‘Genevieve Is Pitching Because She Can Get Outs’

At 17, Genevieve Beacom became the first woman to play in Australia’s top professional baseball league. She hopes her next stop is college ball in the United States.

One of the few times Genevieve Beacom can remember boys or men objecting to her playing baseball among them came when she was 11. She was a star pitcher, even at that age, and a boy on another team was so adamant about not facing her that he began to cry.

Was he fearful that he would be humiliated by a girl, or was he opposed to her very presence in the game?

“I think it was a bit of both,” Beacom said with a chuckle in a telephone interview from her home in Australia on Monday.