Squeeze Play

The time: 1972. The event: the World Series. The pitcher fires a curve ball that just clips the inside corner of the plate. "Steee-rike!" the umpire cries. The batter spins around, glares at the umpire and roars with measured fury: "That, madame, was a reprehensible call!"

Sheer fantasy? Not if Mrs. Bernice Gera has anything to say about it. A Queens, N.Y., housewife and a graduate of the Florida Baseball School for umpires, Mrs. Gera, 38, recently won a contract to serve as an umpire in the Class A New York-Pennsylvania League. She was scheduled to call her first game two weeks ago in Auburn, N.Y. Before she could don face mask and protector, though, she received a terse telegram from Phillip Piton, president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, informing her that her contract "has been disapproved and is invalid." Sighed Mrs. Gera: "I guess I just can't get to first base. It's a strikeout, but I will come up to the plate again. The game is definitely not over yet."

She has some influential fans rooting for her. Her attorney, Bronx Congressman Mario Biaggi, plans to press legal action. Her case has also caught the attention of New York Congressman Samuel Stratton, who said that Piton's abrogation of Mrs. Gera's contract "strikes me as a clear-cut violation of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex." The New York State Human Rights Division will hold a hearing on the dispute next month.

Rough Innings. Mrs. Gera's fascination with baseball goes back three decades. At the age of eight, in her tiny home town of Indiana, Pa., she discovered that she could outhit the boys on the block. "Since that time baseball has been my main interest," she says. When she was twelve she moved to Queens and later became a secretary. But she devoted long evening hours to teaching neighborhood kids the fundamentals of baseball and was soon putting on hitting exhibitions for charity with such big-league stars as Roger Maris and Sid Gordon.

In Queens, she met her future husband, Photographer Steven Gera. Their courtship had some rough innings. "While we were dating, he wanted to go dancing or to a movie, the normal things," says the 5-ft. 2-in. brunette. "I wouldn't go out unless we went to Rockaway Park where I could throw and hit baseballs at the concession stands." The couple finally made it to the altar, but marriage did not diminish Bernice's enthusiasm for baseball. "One night in 1967," she says, "I awoke at 2:30 a.m. with an idea. Why not umpire?" Why not? The next day her husband gave in, and Bernice enrolled in the Florida Baseball School. "The school didn't have any facilities for a woman," she says. "They tried to set up some temporary quarters, but they were so awful that I moved into a motel." Though she confesses that "those six weeks felt like 60 years," she graduated with high marks.

She managed to umpire one game at the sub-minors National Baseball Congress in Wichita, Kan. Since then, however, she has been given nothing but the runaround. New York-Penn's President Vincent McNamara rejected her first application because of the lack of adequate facilities for women and the language used by players. When she threatened to take her case to the Human Rights Division, McNamara relented--only to be overruled by Piton.

Bernice considers such tactics just another form of squeeze play. "The tracks have managed to supply female jockeys with the necessary facilities, and I am sure baseball could do the same," she says. "As for the language, well, it's no different from working in a factory. And after all, it's what you are that counts, not your job. When I work a game I am an umpire; the rest of the day I am a lady."

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