 David is a local San Francisco baseball historian and antiquarian whose research and writings have shed new light on the distant origins of the game. So let me welcome David up to the podium and we're going to hear about early English baseball. Thank you Marlene and thanks for everybody coming here today. In June 1885 a newspaper in Liverpool, England reported that members of a local organization, the Liverpool Association of Science and Art, traveled to the countryside for an afternoon's picnic. According to the newspaper, after taking tea, the members adjourned to a lawn where, quote, several games of old English sport rapidly and cheerily succeeded each other, the ladies proving the victors in the game of baseball, unquote. Many of you may consider it an oddity for women to have been playing baseball in England during the late Victorian era. You may also consider it strange for the game of baseball itself to be labeled as an old English sport. This report from Liverpool, however, was not an aberration. In 1888 another newspaper described how members of the Ladies Liberal Association of Portsmouth, England, played baseball at their summer picnic and in 1893 yet another paper disclosed that members of a local branch of the Young Women's Christian Association in the county of Surrey had played baseball at their annual outing. But before you conjure up images of English women in Victorian dresses wearing catchers masks or taking practice swings as they await their turns at the plate, be advised that the baseball being played at these various picnics was not our familiar American style version of the game. Instead the women on these occasions were practicing a far older form of baseball, one that by the late 1800s had already been played in England for more than 150 years. It was truly an old English sport. It was in fact the original form of baseball, one that gave rise to all other versions of the game including our American national pastime. I've been hot on the trail of this original English baseball for more than a dozen years. When I completed my book on the origins of baseball nearly a decade ago I had just begun to scratch the surface of its buried history. I knew that there had been a few references to a game called baseball in England in the 18th century and that it continued to be played through the first few decades of the 19th century and I was aware that the word baseball appeared sporadically in English literature such as Jane Austen's well-known mention of it in Northanger Abbey. But my limited knowledge of English baseball back then led me to come to some mistaken conclusions about it in my book. One such error was that at the time I surmised English baseball to be essentially the same game as the English game of Rounders. I hypothesized that when Rounders came along in the early 19th century it was simply a new name for the older game of English baseball. I now know better as I found ample evidence that showing that the two pastimes although related were in fact clearly distinct from one another. The game of Rounders was always played with a bat while my research shows that English baseball in its pure form did not employ a bat. The players would strike the pitched ball usually a very soft ball with their bare hands. English baseball appears to have been a simpler game than either Rounders or American baseball requiring a smaller playing ground and perhaps less athletic athletic effort by its players. There is no evidence it was ever governed by standardized rules or that it ever produced organized clubs or associations. It was more of a social game played informally on a lawn or at a picnic. However English baseball was made up of the same basic elements found in more familiar forms of baseball such as pitching batting fielding and base running and there is little doubt that it was the direct ancestor of both Rounders and American baseball. A second misunderstanding I had about English baseball at the time I wrote my book based on the evidence that available was that I believed it had largely gone extinct by the middle of the 1800s. Now though I know it survived much later than that. Searching through millions of pages of books and newspapers in newly available digital databases I found dozens upon dozens of references to English baseball from the second half of the 19th century and even a few from the first decade of the 20th century. Yet despite its longevity the game has become almost completely forgotten. Very few Americans have heard of English baseball and surprisingly even fewer people in Britain. This is due in part to its having been largely a rural game played mainly in the villages and small towns of southern England while remaining virtually unknown in London and other large cities. However another factor was almost certainly responsible for why the game remained so far under the radar and why almost nothing about it has been passed down to the present time. Most of the people practicing and enjoying baseball in Victorian England were female while most of those chronicling the history of that era were men. Much of the surviving evidence of English baseball from that period is found on the pages of provincial newspapers from rural English English counties which by the mid 1800s had begun to greatly expand their coverage of the local social activities of ordinary people. These papers reported on summertime events held by all sorts of organizations such as political and workplace groups, fraternal societies and especially the annual outings of church Sunday schools and other schools. Often newspapers listed the specific games that these that were played on such occasions and these frequently included baseball and among these reports of baseball playing a fair number indicated that the players were girls or women. When I discovered this further evidence of female baseball play in England I was really not that surprised. I knew about the strong record of girls and women playing the game going back to its earliest days in the 1700s. In Lady Harvey's well known 1748 description of the family of the Prince of Wales playing baseball she observed quote the ladies the ladies as well as the gentlemen join in this amusement unquote and in a diary entry from 1755 a young man named William Bray described going to the house of a lady friend to play baseball. He helpfully named all of the people who participated in the game and a majority of them were women. Jane Austen