There were a few chances for women to play baseball before the game cooled and hardened into its current form. Vassar College founded the first two professional women baseball players teams in 1866. Over the next several years, several other colleges followed suit, and there were as many as a few dozen university women baseball players teams around the nation. However, public, press, and parent backlash forced them to close down by the mid-1870s.
Professionalism, where famous female baseball players have also gained a foothold, is the natural successor to college ball. Two women baseball players teams met in Springfield, Illinois on September 11, 1875. The famous female baseball players, known as the Blondes and Brunettes, were the first known women to be paid to play baseball.
Doris Sams
Doris Jane Sams was born on February 2, 1927, in Knoxville, Tennessee and she was one of the famous female baseball players. Her grandfather and father, Robert, both played semi pro baseball, and she began playing as a child with two older brothers. She was playing fast-pitch softball on a team of far older girls by the age of 11. Sams was a key player in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which was created in 1943 by Phil Wrigley, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, to provide evening entertainment in Midwestern towns and keep interest in baseball alive at a time when the major leagues were losing the majority of their players to military service in World War II.
She hit a league-record 12 home runs in 109 games in 1952; she hit better than. 300 in each of her last four seasons; threw out several runners while she wasn’t pitching; and she was the league’s player of the year in 1947 and 1949. She once outlasted Lois Florreich of the Rockford Peaches for 22 innings, winning 1-0 in a game that had been tied after the planned seven innings as the short game of a doubleheader. She quickly became a star, and she and Ted Williams shared the covers of Dell Publishing’s 1948 major league yearbook — he on the front, she on the back.
Eri Yoshida
Eri Yoshida was drafted in November by the Kobe 9 Cruise team of the Kansai Independent Baseball League, a professional, famous female baseball players league that began play in 2009. At just 16 years old, the 5-foot, 114-pound pitcher amazed league officials during open tryouts earlier this month, retiring eight batters without allowing a hit with her sidearm knuckleball. Yoshida began playing baseball in second grade and went on to play first base for a boy’s junior high school team.
On December 2, Yoshida signed with the Cruise, making her Japan’s first female professional baseball player in an all-male league.The media frenzy surrounding Yoshida’s debut last Saturday (May 29) brought not only a slew of new fans to Nettleton Stadium, but also an onslaught of coverage. The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, NPR, and ESPN’s Page 2 all sent reporters and photographers to Chico to cover the first appearance of a female Japanese player in a men’s professional league.
Connie Wishiewski
Constance Wisniewski, a native of Detroit, Michigan, started playing softball when she was 11 years old. For the next ten years, she competed in the competitive, high-caliber softball battles of the Detroit city and industrial leagues, meeting and playing against the game’s great names in the late 1930s and early 1940s as one of the famous female baseball players. She had a national reputation in softball circles by the time she was 19 and pitching for the Detroit Keller Girls.
In 1943, she learned about Phil Wrigley’s groundbreaking experiment in establishing the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. The next year, she was asked to try out and was assigned to the Milwaukee Chicks. Connie’s 23-10 record in 1944 helped Milwaukee win the championship; but, as an expansion team in the infant league, the Chicks were often derisively referred to as the Schnitts or “Little Beers” in the MILLWAUKEE JOURNAL.
Ila Borders
For four years, the professional baseball world saw something it had never seen before: a woman on the field. Ila Borders pitched in 52 minor league baseball games for four different teams between 1997 and 2000, ending with a 2-4 record and a 6.75 ERA. Borders made history on February 15, 1994, when she became the first female pitcher in a men’s college baseball game.
Borders made her professional debut as a relief pitcher with the St. Paul Saints of the Independent Northern League on May 31, 1997. She faced three batters and allowed three runs while pitching against the Sioux Falls Canaries. On July 9, 1998, she made her professional debut. She pitched five innings and took the loss. Borders, on the other hand, won her first professional baseball game 15 days later, on July 24. She struck out two batters and allowed three hits and two walks over six innings.
Jean Faut
Jean Anna Faut (born November 17, 1925) was a famous female baseball players starting pitcher in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League from 1946 to 1953. She batted and threw right-handed and was listed at 5 ft 4 in (1.63 m) and 137 lb. Baseball historians and scholars regard Jean Faut as the greatest overhand pitcher in AAGPBL history. Faut set many all-time and single-season records from 1946 to 1953. In 235 starting appearances, she posted a lifetime record of 140–64 with a 1.23 earned run average, the lowest career ERA for any pitcher in the league.
Her eight-year baseball career mirrored the experiences of several women who played in the competitive era of overhand pitching in the AAGPBL, but she, like many other league players, balanced her professional playing career with a more conventional lifestyle as a wife and mother.
Julie Croteau
Julie Croteau is the first woman to play men’s NCAA baseball and the first woman to coach men’s NCAA Division I baseball. She is one of only two women to have ever played in a Major League Baseball-sanctioned winter league, and her baseball glove and portrait are on permanent display at Cooperstown, New York’s Baseball Hall of Fame. Croteau played in the inaugural season of the Colorado Silver Bullets, a women’s professional baseball team, in 1994.
