The topic of women and baseball is one frequently mentioned on this blog; just recently we posted about the Indiana teenager whose lawsuit integrated high school baseball in her state. There's also been much buzz lately about the International Baseball Federation's campaign to make women's baseball an Olympic sport (see, e.g., here, here, and here). It seems like the perfect time to plug Jennifer Ring's Stolen Baseball: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball (University of Illinois Press, 2009). From Stolen Bases, I learned that contrary to popular mythology, baseball was not invented in Cooperstown by Civil War hero Abner Doubleday. Rather, it evolved from the British sport of rounders, which was played by males and females alike. But in the early 1900s, the efforts of Albert Spalding -- of sporting goods fame -- to promote baseball as the "national passtime" positioned the sport as a means of masculinization and colonialism. ("He articulated a mission for Ame

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