was only one of several women authors novelists in the early 19th century whose female characters played baseball. These included Mary Russell Mitford who described girls playing the game in at least four of her works of the 1820s and the 1830s. Another woman author the science writer Jane Haldeman Marcette cited the past time in an 1819 physics textbook designed specifically for girl students. As the 19th century progressed the number of references to girls and women playing baseball continued to rise. In 1850 a newspaper article described an outing of several hundred school children held to celebrate the birthday of a local vicar's daughter in Hampshire County quote after tea the boys amuse themselves by playing cricket in other games and the girls by playing at baseball unquote. A similar scenario played out in an 1855 newspaper report of an outing by school children in Buckinghamshire quote the children enjoyed themselves for several hours the boys with cricket football etc. and the girls with baseball trap bat and swings. I found the same pattern all through the 1800s where boys were identified as playing cricket and girls as playing baseball. Of course often newspaper articles just reported that children were playing baseball without reference to their sex and occasionally the baseball players were identified as boys but overall the pattern was clear. English baseball throughout its history was predominated by girls and women quite unlike in the United States where female participation in baseball has nearly always encountered strong societal resistance. It is frustrating to me that English baseball did not leave more of a record of itself. There are no known surviving rule books for the game if any ever existed in the first place and it is not described in any children's magazines or sporting journals of the 19th century and of the dozens of books on games and sports published in Britain during that same time period English baseball is mentioned in about one and almost totally totally obscure book entitled Jolly Games for Happy Homes published in 1875 and in this just in this description of English baseball it is clear from the author's use of the pronouns she and her that the players of the game were girls. That baseball was originally a female oriented game is quite fitting from a historical perspective. After all according to Agilis a Greek woman scholar from the second century BC it was a woman who invented ball games in the first place. Agilis said this inventor was now Sissa a young woman written about by Homer in the Odyssey. According to Homer now Sissa was a princess who went down to the river with her ladies and waiting to wash them clothes and while the clothes were drying on the riverbank they played a game of ball. According to Chapman's early 17th century translation of the Odyssey the game now Sissa and her and her maidens were playing with a stool ball which in the early 1600s was the most widely played ball game in Britain. Two centuries later in the 1800s another English translator of Homer updated the name of Nassau's ball game to the then popular rounders but before that in the late 18th century a young Englishman had a different interpretation in a journal article about Homer's characters written by a college student in 1788. Now Sissa was described in very glowing terms. According to that author quote she now Sissa is the very pattern of excellence. She drives fore in hand and manages manages her whip with utmost skill. She sings most charmingly and in fine it's not about playing a game of baseball with her attendance. Unquote. Now since we're all baseball fans here I'm sure we all accept that young man's interpretation of Nassau's ball game. By his reckoning and given that Homer is estimated to have written the Odyssey around the year 850 BC I see no reason why we can't all agree that baseball has been part of women's DNA for nearly 3,000 years. Thank you. Next up is Dorothy Mills. Dorothy is going to talk about early the early days of college women baseball players. Girls and women played baseball in this country earlier than most people realize and they did it despite the common belief at the time that women were too weak for baseball or anything active. Two centuries ago teenage girls of the middle and upper classes were supposed to act ladylike at all times. That means young women were supposed to sit still, embroider, paint pictures, pour tea and learn to play the piano. Doing anything else was considered unseemly. However scholars have discovered that girls often played with boys anyhow. Some girls preferred the active games of boys to something boring like ring around the rosy. Girls not only watched baseball they played baseball at school recess as early as 1840s. Girls were supposed to be too weak for advanced study too. Physicians warned that the stress and strain of college study would damage their health. But by the time of the Civil War the general opinion began changing. It seemed pretty obvious that at least some girls could and should be able to study at a high level. There weren't any girls colleges so some well-to-do people decided to set up special colleges for them. In New England that's where these new institutions of higher education for women first grew up. Colleges like Mount Holyoke Smith and Vassar were in place around the 1870s just after the Civil War. Because women were considered too weak for anything active the founders of these colleges hired instructors in gymnastics which was supposed to strengthen them so that they could perform college work. Eventually the girls got bored with exercises and they asked if they could have sports instead. There are the gymnastics. Rather reluctantly the instructors gave them gave their permission but sports were not part of the curriculum. The girls were completely on their own in establishing baseball clubs. Vassar girls formed their own baseball clubs in the late 1860s. Here they are in the costumes they played in. By 1875 the baseball clubs on campus numbered anywhere from three to eight depending on which girl was telling it. The games took place in a corner of the campus that was protected by trees because a lot of people disapproved of their play and the girls didn't want their parents to know about it either. At Smith College the girls decided to play baseball in 1878. A student named Minnie Stevens wrote about it later recalling that because they had no equipment they were on the