Sharing the Game

Abstract

Sharing the Game Jean Ardell (bio) Thirty years ago this summer, Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own appeared in theaters. I did not know of the film earlier that year, when unbidden, one gray Southern California winter morning came the idea to examine the women's side of baseball. I figured I'd have to turn to fiction as there wouldn't be enough material for a non-fiction book. Little did I know. My office wall, lined with file drawers stuffed with interviews, photos, and newspaper clippings, would later demonstrate that non-fiction would suffice just fine. I found the stories I discovered compelling, inspiring this lifelong fan to get busy and spread the news that women have long been a part of every aspect of baseball, despite the constraints and mores that sought to keep it a man's game. It was downright thrilling to discover Ella Black, a Pittsburg (yes, it was spelled this way in the nineteenth century) woman whose regular column "A Woman's View" in The Sporting Life reported on the seminal 1890 season during which the upstart Players' League challenged the established National League. Then there was South Dakotan Amanda Clement's 1904 entrance into five years of paid semipro umpiring in the Upper Midwest. I was able to interview both Toni Stone and Mamie "Peanut" Johnson about their playing days in the Negro Leagues. Unfortunately, Connie Morgan, the third woman to play in that league, died before I could reach her. As for Marshall's film, I learned that she had run into difficulty raising money for the project—the concern being who would pay to see a movie about a bunch of women playing baseball during World War II? Plenty of people, it turned out. The movie went on to become the only baseball film in history to top $100 million in revenue and remains among the most beloved of the genre. You can read more about that here, in Kelly Candaele's reflections about his mother and aunt, Helen and Margaret Callaghan, whose story was central to Marshall's movie. [End Page xi] ________ In 1993, when I attended my first Society for American Baseball Research national conference in San Diego, I walked into a roomful of men. Barbara Gregorich, the author of Women at Play, and I were the only women presenters. Was I intimidated? Yes, until men like Andy McCue welcomed me into the brotherhood. And when I attended the NINE Spring Training Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, the following year, I experienced similar collegiality from Bill Kirwin, the founder of this journal and its accompanying NINE Spring Training conference, as well as Larry Gerlach, Steve Gietschier, and later David Block, Lee Lowenfish, John Thorn, and so many others. In Cooperstown, Tim Wiles's nineteen years as Director of Research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum showed him to be another enthusiastic advocate of the women's side of the game. The same was true of Jim Gates and Bill Simons, the chairs of the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, who welcomed the growing number of women scholars and authors who were discovering that the game they love offers a vast tableau for intellectual inquiry into America's labor relations, immigration issues, urban planning, foreign policy, segregation and race relations, gender and LGBTQ history. After MLB named former major leaguer Billy Bean its first ambassador for inclusion in 2014, it launched the Office of Diversity and Inclusion to good effect in the years since. The contents of this issue of the journal demonstrate just how much times have changed. Some may ask, why devote a special issue to the subject of women and baseball? Why not just leave us to take our place alongside our male colleagues without further ado? Several reasons: If ever there were a time in our divided country to celebrate the ability of diverse Americans to work together, it's now. Over the past thirty years, the men and women at the NINE Spring Training Conference have presented their work in a collegial environment, followed by time spent together that Bill Kirwin considered so essential: "field research"—attendance...