Total Baseball (1994 Edition)/Total_Baseball_1994_Edition_Creative_Multimedia_1994.iso/dp/0017/00174.txt

Text File | 1993-12-30 | 18KB | 260 lines

$Unique_ID{BAS00174}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Women in Baseball}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{
Shattuck, Debra A.}
$Subject{Women Ladies Female Females All-American Girls Baseball League AAGBL}
$Log{}

Total Baseball:  Other Leagues


Women in Baseball

Debra A. Shattuck


     Women have been associated with baseball, either as players or
spectators, since the game's dawn in the early nineteenth century.  Even
before baseball emerged in its final form, girls and young women sometimes
played precursors of the game like One Old Cat, Town Ball, and Stoolball in
Colonial America.  As time passed, and the boys' amusement became serious
business for young men, baseball's reputation as a masculine domain was
established.  In 1865, one year before Charles Peverelly observed that
baseball "has now become beyond question the leading feature of the outdoor
sports of the United States," Harper's Weekly proclaimed:  "There is no nobler
or manlier game than base-ball."  During the latter half of the nineteenth
century, women's presence as spectators at baseball games was tolerated and
sometimes encouraged.  Eventually promoters of the game hosted regular "Ladies
Days" to attract women fans who would bring in added gate receipts and,
hopefully, have a calming effect on the sometimes unruly crowds.  Many women
were content with their role as spectators and moral uplifters, but others
yearned for the opportunity to try their hand at the national pastime.  Those
who lived out their fantasy often had to endure verbal and written derision
from observers anxious to preserve the baseball status quo.
     For the most part, the negative attitude toward women baseball players
continues to this day.  Many still share the opinion of an editorialist who
noted in The St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1885 that "The female has no place in
base ball, except to the degradation of the game."  The criticisms
notwithstanding, uncounted women have pursued their own field of dreams,
contributing their unique chapter to baseball's rich heritage.
     Many of the first women baseball players were college students.  The
secluded atmosphere of all-girl's schools enabled women to play the game
without attracting too much attention.  Students at Vassar College organized
two baseball clubs as early as 1866.  In 1879, according to Vassar alumna
Sophia Foster Richardson, the Vassar girls organized at least seven baseball
clubs.  The private grounds of college campuses did not always protect female
players from public criticism, however.  In a speech to an alumnae association
in 1896, Richardson recalled, "The public, so far as it knew of our playing,
was shocked, but in our retired grounds, and protected from observation even
in these grounds by sheltering trees, we continued to play in spite of a
censorious public."  Within a few years, however, the "censorious public" and
"disapproving mothers" had succeeded in stifling the game at Vassar.  But
Vassar was not the only college where women tried their hand at baseball.  In
a letter to her former classmates at Smith College, Minnie Stephens (class of
1883) reminisced about the baseball clubs they had organized at the school in
1880.  Stephens described the enthusiasm of the players and the keen
competition at games.  She also related how the Victorian-style clothing of
the day, generally a hindrance to sporting endeavors, had actually benefited
one of the players during a heated contest, "One vicious batter drove a ball
directly into the belt line of her opponent, and had it not been for the rigid
steel corset clasp worn in those days, she would have been knocked out
completely."  Like the women at Vassar, baseball players at Smith College
faced opposition which eventually forced them to give up the game for a number
of years.
     Women baseball players were not limited to college campuses.  In
Springfield, Illinois, three men organized a women's baseball club in 1875.
They were confident that the novelty of women playing baseball would attract
large crowds and fatten their bankroll.  On September 11, 1875, the club's
teams, labeled the "Blondes" and "Brunettes," played their first match.
Newspapers heralded the event as the "first game of baseball ever played in
public for gate money between feminine ball-tossers."  The concept evidently
caught on, for numerous other male entrepreneurs copied the idea and organized
women's baseball teams.  One group started the "Young Ladies' Baseball Club"
in Philadelphia in 1883.  These owners billed their team's games as
entertainment spectacles, not serious competition, and they continually
stressed the femininity and moral respectability of their players.  A
newspaper account of one of the club's first games relayed the management's
claim that players were "selected with tender solicitude from 200 applicants,
variety actresses and ballet girls being positively barred."  Furthermore the
article noted, "Only three of the lot had ever been on the stage, and they
were in the strictly legitimate business."
     The Young Ladies Baseball Club played its first game on August 18, 1883,
at Pastime Park in Philadelphia.  Despite the supposed "200 applicants," only
sixteen girls were mustered to form the two teams for the contest; two young
men rounded out the rosters.  The game was played on a regulation-size
diamond, but, as one observer wrote, it was too large for the women.  "A ball
thrown from pitcher to second base almost invariably fell short and was
stopped on the roll.  The throw from first to third base was an utter
impossibility."  Five hundred spectators witnessed the club's debut and were
caught up in "uncontrollable laughter" much of the time.  From a financial
standpoint, however, the venture was a success.  More than 1,500 fans turned
out for the club's match at the Manhattan Athletic Club on September 23, 1883,