lookout for a baseball bat. Once while taking a walk in town Minnie and some of her fellow students came upon a baseball bat lying on the ground. Minnie thought how fortuitous she picked it up and began to swing it delightedly. And they walked on but suddenly they heard an awful yell. Behind them they saw what looked about two dozen little boys chasing them shouting give me that bat. So Minnie dropped the bat and the girls ran as fast as they could escaping from their pursuers and deciding they'd have to get their equipment in some other way. And they did because by the 1890s Facebook was so popular at Smith that each residence building had a team and the girls played interhouse baseball. At Mount Holyoke students played baseball beginning in the 1880s and so did the students of Bryn Mawr. In Oakland California a female seminary was changed into a women's college in 1871 and named Mills College where the first outdoor team sport was baseball. These girls games must have made a wonderful picture because they played in their regular long skirts, corsets, soft shoes, blouses made up to look like the baseball shirts of the time and little baseball caps which they perched on top of the pinned up hairdos that were the style of the day. Baseball the way these girls played it was not a dainty sport. The hair fell down. Girls had baseball batted into their stomachs. Glasses got broken. They went home with skin knees and they woke up stiff and sore. But they loved the game and some of them became skilled players. There was even one secondary school for girls called Miss Porter School in Connecticut that had a baseball club in 1867 the same year as Vassar. In the 1860s Miss Porter gave the girls permission for baseball on condition that they play well back from the road that was in front of the school so that the public wouldn't know about their games. College girls already knew how to play baseball when they entered in the 60s or 70s. Their phys ed teacher didn't have to teach them because the college students in furnished equipment girls had to write home to their brothers to send them balls and bats. Families then were unusually large so most girls had brothers and baseball was the most popular sport among young men at the time. Baseball had actually become the American national game in the 1850s before the Civil War. After college some of these women players from New England colleges joined women's athletic clubs that were just opening for them in the 1890s and there they could play baseball privately. Others had baseball fields laid out on land that their families owned so that they could play baseball there with their friends. But girls of this era with less privileged backgrounds who couldn't attend college often formed baseball clubs on their own and found spots in town to play. Some decided that if they're going to play they ought to charge money for people to watch the way some men's clubs did and that meant being brave enough to perform in front of men who might make fun of them but they did it anyway. Some of these young women who played baseball had real baseball skills. Others just joined clubs for the chance to travel. The famous Bloomer girl teams of the 1890s are examples of these traveling women's clubs. Some of these women's teams hire a couple of male players to play on their teams. Here's a well-known star player of the 1890s called Lizzie Arlington. Lizzie was so good she was hard to play for experienced men's professional clubs. She even played for a minor league team. She wore what looked like the swimsuits of the day. Long stockings worn under knee-length skirts attached to short sleeve tops. Around the turn of the century a few women were playing regularly for successful men's professional touring teams. This is Elizabeth Murphy of Rhode Island who played for 17 years with a men's professional team that traveled all over New England and eastern Canada. As you see by this time serious women players had adopted standard baseball suits which made it easier for them to move and gave some protection to their bodies when sliding it to base. Now when the women's professional league of the 1940s and 50s was formed the players lacked that protection because as the exhibit you're going to see shows the league founders required the players to wear skirts that ended above their knees in order to emphasize their femininity. So those players often walked around with large purple bruises on their thighs from sliding. The college girls of New England the working class girls who decided to form women's teams and play for money and the young women who got to play on men's pro teams all helped pave the way for present-day players like Robin Wallace who recently retired for regular play in a New England League women and girls she looks more modern. Nowadays the best women players not only play in women's leagues they join elite teams that play in tournaments against other women. Some are even selected for the American women's national baseball team. You ever hear of it? No nobody have heard of it. It plays the women's teams of other countries like Japan Venezuela Canada Australia Taiwan Cuba and the Netherlands all of which have national women's baseball teams. So in a century and a half girls and women who love to play baseball have shown that they are well able to handle the American national game and we're learning that baseball is part of a hidden history of women. Thank you. The Negro Leagues last from 1920 to 1960 that's a very specific time period and certainly African American women were playing long before the 1920s. One of our earliest opportunity is going to be the Dolly Vardens but the difficulty in tracking down African American women playing is think about how difficult it is to find women playing and you were just talking about the 19th century and looking for names and things that nature often only identified by first names and often not identified necessarily by color either and so trying to track down what we know is fairly limited but fairly interesting and these are just a few highlights that I'm going to talk a little bit about in terms of some of the women that have played. The only living member of this group is up in the far corner Mamie Peanut Johnson lives in Washington DC played in the 1950s in the Negro Leagues and so these are some of the women that we can talk about. One of the earliest references that we have is to team known as the Dolly Vardens who played