In a 1931 exhibition, Jackie Mitchell silenced the greats back-to-back. It sparked still-ongoing debates over legitimacy and opportunities for women in baseball
The Sultan of Swat sounded exasperated. “I don’t know what things are coming to,” Babe Ruth sighed during spring training in 1931.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen if they begin to let women in baseball,” he elaborated to reporters. “Of course, they will never make good. Why? Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play ball everyday.”
The next day, Ruth and Lou Gehrig were struck out back-to-back by a 17-year-old girl.
Making their way home from preseason in Florida, the New York Yankees had stopped off in Tennessee for an exhibition game against the minor-league Chattanooga Lookouts. The Lookouts handed a debut to a promising young pitcher with precise control, a quirky side-arm delivery and a vicious sinker. Her name was Jackie Mitchell.
The strikeouts of two all-time greats sparked still-ongoing debates over the legitimacy of Mitchell’s achievement and the general lack of opportunities for female players.
Mitchell was summoned from the bullpen in the first inning. In front of a 4,000-strong crowd, Ruth, an Associated Press reporter wrote at the time, came to the plate with “a wry smile playing at the corners of his mouth”. A New York Times writer implied that it was all theater: “The Babe performed his role very ably. He swung hard at two pitches then demanded that Umpire Owens inspect the ball, just as batters do when utterly baffled by a pitcher’s delivery.”
Ruth struck out looking and was said to have hurled his bat while somehow “registering disgust with his shoulder and chin”. Gehrig then struck out after “three hefty swings”. Mitchell came out of the game after walking the next batter, Tony Lazzeri, and the Yankees went on to win 14-4.
Asked in a postgame press conference if the strikeouts were genuine, Mitchell was reported to have “retorted with a gaze of utter scorn and a contemptuous silence”. As Lapham’s Quarterly noted, Ruth and Gehrig enigmatically kept mum on the matter.
There is cause to be suspicious. The occasion had been scheduled for April Fool’s Day, though it was postponed by a day because of bad weather. And the Lookouts were run by a tireless promoter and showman known as the Barnum of the Bush Leagues. A former Major League Baseball pitcher and scout, Joe Engel became president of the Lookouts in 1929 and opened a new ballpark – Engel Stadium – the following year.
Desperate for publicity as he sought to boost attendance during the Great Depression, Engel made the Lookouts the Savannah Bananas of their era.
He famously traded his shortstop, “Binky” Jones, for a turkey “because the turkey was having a better year”. He then served the bird to critical sportswriters, offering them a free lunch and telling them, “You’ve been giving me the bird, so now have one on me.”
So Mitchell’s signing was undoubtedly an exploitative publicity stunt, but that does not necessarily mean that the strikeouts were staged. (Though Engel did have an affinity for hoaxes: he would later pretend to carry out a phone call with Adolf Hitler at home plate for the entertainment of a wartime crowd.)
One explanation promulgated at the time by male sportswriters was chivalry: it would have been ungentlemanly to have humiliated the kid by launching the ball into the stratosphere. “Babe Gallantly Strikes Out For Benefit Of Girl Hurler,” read one headline. But that explanation does not take into account professional pride. While being struck out by a girl might have appealed to the media-savvy Ruth’s sense of fun, Gehrig was a more earnest character. And Mitchell clearly had talent.
Born in Chattanooga on 29 August 1913, the 5ft 8in lefty was a gifted all-round athlete who learned baseball basics from her father and played for Engel’s all-female team (somewhat inevitably named the Engelettes). The story goes that she was taught to throw her signature “drop” pitch by a neighbor in Memphis – “Dazzy” Vance, a Hall of Famer who led the National League in strikeouts for seven seasons in a row.