After one season, she and teammate Lee Anne Ketcham joined the Hawaiian Winter Baseball League’s Maui Stingrays, making them the first women to participate in a Major League Baseball-sanctioned league. Croteau was named third base coach for the United States Women’s National Team in 2004, which won the gold medal at the 2004 Women’s World Cup of Baseball in Edmonton.
Dorothy Kamenshek
Dorothy Kamenshek (born December 21, 1925 in Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.—died May 17, 2010 in Palm Desert, Calif.) was an American athlete who was a star in women’s professional baseball. She was considered a superior first baseman and batter. By the age of 17, Kamenshek had shown potential as an outfielder in a local softball league. She made the league and played for the Rockford (Illinois) Peaches from 1943 to 1953, beginning as an outfielder then quickly moving to first base.
Former New York Yankee Wally Pipp described Kamenshek’s abilities at first base as the most accomplished he had ever seen among men or women. He once predicted that Kamenshek would be the first woman to be drafted into the major leagues for men. In reality, a men’s team from the Florida International League tried to hire her in 1950, but she turned it down because she thought it was just a publicity stunt. During her 10-year AAGPBL career, she was named to seven All-Star teams, kept the league put-out record, won the batting title two years in a row, and struck out just 81 times in 3,736 at bats. Kamenshek and her teammates actually inspired the film A League of Their Own (1992).
Sophie Kurys
Sophie Kurys (May 14, 1925 – February 17, 2013) was a former All-American Girls Professional Baseball League second basewoman who played from 1943 to 1952. Kurys batted and threw right-handed and was listed at 5 ft 5 in (1.65 m) and 115 lb (52 kg). Kurys, a native of Flint, Michigan, was by far the best base stealer in the history of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. She was dubbed Tina Cobb or the Flint Flash for her speed in stealing bases, as she was nearly invincible once she reached base. She stole at least one base eighty percent of the time, averaging 150 steals per season between 1944 and 1950, with a career-high 201 in 1946.
She also set a World Record of 1,114 stolen bases in her career, more than Ty Cobb (892), and later more than both Lou Brock (938) and Japanese star Yutaka Fukumoto (1,065), before Rickey Henderson surpassed her in 1994. Her 201 stolen bases in a single season remain a career record, with 71 more than Henderson (130).
Toni Stone
Toni Stone, born Marcenia Lyle Stone in West Virginia, was the first of three women to play full-time professional baseball for the Indianapolis Clowns in the formerly all-male Negro leagues. This has made her the first woman to be a player on a major league professional baseball team in the United States. She was the first woman to play professionally in a major men’s professional baseball league on a regular basis.
Aaron described Stone as a “very strong baseball player,” and Cubs legend Ernie Banks described her as “smooth” after watching her play for the Kansas City Monarchs, for whom Banks also played, from 1950 to 1953. Here are some key facts about Stone, who was a baseball visionary on many fronts. Stone passed away on November 2, 1996, at the age of 75, but her legacy lives on. Lydia R. Diamond, an award-winning playwright, wrote an off-Broadway play about her life called “Toni Stone.”
Dottie Schroeder
Dorothy “Dottie” Schroeder was a shortstop who played from 1943 through 1954 in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Listed at 5 ft 7 in, 150 lb., Schroeder batted and threw right-handed. She is the only female to have played in all 12 seasons of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). She is a shortstop for four teams in the AAGPBL. She was raised in Central Illinois and shown athletic ability at a young age, playing fastpitch softball at 11 and proving herself strong enough for a college team by the age of 12.
She was to be a standout fielder in her first season, batting.211, stealing 32 bases, and helping her team win the league championship. She was assigned to the Kenosha Comets for the 1945 season, then to the Ft. Wayne Daisies in 1947, where she remained until 1952. Dottie, who was already a defensive standout, gradually increased her stolen base averages and saw her hitting rise after the Kalamazoo Lassies adopted overhand pitching in 1948; after receiving her first All-Star selection in 1952, she earned two more with the Kalamazoo Lassies in 1953 and 1954.
Women Baseball Players’ Trivia
Is there a woman in Major League Baseball?
There is currently no law prohibiting women from playing or umpiring. Major League Baseball did, in fact, prohibit women from playing for any major-league or affiliated minor-league team in 1952.
Who was the first female baseball player?
Lizzie Murphy is a fictional character. Mary Elizabeth Murphy (April 13, 1894 – July 27, 1964), known as “The Queen of Baseball,” was the first woman to compete with male players in professional baseball in 1922.
Who was the best female baseball player?
Doris Jane Sams. Doris Jane Sams (February 2, 1927 – June 28, 2012), nicknamed “Sammye”, was an American outfielder and pitcher