in the Philadelphia and New York area and there were essentially two teams that we have identified and they were known simply as the Dolly Vardens one and the Dolly Vardens two. Very exciting and the only way you could tell the difference at least from the newspaper accounts was one team wore blue belts and the other team wore red and so that was the identification of the first and second team. They were named of course after a literary character and there were white women's baseball teams with the same name as well and so that sometimes confused reporters and so as you can imagine makes the story even a little harder to tell but best we can tell that's as much as we know we have some names beyond those we've been able to put first and last names but of course you get married you left your name behind so tracking them down as they moved forward made it very difficult. As near as we can tell on the Dolly Vardens the best player on the team was Ella Harris. Ella Harris played the infield and I say the infield because on any given account that we found she may have played first base she may have played second base she may have played third base so she played the infield and seems to have been sort of the organizer of setting up their games and so early and similar kinds of uniforms to what we saw in some of the earlier pictures but that's about as much as we know unfortunately about the Dolly Vardens playing in the late 1860s and early 1870s for the most part in the New York and Philadelphia area and continuing to add more accounts I found a number of references I think I'm up to 16 now in terms of references to these two teams okay but unfortunately most of those references never gave you final game scores. Our next major reference then jumps to 1908 to a team at a Springfield Ohio with the manager a local woman by the name of Sarah Brooker and she was in charge of the creation of what they had hoped was going to be an eight member league at the time and they tried to secure monetary support and more importantly newspaper coverage because that's how they would succeed from a local businessman by the name of CI Mayberry and he was willing to give them the newspaper coverage he just couldn't come up with the monetary resources to make it happen and so the league never actually took off the way they had hoped. The team that seemed to have the most success and then continued on to play independently was a team out of Louisville the owner of the team was a Mrs. Harry Newberry her husband was a local businessman and it seems that within the African-American community this was her opportunity as one of the papers said for her to go out and play while he worked and so that was how this was kind of viewed at that particular point so the other team that we know a little bit about from this early stage of the St. Louis block Broncos playing in 1910, 1911 and one reference that I have seen to them now in to 1912 a local former baseball player himself Conrad Kepler who was the manager of the team their most famous player was a young lady by the name of Lily Mae Jenkins outfielder and pitcher very common in both women's and particularly in the Negro leagues as we get move on for players to play multiple positions and not an uncommon idea at all and so she was their most prominent player we found one the first major account was them losing to a men's team in East St. Louis by a score of six to four and in that particular game it is accounted that Lily Mae Jenkins hit three home runs no other evidence to support that idea but that's what the newspaper account said they talked about this strapping woman and as descriptions are always very interesting the article ends by asking who her parents were that let her out to play not an uncommon reference that you find okay and we do have found one picture of the St. Louis Brank Broncos in a newspaper but terrible condition you can barely see any of the players at all it's the only picture we've ever found of the team the quality of the newspaper not very solid unfortunately hey as far as individuals in addition to players one of the things that we find interesting is how many got involved in the management side and one of the very earliest is Olivia Taylor who comes out of Birmingham she started her professional life as a school teacher and she ended up owning the Indianapolis and managing and taking care of a lot of the day-to-day works of the Indianapolis ABC's might sound familiar to anyone who's interested in the Negro leaks her husband was the longtime manager owner of the Indianapolis ABC's gentlemen by the name of CI Taylor and the Taylor family had much involvement in addition to Olivia and CI for their four sons four brothers all participated in the game as well one of them being Ben CI's brother and he eventually decided that she had no business running the team and they whole legal dispute that developed and he took the team away from her because he said she shouldn't have any business running the team she should go back to doing what she was supposed to be doing and she finally it was a long battle and she finally just gave up and she said fine but she did run the team for nearly three years before she gave up and said I've had enough of this if this is what you want I'll get out of your way and that's what eventually unfortunately happened for her and in 1922 the last year that she had the team contrary to what Ben thought she was running the team into the ground the record that team had was clearly a winning record so to me that doesn't look like she ran the team into the ground and financially they were a success and so that was her last full season with the Indianapolis ABC's we also then move into a couple of other individual players in the early part of the Negro Leagues one of them by the name of Pearl Barrett who played in 1917 with the Havana Stars independent traveling team that traveled all over basically playing any opponent who would play them and for them having a female player guaranteed a little bit of a larger audience because she was a little bit of a novelty and if you're a traveling team you need to bring the fans out and so she served that purpose for them we don't unfortunately know a great deal more about her than that and that's again fairly typical of a lot of these women we have her listed in the rosters in the end of March April and through May and then she disappears from the roster have no idea if she got injured she