The ultra-conservative attempt to push women out of the public sphere has a new frontier: the Arizona Charter Athletic Association. Our Lady of Sorrows, a school run by a breakaway Catholic sect, has forfeited the league’s high school baseball championship rather than put their team up against a squad that includes a girl named Paige Sultzbach—a team they already played and lost to twice during the regular season.

Our Lady of Sorrows gave a statement to ESPN explaining that the school bans co-ed sports and will not play a co-ed team because “proper boundaries can only be respected with difficulty” under those circumstances. Despite the fact that it takes a lot of imagination to imagine boys and girls getting frisky on the basepaths or across vast swaths of outfield in full view of the public, Sultzbach and her team have been more considerate of Our Lady of Sorrows’ views than they have been of her rights to participate in sports programs under Title IX:

From early on, Paige tried to blend in, her mother said. When the coach referred to the kids as “guys and gals,” Paige spoke up and said that they all wear the same uniform, so the coach should just call them all guys.

Her teammates have stood up for her.

During Mesa Prep’s two previous games with Our Lady of Sorrows, Paige didn’t play out of respect for the opposing team’s beliefs, but that wasn’t going to be an option this time, Pamela said.

“We respected their school rule … but she took it hard,” Pamela said. “She didn’t like it and neither did her teammates. They went out and played the best they could because they wanted to prove a point.”

As depressing as this story is, it’s encouraging that Sultzbach’s teammates have supported her. The reason it’s important to let girls try out for their high school baseball teams, to have women in all arenas in public life, is not just because it’s nice for women. When 15-year-old girls play second base for championship teams, edit magazines and hold high office, sometimes men find that they like having women there. The more boys figure this out, and the more feminism becomes their cause too, the harder it will be for anyone go give credence to the idea that girls don’t belong on baseball fields or anywhere else in the public square.

I wrote about the news that a Jackie Robinson biopic was in the works last year, and expressed some concern that the movie had found its Branch Rickey—initially Robert Redford, now, apparently, Harrison Ford—before its Jackie Robinson, who rightfully should be at the center of the movie. But I am glad to hear that the movie is starting production, and that it’s supposed to reach theaters on April 12, 2013.

It seems like some of the other cast is shaping up nicely. Sensitive hardasses are Christopher Meloni’s wheelhouse, so he should be dandy as Leo Durocher, the manager who laid down a clear line in support of Robinson. T.R. Knight, who knows a thing or two himself about hostile workplaces and coworker solidarity, will play Ralph Branca, the first Dodger player who stood with Robinson in public. And Nicole Beharie, who was just smashing as Michael Fassbender’s coworker and potential girlfriend in Shame will play Rachel Isum, Robinson’s wife. I just am not that familiar with Chadwick Boseman, who is playing Robinson, and I do worry that the movie who will marginalize him in favor of exploring the reactions of white people to a key moment in Civil Rights history. But it is nice for a younger, less-famous black actor to get a shot at stardom through a big sports biopic.

The bridge is yours.

-The end of the Red Sox decade.

-Joss Whedon on The Avengers and creative frustration.

-More details on SyFy’s new series Defiance.

-Morgan Spurlock, having written a shallow love letter to Comic-Con, is moving on to male grooming.

-Great: more ammunition for the men and women can’t be friends lobby:

The bridge is yours.

-How Fenway Park reached its 100th birthday.

-Matt Zoller Seitz on Veep and June Thomas talks to Armando Iannucci.

-The worst heroes in pop culture.

-Earth’s most adorable Avengers.

-Glee may be a huge mess, but the voices of some of its stars are just undeniable:

The bridge is yours.

-May 6 will be my favorite day of 2012.

-If I was a star Japanese pitcher, looking at the available evidence, I’d probably want to stay in Japan.

-HBO GO may finally be available to all HBO subscribers.

-Time to start playing with Google Music.

-Really excited for the Star Trek sequel.

I am a Red Sox fan, but when it comes to feats like Mariano Rivera’s setting a new major league record for saves, attention must be paid. I actually saw Trevor Hoffman, the previous possessor of that milestone, throw a perfect inning in Baltimore, nine pitches, nine strikes, three outs. It was glorious. And the Thursday before Labor Day, I saw Rivera absolutely destroy my Red Sox on the mound. That he’s done all this with essentially one pitch that no one’s ever managed to figure out is a testament to the great and profound mysteries of baseball.

