling.

For example, out of the 9,000 players who have participated in the Little League World Series over the past 75 years, only 18 have been girls, and only twice before Davis and March have two girls ever competed at the same time.

Is something significant happening here? Or is it all just an old-fashioned one-off?

For some perspective, RCI spoke with Eric Laferrière

Mr. Laferrière, who holds a PhD in political science from McGill University, teaches humanities and philosophy at John Abbot College in Montreal.

One of his courses uses the structure and history of baseball to teach students about themselves and society.

He is also the girls’ baseball director for the Lac-St-Louis region, a collection of suburban towns west of Montreal. A team he coaches that includes his 12-year-old his daughter, Evelyn, just won the Quebec girls’ championship in it’s 12-and-under age group.

Listen