got cut she just didn't want to travel with the team there's no indication when they moved out of her areas that may be as simple as what happened out of the Chicago area because that's primarily where she played family may not have wanted to let her go it was not something that most families were willing to admit that their daughter was playing baseball and so that may have been as the simple answer hey we move then to a young lady by the name of Isabel Baxter who played a second base in the 30s for the Cleveland Giants one of the cities in the Negro Leagues that has the claim to fame of having the most Negro League teams in it ever was Cleveland that's not necessarily a good thing because it meant their teams folded pretty regularly and so they ended up with nine teams in the Negro Leagues and Isabel Baxter played second base through two seasons and we have a number of accounts like this one that tell you what this comes from the Cleveland Gazette in June 1st of 1932 and so it gives you a little bit of an account of how they talk about her as the clever little girl second baseman that's the first description in the newspaper about her and that's that's the more typical kinds of accounts you'll notice just by looking at it no box scores none of those kinds of things that's very typical unfortunately so tracking down more information is a little tough Ruth Calloway played for a very small rather unknown team called the Portsmouth Black Sox second baseman again her claim an opportunity to connect was that her manager was a gentleman by the name of Yellow Horse Morris who played for the Detroit Stars for a number of years she's credited in newspapers sitting in the 1933 season in a late almost end of the year account that she hit 275 which is perfectly reasonable and so that's kind of an interesting statistic for her the couple of other small teams that we know about there's an athletic club out of Maryland that played they originated in Maryland ended up playing most of their games as they traveled and they ended up getting stuck in Pennsylvania because they couldn't get enough money to go back home not an uncommon story either there's lots of those their overall manager was a young lady who was only 19 years old at the time and that may have been part of their problem it seems she got taken for the money now moving ahead just a little bit in 1935 we've got a woman by the name of Clara Jones Boston ABC's team that played locally in the New England area for years and she was the own manager of that team and owner she did a bit of both through late 1934 1935 into early 1936 but probably the most famous of all is Effa Manley and that is a name I see some heads nodding that people should recognize she has a number of unique qualities there she is with her husband Abe and again her in the dugout a variety of pictures of Effa she of course has the most unique opportunity to be the only woman fully elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame to the present day we hope to see that sometime change but at the current point that is her unique claim to fame she was elected in 2006 with the 17 Negro Leaguers that were elected that year been a number of books written about Effa and there she is as both children's books and otherwise her own book here on side that she wrote talking about her own experiences while she was in the game and the players that she mentored etc as you can see born in Pennsylvania died out here in California parents and this is the interesting issue with her and that probably looks rather shocking to you and you see that but it is true and I can talk more about that if anybody asked questions but essentially she grew up in a family where her sisters and brothers were all African-American and she thought she was too turned out her mother had had an affair and so she was did not have the same father that her other brothers and sisters did she didn't figure that out till she was 16 years old and had a choice to make at that point as to what she was going to do and she married Abe Manley who was the owner of the Brooklyn Eagles eventually taking over the team running it with him and she definitely ran the team with him there's no doubt that she was involved in fact she was probably more involved than he was and of course the Newark Eagles won the Negro League World Series under her leadership and so that is her claim to fame as well a couple other owners and I just give you their names because I want to jump real quick to one final there are a number of owners most of them in this particular case Hilda shorter inherited it from her father which was a unique idea she was a doctor and took over the team and she eventually sold the team again for the same reason that many of them did hassles got to be too much you didn't want to have to keep up with all of the things that were happening hey but the other key thing and this is what I want to end on is that there were a number of female players in the Negro Leagues that are also famous from the 1950s most famous of those was Marcenia Lyle Stone better known as Tony Stone getting ready there in the locker room she played for the Indian absence counts and the Kansas City Monarchs she was a sports star in general she played for a number of men's teams out in the Twin Cities area because that's where she grew up and so there's a baseball field now named after her out there she went on to play American Legion ball and then for a team a couple teams out here in the San Francisco area before ending up with the New Orleans Creoles and then eventually in Kansas City and so that's her with the Creoles and the Pelicans in the 50s and she generally hit somewhere between the 250s and the 260s over her career got a decent paycheck as you can see in the 50s and this is where the debate started as to whether these women were just a curiosity or could they really play and as you can see she hit 243 made the all-star team so I think that would say she had at least a decent opportunity and wasn't just a curiosity the other two women who played with her this is where I went and Constance Morgan Connie Morgan and out of Philadelphia played for the Indian absence clowns but Connie Morgan's better claim to fame comes in the last and where she's more well known she played for the honey drippers the Philadelphia basketball team that was very very famous and that's really her claim to fame she played for the year in the Negro Leagues along with