Girls of Summer: In Their Own League Read online

  The United States Congress agreed, voting in favor of continuing baseball to boost morale, but reassuring that players could be drafted. In fact, a fair number of players had already enlisted or announced their intention of doing so. Others, who worked off-season in war-related industries, had decided they were more useful to the war effort on the job than in baseball and had declined to return to their teams.

  Amid this climate, the baseball commissioner, the memorably named Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, had written to President Roosevelt pointing out the need for guidance. Roosevelt’s reply suggests that he viewed both major-and minor-league ball as a wise investment.

  “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going,” he wrote. With America on a war footing, “there will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before. That means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work. Here is another way of looking at it. If 300 teams use 5,000 or 6,000 players, these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20,000,000 of their fellow citizens – and that in my judgment is thoroughly worthwhile.” Roosevelt’s only suggestion was that the leagues schedule more night games to accommodate the longer working hours of fans.

  This gave a boost to the trend towards night games that some, including P. K. Wrigley, were resisting. The 1942 season had featured a grand total of seven games played under lights. Wrigley thought that the game lost some of its spirit if not played during the day, and he thought that night games were unfair to people who lived near the ballparks. As a result, Wrigley Field – the last holdout in the face of universal change – would not be permanently lighted until the 1980s.

  There, for the moment, matters rested. But Wrigley was not relieved. He foresaw an inevitable decline in the quality of big-league play as more and more athletes joined the armed forces.

  War and baseball fished in the same stream. Both demanded the young and vigorous. Professional ball could become, within a few short seasons, the domain of rookies and has-beens, 4-Fs and 40-year-olds, as the best players were shipped overseas. Would the public pay to see these feeble contests? Wrigley didn’t think so.

  Already the clubs were cutting rosters, sending players back to the minor leagues, which were under the same pressures as the majors.

  Presidential assurances were all very well, but the President was a politician, too. Further sacrifices were no doubt in store.

  Gas rationing would severely limit recreational travel. Perhaps the teams would not be able to get from A to B. The schedule might be foreshortened, with an attendant loss in income. And what about underutilized stadiums? Wrigley Field, for example, stood empty half the time as a matter of course, when the Cubs were on the road.

  Casting around for something to fill it – something to have in the wings, ready to go if major-league play was curtailed or canceled outright – Wrigley came up with the idea of a women’s professional softball league.

  Yes, softball. This was Wrigley’s initial concept. Although short-lived, it made sense, given that baseball’s place as America’s national game had been seriously challenged by softball during the Depression.

  Despite the elaborate fiction that surrounds Abner Doubleday, American baseball almost certainly derived from an English game called “rounders” and was adapted for New-World use by Alexander Cartwright (who, having launched it, would emigrate to Hawaii, where for a time there were more players than in North America).

  One of the earliest teams to play a game recognizable as baseball was the New York Knickerbockers, circa 1850. They wore matching uniforms, which consisted of straw hats and webbed belts. By contrast, members of another early team, the Detroit Wolverines, wore different outfits, depending on their positions.

  Early baseball was distinguished by rules that set it far apart from modern baseball. The ball was lighter and much smaller, producing games in which teams pounded out more than 100 runs. This led to a rule stating that the first team to score 21 would be declared the winner. At one point, nine balls constituted a walk. Three strikes made an out, but fouls didn’t count. Catchers could elect to stand 50 feet behind home plate. There was no mound for the pitcher, who threw underhand.

  However, by the 1890s, the game had settled down to something like its present form, with an overhand pitch and a ball size and basepath length that would be familiar to us today.

  As for softball, it was born on Thanksgiving Day, 1887, at Chicago’s Farragut Boat Club, where a man named George W. Hancock, brooding on inclement weather, proposed a game of indoor ball involving a rolled-up boxing glove and a sawed-off broom handle.

  By the following weekend, he had worked out a complete of rules and included the recommendation that “masks and gloves are not essential, but it is a good idea for players to have their suits padded all around the knees.” A very good idea, since many games were played on concrete, not wooden, floors!

  From this modest beginning, softball (known also as Kitten Ball, Bush Ball, Army Ball, Playground Ball, Mush Ball, Indoor-Outdoor Ball and a host of other regional names) came into vogue. It spread quickly, including west and north up through Minnesota and into Manitoba, Canada.

  By the 1920s, Americans were starting to standardize the game and teams and leagues were organized all over the continent; active players numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

  The game generally featured a smaller diamond, with different sizes for men and women, a larger ball (at one point, it measured 16 inches around and must have been impossible to miss), 10 players as opposed to baseball’s nine, and, from the first, an underhand delivery.

  There were plenty of oddities to stimulate the imagination. In 1908, the lead-off hitter in each inning could decide whether subsequent runners would move clockwise or counterclockwise around the base paths. Another rule stated that teams could choose to count either runs or points, a point being earned for every runner who got on base. It must have been something to behold!

