Women’s pro baseball celebrates 75th
Seventy-five years ago today, some 280 women from all over the U.S. and Canada converged at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The brand-new All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) had invited the best women softball players to final tryouts. At the end of a grueling day, 60 were selected “to become the first women ever to play baseball,” according to the AAGPBL players association.
Thirteen days later on May 30, “league play officially began with South Bend playing in Rockford and Kenosha playing in Racine.” The league’s first four teams played 108 games during the inaugural season. That fall, the Racine Belles won the AAGPBL first World Championship title after defeating the Kenosha Comets in a five-game series.
The AAGPBL was the brain child of chewing gum manufacturer and owner of the Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball team, Philip K. Wrigley. Women’s teams playing in major league parks would keep interest in the sport alive and stadiums solvent while the professional baseball players were heading off to war, Wrigley reasoned.
Though about 500 Major League Baseball players eventually served in the military in World War II, league play was never suspended. Even so, the AAGPBL continued to draw crowds, survived the war and played through the 1954 season.
In 1988, the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., opened a permanent exhibit, “Women in Baseball,” honoring the 600-plus AAGPBL players. On Mother’s Day 2006, the museum unveiled a statue dedicated to Women in Baseball. Sculptor Stanley Bleifeld modeled the statue after a photograph of the late Racine Belle Dorothy “Mickey” Maguire Chapman at bat.
An all-star catcher for Racine, the Milwaukee Chicks, Grand Rapids Chicks and Muskegon Lassies, Chapman was also the subject of Mickey & Me, the fifth paperback in the Baseball Card Adventure series by Dan Gutman. She was one of the AAGPBL players on whom were based the characters in the 1992 motion picture, A League of Their Own starring Geena Davis and Tom Hanks.
Just before game time on June 10, 1944, Mickey Maguire learned in a phone call from her mother that her husband, Cpl. Thomas J. Maguire had been killed in action in Italy. She took the field and didn’t tell her teammates until after the game. (She learned two months later that her husband had in fact survived.)
Celebrations have been taking place all over the country and in Canada commemorating the AAGPBL’s 75th anniversary. The players association is holding the commemorative reunion in Kansas City, Mo., Sept. 6-9. Part of the event at the Westin Crown Center is open to the public. From 1-4 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 8, former players will sign autographs and pose for pictures.
“Autograph sessions are very popular,” says Rick Chapman, AAGPBL association president, pointing out their advanced ages.
Most are in their 80s and even late 90s. One of the oldest is Mexican-American all-star catcher, outfielder and third baseman Margaret Cryan, née Villa. Cryan, who is 93, played for the Kenosha Comets from 1946 to 1950. She was one of 11 Latinas in the league, according to José Alamillo, professor of Chicana/o studies at California State University Channel Islands.
The general public interested in attending the entire anniversary reunion can purchase associate memberships on the Website, www.aagpbl.org. The association also welcomes tax-deductible donations to help players attend the event in Kansas City.