Tony Stone and Mamie Peanut Johnson she also played for the Philadelphia Rockettes they were the two dominant women's basketball teams at the time and then the last of that group is Mamie Johnson and Mamie came out of South Carolina was a pitcher Connie Morgan was an outfielder Mamie Tony Stone was an infielder and Mamie was a pitcher and she was better known as peanut because she stands about five foot two I will end with just a simple her favorite story is to talk about one of her very first experiences when she had to pitch against Luke Easter and Luke Easter of course big strapping comes up to the plate and basically does the usual you go home you need to go back to the kitchen and she basically according to her account and I'm cleaning this up says I told him to pick up the bat and shut up and she proceeded to strike him out and she said that was the last trouble I ever had that's all you needed to do to prove that you belonged and so that was her story thank you very much twenty years ago next month I picked up my local newspaper The Daily Pilot and learned that a freshman actually a fresh woman named Ila Jane Borders was due to pitch that afternoon for the Southern California vanguards in nearby Costa Mesa California this was great news for the last couple of years I'd been researching and sifting through library archives in search of historical accounts of women who had played baseball women like the people that you've already heard about today and now here it was going to be live in front of me hers is a story that likely could have only have happened in the nineteen seventy to a child born in the nineteen seventies title nine of the a part of the education acts of nineteen seventy two had opened up tremendous opportunity for sports and girl for girls and women by the time I was ten years old in nineteen eighty five even the doors to the little league had cracked open she became a dominant little league pitcher in her hometown of Lama Rada a sports minded Los Angeles suburb and enjoyed a superb season at age twelve with eight home runs and competing pitching actually on an all start team that went to the rest western regionals and they would have gone farther except for the poor kid in center field who dropped an easy pop fly and she said he never played again so she always remembered him in middle school I look competed with sixty boys to make the team which went undefeated two years running she earned MVP honors both years when I last checked with her coach Roland Essingler Essingler he replied that border still holds a number of spots in the school's record book including first in innings pitched and strikeouts in high school she was moved up to varsity for the playoffs towards the end of her freshman year and was named MVP for her senior year her coach Randall Phillips said she had the heart of a quote warrior and quote she moved on to southern California college where coach Charlie Phillips had given her a partial baseball shot scholarship and as far as I can tell she's the first one to get one she played for four years her final season playing at Whittier College and then she looked to where she would go next was anybody going to sign her to a pro contract well we know it would take an independent thinker somebody with the last name of Vec and it was Mike Vec who signed her to his St. Paul Saints actually he invited her to tryouts she didn't have a guaranteed position when she showed up in St. Paul the Saints are part of the independent northern league and she wound up making the team and she spent six weeks there before they traded her to the smaller market and presumed less competitive to lose superior dukes of the same league another reason she was traded is that the Saints were competing for the pennant needed to fill some gaps on their team and in the way these things sometimes go by the end of the season it was borders who found herself on top of the dog pile celebrating winning the pennant with the with the dukes and not the Saints she spent parts of three seasons with the dukes and in 1998 became the first woman since the Negro leagues Mamie Johnson to win a professional men's baseball game and then another that season Mike Wallace profiled around 60 minutes in 1999 I went up to see her pitch and in Duluth and she had a new manager it was very early in the season and he obviously did not want her there and she was really shaky she went sent into relief relief in a disastrous outing and the next day she was released on waivers she wound up getting picked up by the Madison Black Wolf and she posted a 1.67 ERA that year and the following season she she was having trouble making the team I think her spirits were low pretty low by that point and after a short while she went back to Southern California and then went over to the Zion pioneers of the Western baseball league which was a considerable step down and she quit in the midseason worn out and realizing that she was not going to realize her dream of getting into organized baseball as I followed borders career I was always struck by how composed she was on the mound and how easy she made it look she had good fundamentals all of her coaches have stressed that the ones I've spoken with and she had the temperament of a competitor at 5 8 140 pounds of fastball that never hit the 90s she relied on location craft and preparation and as I followed her story I realized that it had never been easy not from the beginning when she first went to sign up for little league she was told to return the next day and when she did she was told that sign ups were closed her father's tenacity got her a tryout and after she pounded a few pitches she was on the team she won the respect of the other guys on the team she played on and her coaches but little league mothers and later the girlfriends of the guys she played against were among her sharpest critics they couldn't standers to see her striking out their guy she was screamed at chased and ridiculed in college four guys jumped her as she ran the track one night major league clubs toyed with the idea of signing her among the angel among them the angels in the reds but she shot they shied away from the idea too much publicity too much could go wrong with this idea the media was not much of a friend to her either she borders was always amazed at the inane questions she was asked feminists weren't that friendly with her either borders is a born-again Christian and she she wasn't a card