Twenty-first in a new series
I have written about women’s baseball before, particularly about on-field heroes like Lizzie Arlington, Alta Weiss, Ida Schnall, Babe Didrikson, and Toni Stone. But today let’s turn our eyes to a modern-day hero, one who is still “at it.” Her initial exploits were of the barrier-breaking sort, donning the uniforms of men’s major-league clubs to pitch batting practice and coaching internationally, but what makes Justine Siegal a pioneer to this day is her work off the field.
Young women played baseball in England a century before anyone thought to play it here. It was played by girls as commonly as it was by boys; often the two played together, as in a documented game of 1755 (see: https://bit.ly/4gerddJ). Writing in 1798, Jane Austen has her heroine of Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, say that she prefers cricket and baseball to reading, at least books of information if not novels.
Like Justine Siegal, turn-of-the-century baseball pioneer Ida Schnall was Jewish and thus, with her New York Female Giants of 1913, doubly an outsider. In that Jewish Baseball vein I could also mention Tiby Eisen and the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), but that story — like those of Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, heroes to different generations of Jews — is one you may know pretty well.
In America, the women’s game was born in the years after the Civil War in an odd amalgam of female athleticism and male lechery, at a time when a “leg act” was the province of burlesque halls and bagnios. Two nines competed in 1868, at Peterboro, New York, an upstate village some seventy-five miles from Seneca Falls, where the women’s suffrage and abolitionist movements were born. Unsurprisingly, the Police Gazette and the Sporting Times depicted the young baseballists as strumpets.
In the next century, the skills of a Maude Nelson or an Alta Weiss, both primly adorned for their eponymous baseball teams, was countered by the short skirts and powder-puff requirements of the AAGPBL. Negro Leagues players Peanut Johnson and Connie Morgan had to make their mark before a male audience in search of novelty.
In June 1952, as a publicity stunt‚ Harrisburg of the Inter-State League signed a woman player‚ Eleanor Engle‚ but she did not get into a game. Afterwards, National Association president George Trautman banned her from minor-league baseball. Dorothy Seymour Mills wrote in Chasing Baseball that Trautman’s ruling came “with the support of Commissioner Ford Frick,” but there is no evidence for his official ban. Of course, a tacit ban — a “gentleman’s agreement” — could have been enforced, as it was for African Americans between 1885 and 1946.
Into these crosscurrents about the prudence and efficacy of women playing baseball came Justine Siegal, who shared Jane Austen’s vision of baseball as a game that could be played by all. Born in Cleveland, she wanted to play baseball in high school but was not allowed to try out. So, she pitched in summer leagues against male opponents and attended, first, Beloit College (my alma mater) in Wisconsin and then St. Olaf’s in Minnesota, from which she graduated. She went on to earn a PhD in Sports Psychology.
In 2009, Siegal was hired as a coach of the Brockton Rox of the Can-Am League, becoming the first female coach in the history of male professional baseball. In 2015 the Oakland A’s announced that she had been hired as a guest instructor for their club in the Arizona Instructional League, making her the first female coach in Major League Baseball. She has also pitched batting practice for the Rays, Cardinals, Astros, Guardians, and Mets, but let’s leave behind her barrier-breaking in uniform and get to her signal triumph, Baseball For All (baseballforall.com).
In 2010 she had founded that nonprofit organization to empower, educate, and create opportunities for girls to be in baseball … not softball, into which baseball-loving girls will tend to be steered by age 12 or so. Siegal was the Baseball Coordinator for the Amazon Prime show A League of Their Own. She has played a major role in helping with MLB’s Trailblazer Series and Breakthrough Series, giving additional opportunities for young women.
In 2022 Siegal won SABR’s Dorothy Seymour Mills Award for Lifetime Achievement in Women’s Baseball, following Claire Smith. Succeeded as a “Dorothy” winner by Maybelle Blair, she awaits announcement, later this month, of the next recipient.
For guys, baseball is the nation’s soap opera as well as its religion and mythmaking machine. But women are more apt to love the game for its own sake, and to play it with perhaps a heightened sense of beauty. Therein may lie the future of women’s baseball, following the explosion of interest in women’s basketball at the collegiate and professional levels.
The paradox of professional basketball is that while the players have become better, many believe the game has become worse. I’ve taken part in this debate for more than fifty years now, as long as it’s been since the Knicks last won a championship. And supporters of Magic, Bird, and Jordan have suggested that while the Knicks of 1969–70 and 1972–73 were fun to watch, they represented the apex of the old game rather than the dawn of the new. They were right.
Aficionados of men’s basketball today also note that players can soar into realms unvisited by the earthbound lads of yore and could probably run rings around them if they were to square off in cyberspace. So what explains the ascension of the women’s game? They move the ball and the players. Has the basketball of the golden age — the game of give and go, of pick and roll, of action below the rim — survived anywhere except in our memories? In the WNBA.
Might this reflection prompt a new interest in women’s baseball, a game characterized by neither the home run nor the strikeout … the beautiful game that old-timers like me will recall? Here’s hoping.
PIONEERS: Justine Siegal was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.