Ila Jane Borders - Making My Pitch: A Woman’s Baseball Odyssey

Ila Jane Borders with Jean Hastings Ardell

Foreword by Mike Veeck

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln & London

2017 by Ila Jane Borders and Jean Hastings Ardell

Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image Annie Leibovitz / Contact Press Images.

Borders author photo courtesy of Ila Jane Borders.

Ardell author photo by Joe Mozdzen.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Borders, Ila Jane, 1975 author. | Ardell, Jean Hastings, 1943 co-author.

Title: Making my pitch: a womans baseball odyssey / Ila Jane Borders with Jean Hastings Ardell; foreword by Mike Veeck.

Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016029037 (print)

LCCN 2016035649 (ebook)

ISBN 9780803285309 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 9781496200204 (epub)

ISBN 9781496200211 (mobi)

ISBN 9781496200228 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : Borders, Ila Jane, 1975 | Women baseball playersUnited StatesBiography. | Pitchers (Baseball)United StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC GV 865. B 675 A 3 2017 (print) | LCC GV 865. B 675 (ebook) | DDC 796.357092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029037

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Delores Ann Carter

June 22, 1930April 14, 1980

This book is for you, Grandma. I grew up to become a baseball player and, later, a firefighter and paramedic. I couldnt save you on that awful day in 1980, but I have learned how to save myself, and others.

Mike Veeck

Autumn 1999 . Riding through Washington, DC , in the back of a cab in the middle of the night, I felt my eyes beginning to close. All of a sudden the Corcoran Gallery of Art came into view. Photographer Annie Leibovitz had a show there. On the facade of the building was a twenty-foot image of Ila Borders at the top of her windup.

Stop! Stop the cab, I yelled at the hack. Thats Ila. Stop right here.

The cabbie was frightened. You owe me thirty-five bucks, he said.

Keep the meter running, I said. Just stop. I have to get out.

I had been looking for a ballplayer like Ila Borders for much of my life. I joined my father, Bill Veeck Jr., who then owned the Chicago White Sox, as the clubs director of promotions in 1976. I remember our hosting a softball game and picnic for the front office staff. During the game, a woman who worked in the accounting department launched a triple off the left-field wall. Dad and I immediately looked at one another with the same thought: Somewhere out there, in Keokuk, Iowa, perhaps, was a woman with the talent to play professional baseball.

If only we could find her.

Twenty years later I did.

In the spring of 1997 I was running the St. Paul Saints of the independent Northern League, when our pitching coach, Barry Moss, called. Barry also scouted for us in Southern California. He wanted me to know that he had found a young woman who was, he said, the real thing, competitive and talented. Her name was Ila Borders. Should we give her a tryout? If she made the team, she would be the first woman to play mens professional baseball since the 1950s, when Mamie Peanut Johnson, Connie Morgan, and Marcenia Toni Stone played in the Negro Leagues, most notably with the Indianapolis Clowns. With a smile and a glance heavenward, where my father now dwells, I picked up the phone.

Ila flew into town on May 14 and came straight to my office. In my most avuncular manner, I said, Lets take a walk around the parking lot. That was the only place we could get away from our cramped quarters in the front offices of Midway Stadium.

Ila, I began, we are about to embark on a great adventure. It will be fun. It will be all that we both could hope for. But itll have its moments. I struggled to find the appropriate words. You will be castigated, ridiculed, and called a promotion, even though the Saints are already sold out for the season.

I had been raised to think of women as equals but knew it would take a strong woman in every sense of the word to play professional baseball. Breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball is considered one of the defining moments in American history. I had never forgotten the stories Dad told me about his signing of Larry Doby in 1947 and the indignities the young center fielder had suffered as the American Leagues first black player. Perhaps it wasnt going to be the same scope for Ila, but the heckling, the name-calling, and the sexist comments that would come her way meant that she needed to be mentally and emotionally stronger than nearly anyone else who was going to set foot on the field that season.

Very quietly, very kindly, Ila responded. Mr. Veeck, I know exactly what were in for. I have been cursed, spat upon, beaned, and hit with all manner of missiles. Im not afraid. I know what were up against. Do you?