carrying flag waving feminist and they wanted her to be and she wasn't and they suggested she should be playing for the Colorado Silver bullets which were barnstorming during the middle 90s for three seasons and she wouldn't do that either she didn't think it made any sense for girls who had mostly played softball to suddenly become baseball players again even though that was their first love and go on the road and play men's teams so it turned out to be right in that I will learn that oh she also kept her Christian faith quiet because she had a mouth that would put a sailor to shame and she knew that was not going to play she didn't want to you know stink up the reputation of the Christian faith she learned that male groupies exist baseball andies let's call them and she learned to be watchful one day she checked into her hotel on the road and walked in and there were two guys standing there the letters she received from people were and I've seen some of them are amazing they range from marriage proposals to death threats and everything between and all she ever really wanted to do was talk about baseball and go out and pitch another game borders left the game at age 25 tired of being broke and burned out and then she did what many many retired players do she laid around on the couch for several weeks asking herself as they do tend to do this is all I ever wanted to do what comes next she had no clue the Hall of Fame and recognized her she'd been inducted to the baseball reliquary shrine of the Eternals and that's not a obscure Southern California religious cult it's a honified baseball populist it's hard to describe finally a good friend of hers told her to get her butt up off the couch and get a life and she turned to firefighting it was a good call for her she was right back in a male arena she felt at home there she loved the idea of doing something that saved lives clay Bellinger is one of her coworkers and the discipline she learned at baseball of course did her in good stead when she went through the fire academy she's in her fifth year with the Gilbert Arizona fire department she still loves the game she plays on her days off and as coach since her college days for the world children's baseball fairer mostly in Asia when she decided to co-write her memoir with me we tentatively titled it making my pitch my life and times in baseball but she didn't want to tell a woe be gone tale of victimization but one that would serve to inspire the girls and women who share her dream of baseball playing baseball coming after her who want to break cultural barriers and who seek to live authentic lives an author I admire Carolyn Hilbrin pointed out in her book writing a woman's life quote lives do not do not serve as models only stories do that and it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by we can all only retell and live by the stories we have read and heard and quote and I would suggest to you that the stories you've heard today the presentations that my colleagues have made and are about to make are part of this record and it's important to be telling these stories they're valuable they mean something they're part of baseball history they're part of human history you know it's it's funny it's been said that there's really only two themes in literature either a stranger comes to town or somebody leaves home and has to find their way back and I can't think of a better vehicle to tell those stories and then through baseball after following I was story for 20 years what have I learned and what has surprised me so much to begin the tenacity of the human spirit and going after someone after something you care about deeply despite formidable barriers that at each step of the way a mentor and or an advocate somehow appeared for Isla borders and they were men who opened the doors and said yes and paved the way whether they were coaches or the scout named Barry Moss who recommended her to Mike Beck there is always a man around and that leads to me my next point that when men and women and girls and boys play together on the field or in any arena you tend things tend to go better it's a better way of sharing the power of of getting the full input of what needs to be done and how we might go about doing it and I can tell you that's true in my family it's true in society from my observations I would suggest that I would say that even in the waning years of the 20th century in America the land of possibilities whited borders have such a hard time living her dream even today I heard from her gosh a couple years ago there isn't a story coming out of Phoenix about a girl who was playing in a high-school team and they came up against a Catholic team and the Catholic team wouldn't play because and this was in the playoffs because there was a girl on the other team and they felt that was inappropriate now this was 2011 or 2012 and I was I rate over it she said this is still going on I can't believe it I was talking to Jim Jim where are you Jim never off last night about a girl in Indiana I mean as just a few years ago little league and you can fill in the details when we have Q&A little league was banned girls and what's so ironic about that is that in 1928 there was a girl who was playing American Legion baseball and she was good and they went all the way into the finals and the next year they changed the rule to eliminate girls they were she was able to play because there was no rule against it so you know almost a hundred years later we're still going through all this and I don't know what else to say that's where we sit thank you a woman's work women wore hats and gloves but not the baseball kind I'm gonna quote from my good friend Dorothy Seymour Mills from one of her books entitled a woman's work in 1949 Mrs. Harold Seymour walked into the sporting news newspaper office in St. Louis and felt all eyes upon her she wore an elegant summer suit that is not Dorothy by the way she wore an elegant summer suit with matching accessories as women wore hats and gloves in those days for all occasions outside the home business or social no other no other women in the office were present rough-looking men in tie-less shirts turned from their typewriters to gaze at her in surprise some nearly knocked over their paper cups or of stale coffee others almost lost their cigars from their open mouths upon returning home with her husband a note was received from the editor of the sporting news upon other