where they "laughed themselves hungry and thirsty."  Though one observer
conceded that "four of the girls had become expert--for girls," it is obvious
that "novelty" and not "ability" was the hallmark of women's baseball at the
time.
     Another novel group of women baseball players was the Bloomer Girls.
Actually "Bloomer Girls" was a misnomer, since Bloomer Girls teams were
composed of both men and women.  Kansas City Bloomer Girls, New York Bloomer
Girls, Texas Bloomer Girls, and Boston Bloomer Girls were just a few of the
teams traveling from diamond to diamond in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries in search of fame and fortune.  Despite the number of
Bloomer Girl teams, they did not play each other and no formal league was set
up.  Instead, they journeyed from town to town, challenging men's amateur and
semiprofessional teams.  The Bloomer Girls teams relied on sideshow style
appeal to draw fans and, not surprisingly, the bottom line was money.  The
manager of the Texas Bloomer Girls wrote to one prospective promoter in 1913,
assuring him that the team's seven girls and four boys, "including the
one-armed boy who plays center field," would draw enough fans to ensure the
backer "three hundred dollars clear money" each week.  A few of the male
Bloomer Girls players like "Smoky Joe" Wood and Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby
went on to become successful big league ballplayers, but the future was not as
bright for the female players who could not aspire to anything higher in the
baseball world.
     The Bloomer Girls teams were not the only option available to
baseball-playing females around the turn of the century.  Women's teams and
mixed teams competed occasionally in "pickup" games.  One such game took place
in Kearsarge, New Hampshire, on August 7, 1903.  An article in the Boston
Herald the following day noted, "The teams were made up of young ladies gowned
in white and young men decked out in girls' clothes, all New Englanders,
guests at the hotel."  On August 31, the newspaper announced an upcoming game
at Forest Hills between the "Hickey and Clover clubs," each composed of five
women and four men.  One year later, in Flat Rock, Indiana, a group of women
organized two baseball clubs, one consisting only of married players, the
other only of single players.
     While some women played on all-female or coed teams, others challenged
social constraints of the day by playing on otherwise all-male teams.  On June
12, 1903, the Cincinnati Enquirer printed an article about the efforts of a
local woman, Miss M.E. Phelan, to get a job as center fielder with the
all-male Flora Baseball Club of Indiana.  Phelan wrote to the club's manager
informing him, "I have played with a number of lady ball clubs and am
considered the equal of the average country player."  Whether the Flora club
took Phelan up on her offer to play for them for "$60 per month and expenses"
is unknown, but only four years later another Ohioan, Alta Weiss, became an
overnight female baseball-playing sensation and, as one article put it,
"perhaps the only girl in the United States to obtain college education
through skill as a baseball player."
     Weiss, a native of Ragersville, Ohio, became a celebrity in the Cleveland
area when she made her pitching debut with the all-male, semiprofessional
Vermilion Independents on September 2, 1907.  More than 1,200 fans attended
the game in which Weiss pitched 5 innings, giving up only 4 hits and 1 run.
By the time Weiss made her second appearance on September 8, she was already
being heralded as the "Girl Wonder" in the press.  According to the Vermilion
News, so many fans wanted to see Weiss play that special trains had to be run
to Vermilion from Cleveland and surrounding towns.
     Weiss pitched 8 games for the Independents during their 1907 season.
More than 13,000 fans saw the games, including a season high of 3,182, who
witnessed her debut at Cleveland's League Park on October 2, 1907.  At least a
dozen newspapers covered her exploits.  The following year her father bought a
half-interest in a men's semiprofessional team which was known thereafter as
the Weiss All-Stars.  It was based in Cleveland and, with Alta as a drawing
card, played for large crowds throughout Ohio and Kentucky.
     Though Weiss was far and away the best-known woman baseball player in
northern Ohio at this time, she was not the only one.  On June 22, 1908, the
Cleveland Press introduced fourteen-year-old Carita Masteller to the public.
The paper reported that she had been playing baseball for eight or nine years
and was as good as Weiss.  That same month Weiss pitched against another
female pitcher, Irma Gribble.  The two dueled again in August.  In another
unique game, two sisters from Bellevue, Ohio, Irene and Ruth Basford, pitched
for opposing men's teams.
     Another well-known woman baseball player who played on men's teams was
Rhode Islander Elizabeth Murphy.  "Lizzie," as she liked to be called, played
amateur and semiprofessional baseball from about 1915 to 1935 and was known as
the "Queen of Baseball" throughout New England and eastern Canada.  After
playing for a number of amateur teams in Rhode Island, Murphy signed with the
semiprofessional Providence Independents in 1918.  A few years later she
joined Ed Carr's All-Stars of Boston and earned quite a reputation for her
skills as a first baseman.
     In 1928, while Murphy was still impressing the fans in New England,
fourteen-year-old Margaret Gisolo helped her Blanford, Indiana, American
Legion boys' baseball team win county, district, sectional, and state
championships.  In seven tournament games she had 9 hits in 21 at-bats.  She
scored 10 putouts and 28 assists in the field, with no errors charged against
her.  A protest against her participation filed by opposing teams went all the
way to the American Legion's National Americanism Commission, which referred
