Sue Macy - A Whole New Ball Game: The Story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Contents

To the Women of the AAGPBL

Even today, when spring comes around, I think, Gosh, years ago Id be getting ready to go to spring training. The smell of the earth coming alive again, it just brings back memories that make you want to go get out your baseball mitt.

Shirley Stovroff,
South Bend Blue Sox,
19481952

Acknowledgments

Amelia Earhart was my hero when I was growing up. Its not so much that I wanted to be a pilot. Its just that her courage, her determination to do what others thought women couldnt do, inspired me to believe that I could soar to any heights. Had I known about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, Jean Faut, Audrey Wagner, Faye Dancer, and their teammates would have laid equal claim to my imagination. Like Earhart, they also dared to defy tradition and live out their dreams.

It is the women of the league who ultimately are responsible for this book, for they refused to let history forget them. By publishing newsletters, organizing reunions, and lobbying for inclusion in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, they kept the spirit of the AAGPBL alive until the world was ready to rediscover it. Their persistence was infectious. It motivated me to continue my work on the league despite jobs and other distractions.

While the ball players were pioneers in sports, Merrie Fidler was a pioneer in sports history. Fidlers 1976 masters thesis was the only available manuscript on the league when I started my own research. I greatly appreciate her generosity in sharing that work with me. I am grateful as well to Sharon Roepke, the undisputed authority on league statistics. She helped me fill in some missing numbers and graciously granted me permission to reprint the AAGBL baseball cards in Chapter 5. My thanks also go to Diane Barts and her staff at the Northern Indiana Historical Society, for photo research above and beyond the call of duty.

In addition, I would like to express my appreciation to the following people for their help along the way:

To Estelle Freedman, who first taught me to seek lessons from women of the past;

To Abby Jungreis, June English, and Julie Winterbottom, for their moral and critical support, and their friendship;

To my colleagues at Scholastic Inc., especially Carol Drisko, for training me to be a professional writer, and Ernie Fleishman, for allowing me the time to finish this book;

To my editor, Marc Aronson, for continually challenging me to do better;

To my cats, Mickey and Lacey, for keeping me company as I wrote by contentedly napping on my deskand on my source material;

To my father, for teaching me to love baseball; my brother, for respecting me as a sister and a ball player; and my mother, for always having confidence in my ability to write;

And to Sheila Wolinsky, for her unending support and patience as I struggled to find just the right words to tell this story.

Notes on Names

Throughout this book, players are referred to by the names they used during their years in the league. If a woman was married and played under her married name, thats how she appears (for example, Olive Bend Little). If she was married but continued to use her maiden name in the official records, she appears here under her maiden name (for example, Jean Faut). If she married after leaving the league, she appears in the text under her maiden name.

Also, the leagues official name changed many times, from the original All-American Girls Softball League (AAGSBL) in early 1943 to the American Girls Baseball League (AGBL) in 1954. During the 1980s the former players adopted the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) as their name of choice. In this book, the original name and initials (AAGSBL) are used when referring to the league before the first name change, in July 1943. After that, the league is referred to as the AAGPBL.

Foreword: Welcome to Cooperstown

What are all these old women doing here?

On November 5, 1988, that was the question of the day in Cooperstown, New York. It seemed that the quaint village, home to the very male National Baseball Hall of Fame, suddenly was overrun with women. They came from California, Arizona, Indiana, even Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada. Women called Slats and Beans and Frisco and Tex crowded into the hotels and restaurants, acting more like 20-year-olds than gray-haired retirees. The refined streets of Cooperstown were filled with their bear hugs, backslaps, and hearty cries of How the hell are you? No one could blame these women if their enthusiasm got the better of them on this crisp autumn Saturday. Three and a half decades after their accomplishments faded into history, they were about to be honored as sports pioneers.

For 12 years, from 1943 through 1954, the women who now gathered in Cooperstown had played in the first, and only, womens professional baseball league. When Americas top male baseball players joined up to serve their country during World War II, Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley started to worry. Wrigley wanted to make sure baseball fans on the homefront continued to spend their time, and money, at the ballpark. So he decided to form a professional womens league, which would, he said, furnish additional means of healthful recreation to the public, who are all in one way or another under severe pressure from war work. As a first step he instructed the Cubs baseball scouts to find him the most promising female ball players in North America. Implicit in these instructions was the order to search for only white athletes. Although there were outstanding African-American women ball players in the United States, none were invited to try out for the new league. (See Chapter 5 for a discussion of this issue.)

Wrigley hired 64 women to play in his new All-American Girls league in 1943, but eventually more than 550 would wear the uniforms of the AAGPBL. On that November day in 1988, 147 former players made their way to Cooperstown, along with hundreds more friends, family members, and fans. Catcher/outfielder Sarah Jane Salty Sands brought her 88-year-old father, who had spent more than 30 years bragging about his daughters baseball accomplishments. Outfielder Lois Tommie Barker brought so many supporters that she had to charter a Greyhound bus to get them there.

Accompanying these baseball women were a few baseball men who in a way owed their own careers to the AAGPBL. Major leaguer Casey Candaele learned the tricks of his trade from his mother, outfielder Helen Callaghan. And former major league pitcher Bill Spaceman Lee says he got his competitive nature, and some valuable pitching lessons, from his aunt, hurler Annabelle Lefty Lee.

At one P.M. on November 5, Candaele and Lee were part of the crowd that made its way through the arched doorways of the Hall of Fame Museum, where bronze plaques honor Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and other American heroes. They filed upstairs past the exhibit on the old Negro leagues and stopped at a covered display case across the room. A few moments later a cheer erupted as the cloth was lifted from the case to reveal Women in Baseball, the first collection in the Hall of Fame to acknowledge womens contributions to the national pastime.