  Women claimed the right to play early on. College students at Vassar in 1866 were playing some form of ball, but it was kept quiet in order to avoid outraging the townspeople. Three years later, a “female baseball club” came out of hiding in Peterboro, New York. A newspaper reported the first game “ever played in public for gate money between feminine ball-tossers” at Springfield, Illinois, in 1875, and a loosely organized network of touring teams appears to have been established by the mid-1880s. In 1890, a visiting squad was arrested for playing on Sunday in Danville, Illinois, to 2,000 Sabbath-breaking spectators.

  By the turn of the century, traveling teams of “Bloomer Girls” were fairly common.

  A pitcher named Alta Weiss played on the men’s semi-professional circuit shortly before World War I. From 1918 to 1935, Elizabeth Murphy played on men’s clubs as a first baseman. A team known as the Philadelphia Bobbies barnstormed around the country in the 1920s and toured Japan in 1925. Their shortstop, Edith Houghton, signed on at age 14 and later became the only woman to scout for a major-league men’s team.

  In 1988, when the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, mounted its “Women in Baseball” exhibition, two of the surviving Bobbies – Nettie Spangler, then 81, and Loretta “Sticks” Jester Lipski, a year younger – attended the ceremonies. Spangler, despite her age, made news by tap-dancing on the steps of the hall.

  For the most part, however, early women’s teams were viewed with suspicion. Many people believed that they were prostitutes or freaks. They tended to tour under names like Slapsie Maxie’s Curvaceous Cuties, Barney Ross’s Adorables and the Num-Num Pretzel Girls.

  By all reports, a fair number of these players were quite hard-bitten. They played men’s teams, and some of them – usually the shortstop, in a fright wig and two days’ worth of stubble, so everyone got the joke – were men in drag. One such transvestite was congratulated by his manager for “making as handsome a girl as any boy on the team.”

  J
ohnny Rawlings, later a manager in the All-American League, was fond of spinning yarns about male big-leaguers of his acquaintance who had done time on this circuit.

  The game was dominated by its sleazy promoters, the most notorious of whom was Harry Freeman, a “dangerous and suspicious character” who was charged in New Orleans with “inducing young girls to leave their homes and parents to join his troupe of baseball players.”

  These early days are clouded by the mists of legend.

  In 1931, a 17-year-old female pitcher named Jackie Mitchell signed with the Class-A Chattanooga Lookouts. This men’s team made headlines by playing an exhibition game against the New York Yankees, with their female hurler facing Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. In the course of this contest, Mitchell struck out the legendary Yankees. The newspaper coverage leaves no doubt it was a publicity stunt, but it failed to amuse Commissioner Landis, who voided Mitchell’s contract, stating grimly that “life in baseball is too strenuous for women.”

  Indeed, to this day, a woman is barred by statute from signing with a major-league men’s team, a rule instituted in 1952.

  By the mid-1930’s, however, women were taking an active part in softball from coast to coast. It, not baseball, had become the national pastime.

  Softball appealed to people for very sensible reasons. The 1930s were an era of cheap entertainment, and what better way to amuse yourself than to play a game, rather than pay to watch it?

  Almost anyone could join in. Softball wasn’t nearly as strenuous as baseball for the average player. The distances between bases, and between pitcher and batter, were shorter and easier for those who were more or less fleet-footed but didn’t have a lot of stamina. The larger, heavier ball and smaller, lighter bat meant that you could take your turn at the plate and retain a degree of self-respect. The ball didn’t come at you as fast; it was easier for fielders to keep track of and catch. Games were shorter – a regulation seven innings – which made for a more relaxing evening out.

  If things moved quickly, you could even squeeze in a double-header.

  The underhand pitch is a more natural, less stressful motion; sometimes the same person would pitch both games.

  None of this made for spine-tingling contests; games sometimes turned into marathon pitching duels. Low scores were the norm and big-inning, last-minute rallies a rarity. It was all very low-key and friendly, and women liked to play just as much as men, because they were just as good.

  The result was an explosion in softball’s popularity that is difficult to grasp today.

  In 1935, Time magazine estimated that the United States had more than two million amateur players on 60,000 organized teams. Fairmont, West Virginia, with a population of 25,000, had over 1,000 players on 56 teams.

  Wrigley’s research turned up 9,000 teams – 1,000 of them all-female – within a 100-mile radius of his second stadium in Los Angeles, home of his semi-professional club, the Angels.

  Such teams might be simply sandlot friends, or largely informal groups that were sponsored by local businesses. Players, in return for some equipment, became moving billboards for the likes of Tom and Jerry’s Auto Body. Enormous numbers of people played everywhere – on vacant lots, in gymnasiums during the wintertime and in the 8,000 parks, completed with softball diamond, constructed during the Depression as a national make-work project. Some of them had two or three diamonds; a softball field is small.

  Every U.S. city and town resounded to the crack of bat on ball from Memorial Day to Labor Day. This was the American experience, and it held true to a similar degree in Canadian cities and towns as well.

  None of this escaped the notice of Philip Wrigley. He may not have perceived softball as an outright threat, but its popularity was impossible to overlook. Softball was outdrawing baseball in many cities. Centers including New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix, New Orleans and Detroit had developed well-organized leagues of talented female amateurs.

