OVER the next three weeks, baseball players from around the country will compete in three regional tryouts for a chance to make it onto the United States baseball team. These are among the most elite, dedicated and talented athletes in their sport, and the best of them will go on to play against teams from Japan, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Venezuela and Taiwan in the World Cup tournament held in September in Miyazaki, Japan. But the team receives almost no attention, and many of its members weren’t even able to play their sport in high school. These baseball players are women.

The conventional wisdom is that baseball is for boys and men, and softball is for girls and women. But women have been playing baseball since long before they had the right to vote. As the national pastime went professional, women were forced out of it — and into softball. Title IX, the 1972 federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, also protects equal access to and funding of sports for boys and girls at the school level, and girls have been fighting to play baseball — with lawsuits, if necessary — since the 1970s. But equal access is often interpreted to mean not baseball, but softball.

Both men and women swim, ski, snowboard and run marathons and sprints. Both play tennis and soccer and basketball. Softball, though, is a completely distinct sport, with different pitching — underhand — and different equipment, including a larger ball. It also has shorter distances from pitcher to home plate and between bases, fewer innings and a smaller outfield. Yes, Division I softball is demanding, far from the beery fun of middle-aged weekend leagues. But the women’s version of baseball is not softball. It’s baseball.

Baseball evolved from the British game rounders, played by both girls and boys. Softball was invented in 1887 by men, though it came to be seen as an easier, “safer” and more modest game — more suitable, that is, to ladies.