“She uses an odd, side-armed delivery, and puts both speed and curve on the ball. Her greatest asset, however, is control. She can place the ball where she pleases, and her knack at guessing the weakness of a batter is uncanny.” - The Chattanooga News

It was a bit of serendipity. Yesterday, as our own Sarah contemplated her trip down to the American South, I mentioned that I had a faint recollection of owning a Chattanooga Lookouts hat as a wee lad. The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that this couldn’t possibly be true. Why would a Japanese kid growing up in Staten Island wear the paraphernalia of a AA-Southern League baseball team? Where would I have gotten such a thing, having never been to the state of Tennessee?

But as I sat around my apartment last night, programming my DVR to record my usual TV shows for the week, I noticed a program that I had never heard of before called “Amazing Sports Stories“. The episode that will be airing tonight in the NYC-area (MSG-Plus, I think) will cover the life of Jackie Mitchell, perhaps the most famous female baseball player in history. And yup, she played for the Chattanooga Lookouts. What are the odds? So I think I need to appease the baseball gods and spend some time today talking about Jackie.

No one really seems to know exactly when she was born, but it’s believed to have been around 1913. Her interest in the game came from her father, but, if the story is true (I have a sneaking suspicion that 50% of baseball stories from this era are flat-out false), her skills came from Dazzy Vance, her next-door neighbor and Hall-of-Fame pitcher who played most of his career with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1920s. While he was still a minor leaguer, Dazzy became impressed with what little Jackie’s arm was capable of doing with a baseball at such a young age - she was apparently roughly seven or eight years old.

As she grew older, she became known as a talented athlete around Memphis, Tennessee and, at the age of sixteen, she joined a women’s baseball team across-state in Chattanooga. And like so many great baseball stories of the era, it took an owner of a minor-league baseball team for this story to become a legend.

Joe Engel, known as the “Barnum of Baseball”, was the owner of the local professional team, the Lookouts. He was the kind of man who would have his players take the field on Opening Day riding elephants. He once traded his shortstop (a guy named Johnny Jones) for a turkey. Literally. In 1931, Engel apparently came upon Mitchell playing in Georgia. Jackie was by then a seventeen-year old lefty pitcher, who was more than capable of handling her own playing against men. The Lookouts owner signed her to a contract in late March, mostly as a publicity stunt.

Just a few days later, on April 2nd, the Lookouts played an exhibition game against the New York Yankees - a team that featured Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Joe Sewell, Tony Lazzeri, Earl Combs, Lefty Gomez, and of course, The Babe. When the Chattanooga starter, Clyde Barfoot, struggled to get through the stacked Yankees lineup, Jackie was called into the game in relief. To face Ruth. And what followed will be remembered forever:

“(Ruth) watched her first sinker dart low for ball one. Mitchell followed with a sinker on the outside corner, which the Babe swung through and missed. Grinning, the “Sultan of Swat” swung at the next offering and missed for strike two. The next pitch was another sinker on the corner of the plate, which Ruth watched sail by for called strike three. At that point, according to The Baseball Chronology, the Babe “kicked the dirt” and “gave his bat a wild heave” as he stormed unhappily to the dugout.”

As if that were not enough, Mitchell then had to go up against Gehrig as well. But the “Iron Horse” followed suit, unable to touch Jackie’s sinker, and struck out on three pitches. A seventeen-year old girl had struck out Ruth and Gehrig on seven pitches combined.

Mitchell ended up walking Lazzeri (another Hall-of-Famer) next, and was then removed from the game. She wouldn’t play in a professional, organized game ever again, thanks to the (ahem*bigoted jackass*ahem) Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who, as Commissioner of baseball, voided Jackie’s contract soon after her debut, claiming that the sport wasn’t meant for women. And of course, the man then went on to continually bar black men from playing as well. What a guy.

Jackie continued playing in barnstorm leagues, playing for a team called House of David, whose biblical name made sense after you learn that all the men had ridiculously long beards. But she ended up retiring early at the age of 23, when she became supposedly fed up with being a sideshow.

I sometimes wonder why there aren’t more women like Jackie Mitchell. Of all the major American sports (football, basketball, hockey, sumo), baseball seems to be the one most suited to having women play alongside men. I’m fairly certain that Marla Hooch could have taken Bob Feller deep. But then I think of good ol’ Keith Hernandez. And it all makes sense.