things that it's among other things that it said I read professor Seymour to be perfectly honest with you I wondered why a man's who had such a nice looking wife was hauling her around to a basement publication office to check some records Dorothy remembers thinking that it never it must have never crossed the man's mind that a woman might enjoy research even on baseball Dorothy's remarkable book a woman's work contains many kernels of truth and insight as she tells the story of how she not only helped conduct the research of baseball's history but also helped write the three volume work that cited her late husband Harold Seymour as a sole author Dorothy recently wrote to me a very profound statement knowing that I was going to include parts of mentioning her work in in my talk today she said this is recent one reason I identify with women who want to play baseball at a high level is that they and I have been kept from fully enjoying the results of our abilities by men who fail to realize that we belong in our chosen work as much as they do she went on to say because of the gent because of the generation in which I was raised we were taught that women were men's helpers I was easily exploited even after I revealed that I was Seymour's co-author rather than his assistant many men of our generation found it hard to believe just as many men cannot believe today the women can play baseball at a high level of ability even after they have seen them play that's why my popular speech or my most popular speech is called how baseball made me a feminist go Dorothy so following in Dorothy's footsteps is not easy but it's also not impossible there are many women who have written on the topic of baseball and been published there are great books such as Jean Ardales breaking into baseball women in the national pastime also gay burlages women in baseball the forgotten history and Barbara Gregorich women's women at play the story of women in baseball Marilyn Cohen's no girls in the clubhouse the exclusion of women from baseball and Leslie Hefe's books on topics from Sacha Page and the Negro Leeds to the encyclopedia of women in baseball wow that's quite a lineup of course there's my book about a man who lived in the 19th century who lived through some major historical events in our nation's history and actually was not only a witness to that history but participated in it including the founding of the Nicarabacca baseball club of New York in in 1845 so when I was first asked to choose a topic to speak about today knowing that this venue would be a little different than my typical presentation settings I instantly thought of the most common question that I get asked in regard to my book so why this book actually it's I get it in a more eclectic kind of ways than that or what prompted you to write a book like this or so you're a big baseball fan all these questions kind of make me cringe a little because I really want to answer back well why not this book do I have to be a man to be interested enough to research and write about a man who lived in the 19th century and led a very interesting life seriously why not this book would I get asked these kind of questions and if baseball had nothing to do with his story because baseball is known as a man sport I like being asked questions like how long did it take you to research and write such about such expansive topics in American history or what was it like to delve into details about all the historical events from that era or what did you find the most surprising or interesting from all of your research these questions represent that I have the capability of doing such a work regardless of my gender or sports interest to be honest I was fresh out of graduate school when I started researching Alexander Cartwright after meeting his descendants my mind was still revved up from researching and writing my graduate thesis work the topic doesn't really matter and it did not have anything to do with baseball by the way and this was the next step next topic that kind of captured my interest and I felt it was like a mystery to solve or a thesis topic that needed to be substantiated in fact this book led me to work on my next book which has nothing to do with baseball yet something to do with Alexander Cartwright my next book is about Cartwright's daughter-in-law Princess Teresa a Hawaiian princess who married one of Cartwright's sons his from his namesake Alexander Cartwright the third I want to conclude my presentation with a story of a young girl who plays little league baseball not softball baseball her name is Chelsea Baker from Plant City Florida her mother tried to raise her to model in beauty pageants but she was but she was disinterested she told her mother at age five I'll do one and that that was it she she wanted to play baseball she began with t-ball and then on to little league softball but she didn't like softball she liked playing baseball she was the only girl when she joined and played for her local little league baseball team her little league coach was Joe Negro a former American major league right-handed pitcher he taught her to pitch and he also taught her his famous knuckleball Chelsea has said that one of her challenges is hearing all the negative comments that some people say mostly from the parents of other little leaguers she said that it makes her try harder just to prove them wrong Chelsea is approximately 17 right now but in 2010 and I'm not going to show it today but there is a YouTube ten minute like little documentary about her she was when she was about 15 actually when she was offered a professional contract to play with Japan for 40 to $50,000 a year and playing against women twice her age she's that good although taking the offer wasn't the right fit at the time because she was only 15 during her previous trip to Japan she saw a vast difference between women's baseball in Japan and in the US a very vast difference Chelsea stated they have a lot more passion for the game than we do here it doesn't really clarify in that statement whether she's really referring to women's baseball or men's baseball in Japan women's baseball is a popular sport drawing 30,000 to 35,000 fans to venues such as Tokyo Dome during professional games in Japan Chelsea is known as the knuckleball princess maybe someday she will be the first major league baseball knuckleball pitcher and maybe someday I will write her biography the knuckleball princess thank you