  Wrigley offered his Los Angeles ballpark free each year for the state championships in both men’ and women’s softball, with the gate going to charity. People packed the place.

  Wrigley had also recognized the relatively untapped potential of women as baseball fans. Even before he inherited the Cubs, he had declared every Friday “Ladies’ Day” at Wrigley Field.

  In 1930, over 30,000 women showed up, in response to a particularly vigorous promotion. This touched off a minor riot, there being only 38,000 seats. Wrigley was subsequently forced to distribute tickets in advance at locations scattered around the city, and later to adopt a mail-order system.

  His aim at this time was simply to attract female spectators; he thought they had a civilizing influence on unruly men. They broadened his audience and enforced the idea that baseball was wholesome family entertainment. This was also the thinking behind his policy of admitting children for half-price, which no other big-league owner thought worthwhile.

  At any rate, Wrigley knew that there was something attractive – something marketable – about women playing ball. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he knew that to delay was fatal. He risked being scooped by the competition in his own backyard.

  There were a tremendous number of women’s softball teams, loosely organized into several leagues, in and around his home city of Chicago. In 1942, one such league, composed of just four teams, had drawn 250,000 fans.

  The Chicago clubs had considered forming a more cohesive body, but the idea had foundered on lack of seed money and the fact that each team was controlled by an individual owner-manager, none of whom could agree on what to do. Sooner or later, though, these people might come together in a professional women’s league.

  Wrigley could simply have taken his pick of several of these clubs, bought them out and fielded his own full-blown league the following week. But Wrigley was being cautious. The Chicago softball scene had a somewhat rakish reputation, and its promoters did not always inspire confidence.

  One of the owner-managers, a man named Rudy Sanders, was consulted by a Wrigley minion, but scored no points for showing up with “a chew (of tobacco) in his mouth that interfered to some degree with his diction.”

  Despite this inelegant habit, Sanders turned out to be a font of useful information. He said that he paid his players about $25 a week (a decent salary, considering that they could also hold down steady day jobs and incurred no travel expenses). He owned the team outright, supplied all its equipment and paid nominal rent for ballpark use. He took the gate receipts, on top of which he sold the team as an advertising vehicle and received a flat fee for publicity – as much as $3,000 per season if the players did well – from a sponsor firm.

  Sanders’s net income in 1941 from one team was $5,000.

  Wrigley digested these figures, but he had other, farther-reaching ideas. In mid-1942, Wrigley began to canvass his fellow major-league owners to see what they thought about the basic concept – highly organized, truly professional women’s softball.

  They didn’t think much; most dismissed it as yet another of his zany schemes. Only Branch Rickey, vice-president and general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, showed any real interest.

  Like Wrigley, Rickey was a man of singular vision. He was almost solely responsible for introducing the major-leagues’ farm-team system, replacing aimless hit-or-miss recruiting. He argued in favor of pooled scouting long before it became the norm.

  His wartime contingency plans included the importation of draft-proof Cubans and other aliens, a course he had pursued during World War I. A devout Methodist, he promised his mother that he would never see a Sunday game, and he never did. He also reputedly kept track of the sexual misadventures of his players.

  Much more could be said, but Rickey’s justifiable fame rests on the fact that, in the face of almost total disapproval, he broke the color bar in professional baseball by signing Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. He played almost no active part in the All-American League, but he did consent to stand as trustee, and his name alone carried weight
.

  Wrigley had a grudging admiration for Rickey, but little use for the rest of the owners, whom he considered to be nickel-grabbers and fools.

  In his estimation, they failed to run their ballparks well. For one thing, they plastered the fences with unsightly advertising – unlike Wrigley Field, whose walls were covered with ivy (a hit that lodged in it counted as a ground-rule double).

  Other owners scrimped on ushers and other staff, and (worse yet) refused to sell gum, on the excuse that, since it reduced thirst, it would harm their soft-drink concessions.

  Wrigley had other, more fundamental differences of opinion with the owners.

  His pet bogey was the reserve clause.

  Introduced to men’s professional baseball in 1879, it remained in place for almost 100 years. Basically, it meant that a player, when signed by a given team, lost any element of control over his career. His services for subsequent seasons could be “reserved” in perpetuity by the signing club. It owned him outright, could force him to accept whatever salary offer it came up with and could trade or sell him against his will to another team.

  Wrigley found this concept odious, akin to serfdom.

  “I guess it is because I have a sort of old-fashioned idea that if a man likes his job he will give you his best,” he said. “If he does not like it, no contract on earth can cause him to put forth his best efforts.”

  Wrigley had his legal department check out various alternatives but, not surprisingly, he failed to interest the other owners in any sort of modification. Nor did he feel secure enough to dispense with the clause unilaterally when it came to the Cubs.

  Wrigley had a vision of baseball. It was, he believed, above all else entertainment, and it had to sell itself on that basis.

  In his view, the virtual certainty that the New York Yankees would win the American League pennant year after year had contributed to baseball’s decline during the 1930s. People became bored; teams weren’t evenly matched. As a result, there were too many lopsided games and foregone conclusions.