it to the major league baseball commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Landis determined that American Legion rules did not specifically ban the
participation of women and disallowed the protest.
     Landis had to address a similar situation three years later when the
"Barnum of Baseball," Chattanooga Lookouts manager Joe Engel, signed
seventeen-year-old Jackie Mitchell to a contract with his Class AA minor
league team, thus making her the first female professional baseball player.
Mitchell had been taught to pitch by major leaguer Dazzy Vance and had once
struck out nine men in a row in an amateur game.  She became an overnight
celebrity on April 2, 1931, when she pitched in an exhibition game against the
visiting New York Yankees--and struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, back to
back.  Speculation continues as to whether Ruth and Gehrig were merely putting
on a show or really trying to hit Mitchell's pitches.  Mitchell contended that
it was not a setup and that the only instructions to the Yankee players had
been to try not to hit the ball straight through the pitcher's box.  A number
of Yankee players confirmed her story.  Unfortunately Mitchell never had a
chance to repeat her performance as a professional baseball player.  A few
days after her debut, Landis informed Engel that he had disallowed Mitchell's
contract on the grounds that life in baseball was too strenuous for women.
Organized baseball formalized the ban against women signing professional
baseball contracts with men's teams on June 21, 1952; the ruling still stands.
     The restriction on women playing professional baseball on men's teams did
not prevent the formation of a women's professional baseball league, however.
In 1943, with wartime manpower shortages threatening major league baseball,
Chicago Cubs' owner Philip K. Wrigley decided to form a women's professional
softball league which would play its games in the major league stadiums while
the men were away at war.  Within a year of its founding, the league modified
its rules and the All-American Girls Baseball League (AAGBL) was
born.  The AAGBL made its debut in 1943, when four teams--the Rockford
[Illinois] Peaches, the South Bend [Indiana] Blue Sox, the Racine [Wisconsin]
Belles, and the Kenosha [Wisconsin] Comets--squared off during the League's
108-game schedule.  Attendance that year was 176,000 fans, which, according to
one contemporary, meant that the League was "drawing a higher percentage of
the population [in league cities] than major league baseball ever did in its
greatest attendance years."  Attendance figures continued to rise year after
year, reaching a peak in 1948, when the League's ten teams drew almost
1,000,000 fans.  That same year, AAGBL teams drew more than 100,000 fans for
a series of nine games in Puerto Rico.
     Unlike women's teams of the past, the AAGBL relied on players' skills,
not their gender, to draw fans to the ballpark.  The 500 women who played in
the AAGBL during its eleven-year existence were top-notch athletes.  Many were
veterans of championship school, community, or industrial softball teams, and
a few had even played on boys' or men's baseball teams.  In addition, many of
the AAGBL managers were experienced professional baseball players--some, like
Bill Wambsganss (the only player ever to achieve an unassisted triple play in
a World Series), Max Carey, Jimmie Foxx, and Dave Bancroft, were legends.
     The AAGBL represented one of the only times in history that women
baseball players received widespread moral and financial support.  Once World
War II ended, however, social pressures for women to leave nontraditional jobs
and return to household duties resumed.  This fact, coupled with
organizational problems and the rise of televised major league games, led to
the demise of the AAGBL.  Interest in the league all but disappeared until the
1980s, when a group of former players organized a players association and
began lobbying to have the league honored in the National Baseball Hall of
Fame.  The popular media and serious scholars rediscovered the league and
hundreds of articles about the AAGBL appeared in newspapers and magazines
across the country.  In October 1988, the Hall of Fame unveiled a permanent
exhibit of AAGBL league memorabilia.  In the summer of 1992, the AAGBL was
further memorialized when it became the subject of the feature film, A League
of Their Own.
     Despite the newfound popularity of the AAGBL, modern-day women baseball
players still face the same obstacles and criticisms endured by nineteenth
century players.  For the most part, organized teams and leagues remain
closed to women.  When Commissioner Ford Frick issued his ban against women
players in 1952, his purpose was to prevent teams from using women players as
publicity stunts.  The end result of his edict was that even highly skilled
women players (like those on the all-female team that tried, unsuccessfully,
to gain admission to the men's Class A Florida State League in 1984) lost an
important avenue for upward mobility and legitimacy in baseball.  Women who
challenge baseball's "men only" reputation rarely escape the experience
unscathed.  Julie Croteau, who gained notoriety in the late 1980s by playing
first base for the St. Mary's (Maryland) College men's baseball team, earned
school and conference honors yet still had to endure derisive comments from
teammates.  She left school in the middle of her junior year disillusioned
with a system she believed treated women as inferior to men.
     It is possible that baseball may one day lose its masculine cast and
become equally accessible to women and men.  Thanks to a series of court
battles in the 1970s, generations of young girls have the opportunity to play
baseball on Little League teams.  As they mature and resist abandoning the
game of their youth, perhaps more high schools and colleges will field girls'
baseball, instead of softball, teams.  If women baseball players become the
rule instead of the exception, baseball will finally, truly become the
national pastime.