I was g-chatting with my buddy Alex the other day. We were having an online conversation about Barry Bonds and Alex was saying that he thought the whole * thing is ridiculous…

Me: Letting Bonds get away with using steroids isn’t fair to players like Ken Griffey, Jr., who are clean.

Alex: I think in an ideal world we would have completely clean players records to chase, and the record would really mean the same thing from one generation to the next, but there is such a huge history of cheating in baseball, and different rules of the game for different eras, that I think Roger Maris’s home run season really should have put an end to any nonsense about asterisks or special rules.

Me: But what about Ken Griffey, Jr.!

Alex: it is unfair to Griffey, but baseball records are not about fairness, they are about watching someone do something (regardless of where, how, or why they do it) that is unprecedented.

I think Alex is right. You wanna talk about fair? Here’s something I dug up while reading about Babe Ruth on Wikipedia:

Another rules change that affected Ruth was the method used by umpires to judge potential home runs when the batted ball left the field near a foul pole. Before 1931, i.e through most of Ruth’s most productive years, the umpire called the play based on the ball’s final resting place “when last seen”. Thus, if a ball went over the fence fair, and curved behind the foul pole, it was ruled foul. Beginning in 1931 and continuing to the present day, the rule was changed to require the umpire to judge based on the point where the ball cleared the fence. Jenkinson’s book (p.374-375) lists 78 foul balls near the foul pole in Ruth’s career, and the research indicates at least 50 of them were likely to have been home runs under the modern rule.

If Ruth had played under the same rules we use today, he would have had about 764 home runs in his career, instead of 715. And Bonds would still be chasing Ruth, rather than about to pass Aaron.

Oh, and here’s an interesting piece that appeared in Editor and Publisher. Michael Witte, an illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, Sports Illustrated and The Wall Street Journal, says that he thinks Bonds’ elbow pad has helped him as much as the steroids. Witte lists six ways the protective device gives Bonds an unfair advantage. Here’s just one of the six:

The apparatus is hinged at the elbow. It is a literal “hitting machine” that allows Bonds to release his front arm on the same plane during every swing. It largely accounts for the seemingly magical consistency of every Bonds stroke.

Crazy stuff!

Long story short, I think we could come up with a million reasons that Bonds 755 home runs aren’t legit. Does that mean we shouldn’t care about the steroids as much? I can’t decide.

During his career, Babe Ruth played in 13 seasons in which an MVP was awarded. In one of those seasons, 1914, he only played in five total games. In his last season he only played in 28 games. During the remaining 11 seasons, how many MVP awards did Ruth win?

The Boston Red Sox have a long history of trading away promising young pitchers who then go on to become renowned sluggers.  First there was Babe Ruth. And now there is… Bronson Arroyo?

Bronson’s hitting prowess first gained notice earlier this year when he smacked two dingers in his first two games in the National League. This Saturday he was at it again, going 3 for 3 with a double, 2 singles, and 4 runs batted in against Andy Pettite and the Astros.  Oh, and Arroyo also pitched 6 innings without allowing and earned run to lead the Reds to a 7-5 win.

“Bronson has some good bat speed,” said Reds manager Jerry Narron.

“His hitting was incredible!” gushed Reds catcher David Ross.

“He obviously was seeing the ball really well,” lamented Astros pitcher Andy Pettite.

But alas, before we can start demanding the Reds move Arroyo to the outfield so he can hit every day, it is worth noting that in his previous 27 at bats, going back to his second homer on April 11, he had gone 0 for 27, and had had only 6 hits in 84 career at bats coming into the game.

“I’m probably going for another 20 strikeouts in a row after this,” Arroyo said after the game.

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As an aside, the Reds would not have won the game at all if Ryan Freel had not made a ridiculous circus catch in the bottom of the 9th with two Astros on, crashing into the fence in deep left-center on the dead run to rob Mike Lamb. If you can track down a highlight of it, it is truly a sight to see. 

 

 

 

 

In a recent Philly News poll, 612 people were asked who they thought the greatest homerun hitter of all time was: Aaron, Ruth or Bonds.

56 percent said Ruth, because he set the standard.

36 percent said Aaron, because he hit the most homeruns.

2 percent said Bonds, because he hit 73 homeruns in one season.

6 percent said “other”.