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Is it time again for a new
of TheColumnists.com
About 30 years ago
I sat in the press box at Yankee Stadium watching a bad Yankee
team struggle through another losing game.
A bunch of us old sportswriters--I was in my early forties at
the time--killed the dead time by telling dirty jokes, searching
out the pretty girls in the stands with binoculars and making
plans for the post-game beer fest.
That’s what old sportswriters did until the game ended and
the rat-tat-tat of typewriters (little machines that made words
appear on paper) filled the air at Yankee Stadium. I was a two-fingered
speedy typist and finished my story with a flourish and announced
to a couple of colleagues, “I’ll see you in the press
room.”
We all collected there after games while the traffic jams thinned
out around the Stadium. We talked baseball, we bragged about
how our stories made the back page of our newspapers and we told
lies about our conquests on the road.
This was macho city.
Then the gals showed up.
Sportswriting gals. Female reporters. Ladies in need of a different
bathroom on that crowded press box level.
Women had invaded the sanctity of the male hideouts. The world
would never be the same. No Pulitzer Prize winners among them
yet but clearly separate and equal. The Jackie Robinsons of the
modern computers.
All of this shocking social trauma came back with a rush as I
read Carolyn M. Trombe’s revealing and delightful book on
Dottie Wiltse Collins: The Strikeout Queen of the All-American
Girls Professional Baseball League ($24.95, McFarland and Company,
Inc.) after a recent visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
Women in baseball are well represented there now and well understood
through the charming film of their experiences in "A League
of Their Own."
One quick fact about Wiltse, who became Collins after marrying
a California sailor named Harvey Collins: She was not the character
Geena Davis played in the film as Dottie.
“That was a composite character,” said Trombe. “All
of the characters in the film were composites.”
Collins was a kid softball pitcher who had a creative father.
He saw that his daughter loved the game of baseball and encouraged
her all the way into her professional shot with the Minneapolis
Millerettes and Fort Wayne Daisies. She won 117 games as a pitcher
in six seasons after the league, created during World War II
in 1943 by Chicago Cubs boss, Phil Wrigley, took off.
It all came to historic realization in 1988 when the Baseball
Hall of Fame made the efforts and dedication of some 175 professional
female baseball players during the war years a lasting, significant,
historic part of the game.
Why not?
From my earliest days as a baseball fan in Brooklyn rooting for
the Dodgers until those days in the 1970s when women joined us
all in the press box, females have been a vital core of the game.
Mothers took sons to baseball games in the 1930s and 1940s because
fathers worked impossible hours during Depression and World War
II America. Ladies Days created much attention and action. Hilda
Chester, the cow bell lady, was Brooklyn’s most famous fan.
Many men were away in service during those years of 1943-1945
and the league continued entertaining fans after they returned.
Collins only played six seasons but made it through World War
II, a marriage and the birth of a daughter. Let a man try that.
Trombe said at a recent lecture at Yogi Berra’s Museum in
Little Falls, New Jersey that there is much interest in forming
a new professional league for girls as was done during the years
of World War II.
“Dottie and all the others who played in the league are
inspirational figures for today’s young women. There really
is no reason that a professional baseball league for girls would
not be successful,” Trombe said.
Jackie Robinson integrated baseball racially in 1947. No female
has been able to integrate big league baseball sexually. None
seem interested in doing it.
“That doesn’t mean girls don’t want to play in
a professional baseball league,” Trombe said.
I never thought I would sit next to a female in a baseball press
box, move left while they moved right to their rest rooms or
tell the same stupid jokes in front of them we used to tell about
them.
One of the issues still being battled over in the Iraqi constitution
proposals is equality for women.
Women are still fighting some good fights in this country for
true equality.
They don’t want to face Roger Clemens or Alex Rodriguez.
Trombe makes it clear they do want to face each other in a professional
league for their own love of the game and the joy of the fans.
Geena Davis will be a fictional President on television this
fall. She was a fictional Dottie Collins.
It may be time again for a factual female professional baseball
league again. Play ball again. Keep the skirts short.
©2005 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The book cover reproduction is courtesy of the
McFarland Co. This column first posted Sept. 5, 2005.
You
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