A ball snapped in a leather glove as the sun rose higher over Capitol Hill. The hits weren’t coming easily that morning.
“Wait for your pitch,” Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., yelled from the dugout.
A few minutes later, Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., stepped up to the plate and drove one into center field, drawing cheers from both Republicans and Democrats. Another practice was complete.
Players say they’re ready for this year’s Congressional Women’s Softball Game, which raises money for a breast cancer charity. The annual event will go on as planned Wednesday — even though much of Congress won’t be around.
When Speaker Mike Johnson cut short the House schedule this month, it gave members more time to campaign at home ahead of the midterms. But it also left some on the softball team feeling slighted, as they stick around for the game while their colleagues leave town.
“I think it’s bullshit. And I think if it was the Congressional Baseball Game, they would never do that,” Cammack said.
The women of Congress have a lot to be mad about these days.
They watched as a new wave of sexual misconduct allegations swept over the Hill this spring, prompting two male colleagues to resign. A pair of congresswomen — Cammack and Teresa Leger Fernández, D-N.M. — were tapped to lead a push to change how the House deals with sexual misconduct.
Now that overhaul effort is stalled until after the midterms, thanks in part to the House schedule change. “We’ve lost so much time on the legislative front. That’s been really frustrating,” Cammack said.
Cammack leads the Republican Women’s Caucus, while Leger Fernández leads the Democratic Women’s Caucus. Both have played on the bipartisan softball team for the last few years, facing off against members of the press to raise money for Young Survival Coalition, which supports people under 40 who have been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I am a breast cancer survivor, so I show up as, ‘I’m a breast cancer survivor, of course I want to show up at the softball game.’ But she is actually a real ball player,” Leger Fernández said of her counterpart.
While the New Mexico Democrat said some personal obligations will keep her from playing in this year’s game as she originally intended to, she cited softball as one thing that makes it easier to work across the aisle.
“That’s a key thing — that we need to know each other outside of the floor,” Leger Fernández said earlier this summer.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who founded the game in 2009 after announcing her own battle with breast cancer, said this is by design.
“This is a field in which we are women and friends, and we talk about our families and life at home. Politics doesn’t really come up on the softball field, and we really intentionally keep it that way,” she said.
But some say it’s been hard to shake the background noise.
“This is a really challenging time. I don’t think it’s ever been an easy time to be a woman in Congress, but this year, not just with the misconduct, the sexual harassment, the abuse allegations, certainly the way that the Epstein survivors have been treated — it’s very hard,” Balint said. “And when you see that with some of the candidates running right now, who are openly misogynistic and say horrible things about women, and yet somehow that’s OK?”
In an environment like that, leaving political differences behind isn’t so simple, she said.
“I don’t think it will come as a surprise that there are a number of us on the softball team who are of the LGBTQ community, and we’ve had conversations over the last couple years about what does it feel like for us to come out, no pun intended, to come out to practice?” Balint said. “But I love my teammates. I’m gonna keep showing up. But yeah, I’m not gonna lie and say that it’s comfortable all the time.”
At Tuesday’s early morning practice, Balint warmed up by playing catch with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., a longtime fixture of the game and the only senator on the roster this year. And when Rep. Julie Fedorchak, R-N.D., had a good at-bat, she cheered loudly from the dugout.
Everyone laughed about the need for more practice, as they hope for a long-shot win on Wednesday at Audi Field against the press corps team, known as the Bad News Babes.
“We looked a little like the Bad News Bears this morning,” Balint said.
The journalists have won 10 of the last 15 games over the years. But the lawmakers point to other wins on the sidelines.
“I’ve passed many a law with a Republican colleague that I would not have met if I didn’t play softball and they weren’t my teammate,” Wasserman Schultz said.