As someone who both grew up on Cape Cod League baseball and would love to see more women in the executive ranks of professional sports, I was particularly interested to read Jane Leavy’s Grantland piece on the women who run and act as general managers for the Cape League. Unfortunately, the piece spends a lot of time on the idea that if these older women worked in big-league ball, their priorities would be about things like banning hip-hop, migratory circles around the pitchers’ mound, and smokeless tobacco (I’d be fine with that last item), reaching perhaps the most interesting thing about the Cape League only towards the end:

Over the years Mrs. E has hosted give or take 160 players. In her view, parents are a clear and present danger to their offspring. One year looking over the roster for the coming season, she told her manager, “You’ve talked to the fathers of three sons and all three have the second coming of Christ living at home. How is that possible?”

She snorts. “We oughta hire only orphans to play the game.” If that proves impossible, Mrs. E suggests an all-out ban on living vicariously through your children. “After five years in The Show, they can look up their parents,” she said.

Jim Collins gets at this a bit in The Last Best League, his 2004 book where he follows a group of players through a Cape League season. But as much as the Cape League is a showcase and developing ground for major league talent, they also preach what’s essentially an anachronistic set of values. The players work side jobs. They stay in Cape Cod families’ extra bedrooms. They sign autographs and sell 50-50 raffle tickets during games. That kind of humility and service to fans isn’t a skill set that they’ll need in the majors, or at least not at the same intensity. Professional athletes who don’t want to be seen as terrible human beings at least make the motions at fan service and charity work, but the alignment and priorities are just totally different, and I’d love to see someone explore at greater length how long the Cape League’s character-building structure can last, and what kinds of pressures it’s come under at an age when stars are anointed at younger and younger ages, and made increasingly aware of other people’s perceptions of their own worth by their parents and agents.

In any case, for as long as it’s seen as a necessary stop on the road to the majors for elite college athletes, the Cape Cod League will remain a delight. Leavy’s totally correct to single out Orleans, though the Brewster home field is a wonderful combination of high school field and major-league promise.

Harold Meyerson’s upset by the prospect of a Chinese government-owned bank buying a stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers:

In their defense, the Chinese certainly have plenty of money to put into the team if they see fit. But if it was harder to root for the Dodgers under Murdoch than under the O’Malleys, and harder still under McCourt than under Murdoch, imagine rooting for a team owned by an authoritarian government that jails its citizens for organizing unions or worshiping the wrong gods, and depresses its currency to decimate what remains of American manufacturing.

Over the last 30 years, the financial whizzes who dominate this country have sold off our industry to China in return for some quick and huge returns, never mind that they were wiping out the American middle class in the process.

It’s too late to stop the sale of our industrial might, but the proposed sale of a team in which millions of fans have invested their dreams for decades may be the moment when Americans say they’ve had enough — that the claims of the many, which matter so little in the normal conduct of American big business, should at least this time outweigh the interests of the few (particularly when that “few” is really just Frank and Jamie).

I’m not sure I can get quite as irritated by this as Harold is. It’s not like the Dodgers would be the first team to be under corporate ownership, or even under foreign corporate ownership. The Seattle Mariners are owned by Nintendo of America, the Atlanta Braves are owned by Liberty Media, and the Toronto Blue Jays are owned by Rogers Media. Individual owners are entirely capable of doing noxious things. When Ted Turner owned the team, he tried to nickname a player with the same jersey number as one of his stations Channel as an effort in cross-promotion. In the National Football League, Dan Snyder is a poster child for both poor management of a franchise and general terrible person-ness. It’s a bit of an odd hierarchy that we prefer ownership by fabulously wealthy individual Americans to ownership by corporations to ownership by foreign corporations.

To paraphrase Annie Savoy, baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a big, big business. There have been long-standing efforts to spark interest in baseball in China after Mao’s ban on the sport expired, and in 2003, the Chinese government asked Major League Baseball for help—the league actually pays the coaches for China’s national baseball team. And if we’re going to treat baseball as a major symbol of American democracy (which may be a sentimental overstating of the case but none the less an appealing myth), maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to stoke Chinese interest and emotional in a quintessentially American game. Either way, the ownership of the Dodgers may be an important symbol, but it isn’t necessarily a substantive intrusion of corrupting capitalism and foreign influence into a game that’s already plenty impure.

-People who are developing daytime talk shows: Anderson Cooper and Kevin Smith.

-The importance of geography, economics, and legal regulation to arts criticism.

-Debunking the myths of the 1961 baseball season.

-Wesley Snipes could have been Geordi La Forge, and boy would that have been strange.

-Because more brass in pop music is always a good thing, this is my track of the day:

-This would be better news if it was an announcement of a show about how Sam Malone turned Cheers into a detective agency. Norm and Cliff as partners, Carla as the tough interrogator who prefers to work alone, Diane as a brilliant but annoying lab tech…

-USA Network execs discuss their show-design jujitsu.

-A first-hand account of what it was like to work at News of the World.

-How to fix the All-Star game.

-Table-flipping and weave-pulling for Jesus: