Historic high school game to feature two female starting pitchers

posted by Pretty Tough
Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 11:22am EST

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This Saturday, March 5, at Birmingham High in Los Angeles, a historic varsity baseball game is scheduled to take place. That’s the day one of baseball’s long-standing gender barriers will be broken and the two starting pitchers will be female.

Birmingham Coach Matt Mowry confirms that he plans to start senior Marti Sementelli on the mound against Ghazaleh Sailors of Santa Barbara San Marcos Royals in an 11 a.m. game that should bring out lots of TV cameras.

I’ve watched Marti play since she was little girl on tee ball and Little League teams at the local park. When most girls transitioned to softball or stopped playing entirely, Marti never wavered from her love of baseball. Her dad, Gary, a former high school and American Legion player, has nurtured her love of the sport from the time she was a toddler.

Marti (named after Pedro Martinez) was a phenom from an early age. At 5, she outplayed the 7 and 8-year-old boys in the coach-pitch league. At age 7, she joined the Sherman Oaks Little League. Marti struck out nine in her first game and fanned 100 during her first season. At age 14, she posted a 14-0 record in Sherman Oaks’ junior division.

As a varsity pitcher, Marti throws a slider, a changeup, a two-seam and four-seam fastball and two different kinds of palm balls. What she lacks in velocity she makes up for with precise control and a lot of movement.

At age 15, Marti was the youngest member of Team USA during the 2008 Women’s Baseball World Cup in Japan. The team was filled with women in their 20s, 30s and even 40s, but Marti was named the best pitcher in the tournament, posting two wins, five strikeouts and a 1.50 ERA – giving up just two runs in 12 innings. She was on the mound when the team defeated Australia for the bronze medal.

The opposing pitcher, Ghazaleh Sailors, is a teammate of Marti’s on Team USA.

If you’re in the LA area, please come and support history. Pretty Tough will be there – so if you can’t make it, check back for pictures and results.

~js

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Historic high school game to feature two female starting pitchers

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