Westly - Fastpitch

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Touchstone

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Copyright 2016 by Erica Westly

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Touchstone hardcover edition June 2016

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Cover art based on original material of the All-American Girls Softball League, used with permission AAGPBL Players Association, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-1859-3

ISBN 978-1-5011-1861-6 (ebook)

For female athletes, past, present, and future

F or most of the year, the weeds are so overgrown that you cant even make out the chain-link fence, let alone the field. If you happened to drive by it, which would be unlikely, given its isolated location on the outskirts of a residential area, you probably wouldnt notice it at all. Only if you walk up close to the fence and peer carefully through the dense plant life do the dugout and the wooden bleachers where thousands of fans used to sit become visible. The field is a Superfund site now, sealed off by the Environmental Protection Agency after piles of asbestos and other toxic pollutants were found buried there. But for more than three decades, it was Memorial Field, home to the legendary Brakettes softball team. Women used to come from all over the country just for the chance to play there.

Raybestos, the company that owned the team, built the field for its employees in the 1940s. It was within walking distance of the companys manufacturing facility on Frog Pond Lane so that workers could go straight to practice when their shifts were over. It had state-of-the-art field lights and a giant scoreboard, making it nicer than many minor league baseball stadiums. A restaurant, fittingly called the Frog Pond Restaurant, even opened up down the road and began advertising itself as the place to go for food and wine before, between, and after the games.

Stratford, Connecticut, was an unlikely location for a champion softball team. Historically, the other top teams came from the West Coast or large Midwestern cities such as Detroit or Chicago, where the sport was the most popular. Stratford, meanwhile, was a small town nestled between Long Island Sound and the Housatonic River, primarily known for its lighthouse and Shakespearean namesake. But Bill Simpson, the eccentric owner and general manager of the Raybestos facility, had become enthralled with fastpitch. He had never been much of an athlete himself, although he lettered in soccer and tennis as a student at Williams College. Once he saw his first fastpitch game, he was hooked, however, and he was determined to have the best mens and womens teams in the nation.

The Cardinals, the Raybestos mens fastpitch team, were good, but it was the Brakettes, named after the brake linings that the company produced, who made sports history. Between 1958 and 1978, the team won fifteen national championships and made the finals all but one time. They were the New York Yankees of softball. For women, who had been banned from baseball and had few athletic options at school, the Brakettes represented a rare opportunity to not only play sports, but play at a competitive level. Girls found out about the team through word of mouthin those days every town seemed to have at least one fastpitch enthusiastand if they made the cut, they would move up North, get a job, usually at Raybestos, and find a place to live. Many stayed with the team for years, even decades.

Fastpitch wasnt the only company-sponsored amateur sportcompanies also had leagues for bowling, basketball, volleyball, and even sailing in some statesbut it was by far the largest, with hundreds of thousands of mens and womens teams across the United States in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, and was the most popular with fans. It was also one of the oldest company sports. The trend dated back to the early 1900s, when factories adopted fastpitch as a way to keep workers in shape and boost morale.

Then, in 1933, fastpitch became a spectator sport, when it made its national debut at the Chicago Worlds Fair. After that, the company teams started selling tickets to their games, and they quickly became community events. People went to cheer on their coworkers and neighbors, spreading out blankets on the grass if there werent enough seats in the stands. Having mens and womens teams meant twice the number of games to attend and doubled the chances of victory. When the teams won, the entire town celebrated.

The level of play of top teams such as the Brakettes was orders of magnitude above that of todays company softball teams, most of which are of the laid-back slowpitch variety. The top fastpitch players were akin to professional athletes: they trained year-round, and for many of them, the sport was the main focus of their lives. Women cleaned and ironed their team uniforms with such care an onlooker might assume they were handling priceless works of art. Many put off marriage and school and left their families behind to play on the best teams. They spent their spring and summer weekends traveling to and from regional and national games, usually by car or bus and often on their own dime.

Fastpitch was the first team sport that women got to play seriously. It wasnt a gimmick or a show, and it was stable and established, which meant that players could develop their skills over time and not have to worry about whether the league would still be around the next year. The women who played on the Brakettes and other strong fastpitch teams were among the most prominent female athletes of the twentieth century. They appeared on television shows, such as CBS Sports Spectacular , and helped pave the way for Title IX, the 1972 law that required American schools that receive federal money to provide athletic opportunities for female students. They were also some of the first female athletes to have their own professional sports league.

Today, fastpitch is primarily a womens high school and college sport. The competitive adult teams made up of male and female workers are long gone, along with most of the companies that sponsored them. Raybestoss downfall was particularly dramatic. In the late 1970s, town and state officials discovered that the company had been using its softball field, along with several other areas in town, to dump asbestos waste from its manufacturing facility (the bestos in the company name stood for asbestos, the main component of the brake linings). Ten years later, the company was bankrupt and facing a slew of lawsuits. Investigations revealed that Raybestos had been exposing the townspeople to asbestos, lead, and other toxins for decades. In the 1940s and 50s, the company even gave residents free samples of asbestos-laced sludge from its factory and encouraged them to use it as fill soil in their yards.