A few years ago, our daughter Elizabeth rather suddenly grew interested in the story of Jackie Mitchell. She had not expressed interest in baseball at all up to that point. When we took her to ballgames, as I’ve written before, she would bring a book and so lose herself in it that when I would try to point out something on the field, she would briefly look at me a bit bewildered, as if she had totally forgotten that we were at a baseball game.
But then, one day a few years ago, maybe when she was 12 or 13, she became fascinated with the story of Mitchell, the girl who struck out Babe Ruth.
“Have you written about her?” she asked me. I said that I had not.
“How can you not have written about her?” she asked after that.
And so, we learned about Mitchell together. This is an updated version of the story we put together.
Mitchell was born in 1913 in Chattanooga, Tenn. Her father, Joe …
“Hey, Jackie Mitchell’s father has the same name as you!” Elizabeth said.
Yes. Joe Mitchell was an optometrist. As the story goes, the Mitchells moved to Memphis for a time when Jackie was very young, and they just so happened to live next door to a minor-league pitcher named Dazzy Vance. It must have been in 1917 or 1918, when Vance was playing ball for the Memphis Chickasaws in the old Southern Association.
Vance was, himself, an impossible story. He always said he got the nickname “Dazzy” as a boy because, like a cowboy he once met, he often used the expression, “Ain’t that a daisy,” only he pronounced “daisy” as “dazzy.” He seemed destined to spend his baseball life kicking around the minor leagues because of arm problems, only in 1920 he rather famously smashed his hand on a table during a poker game and felt such extreme pain that he had to rush to a doctor. The doctor fixed Vance’s arm.
And in 1922, at age 31, Vance got his first real shot at the big leagues for Brooklyn. He led the league in strikeouts in ’22 … and for the next six years. He was the National League MVP in 1924. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1955.
Mitchell said she learned about pitching before all that happened. It seemed that one day, she was out throwing a rubber ball against a wall when Vance happened to see her.
“What do we have here?” Vance said. “A southpaw?”
Mitchell was a southpaw and Vance was smitten. “I guess I’ll have to make a pitcher out of you,” he said. Vance taught her a couple of things, including how to grip the baseball in order to throw what was then called a dropball. That would become Mitchell’s pitch. She practiced it every day.
Vance, it seems, had no memory of the exchange — but he admitted it sounded like something he would do.*
*There was another version of the story that instead of Vance, Joe Mitchell took his daughter to see Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was impressed enough that he wrote a letter about her baseball prowess that Joe took to different organizations.
Mitchell always had big dreams. When the United States began sending women to compete in swimming at the Olympics in 1920, she announced to her parents her intention of being an Olympic swimming champion. When Amelia Earhart made the newspapers for her flying exploits, Mitchell wanted to become a pilot. Mostly, though, she played ball. She was small — she grew to be about 5-foot-4 and maybe 130 pounds — but driven. As a pitcher, she developed a quirky windup and her pitches had a bit of movement.
She was good enough that at 17, she was invited to enroll in Kid Elberfeld’s famous baseball academy in Atlanta. Mitchell’s story is surrounded by so many legends — Vance, Ruth, and, yes, Elberfeld. They called him the “Tabasco Kid” — “Kid” for short — because of his spicy hot temper. As Elizabeth and I found, Elberfeld was a very good player but he was famous for getting hit by pitches (he twice led the American League) and threatening to kill the pitcher who hit him.
Elberfeld was a baseball guru. As a coach, he worked with a number of stars, including Hall of Famers Luke Appling, Bill Terry, Travis Jackson and Burleigh Grimes. It was Grimes who always said he picked up his nasty temper from Elberfeld.
But people are a lot of things: Elberfeld was a devoted feminist. He raised all five of his daughters to be athletes, at one point putting them together as the “Elberfeld Sisters basketball team.” And he wanted to make a ballplayer out of Mitchell. He could see that she didn’t throw hard enough to get the ball by anybody, but he thought her delivery was awkward enough to perhaps fool hitters and he loved her attitude. Mitchell threw strikes. She didn’t shrink away from anybody. She didn’t lose confidence in herself even when she gave up hits. He wished some of the other pitchers he worked with had half her guts.
And so, the Tabasco Kid mentioned Mitchell to Joe Engel, who is yet another absurd character. In 1968, a reporter wrote this about him:
“You name it, and Joe Engel has done it. He ran away and joined the circus at age 13; went on a vaudeville stage with Al Jolson at 14; was a Washington Senators bat boy at 15 and a major league pitcher at 18. … He once led an elephant down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington; played before a record house at the old Palace Theater in New York; struck out Home Run Baker; owned a horse that raced in the Kentucky Derby; imported bullfrogs from Louisiana so he could hear them sing at sunset and tied coconuts on palm trees to help sell real estate in Miami Beach.”
There’s another Engel story that Elizabeth and I loved: He once traded a shortstop he hated named Johnny Jenkins for a live turkey. He then had the turkey killed and fed to sportswriters, who complained that the meat was a bit tough. “Well,” Engel said, “what do you expect for that trade?
Engel was an astute baseball scout — he signed Joe Cronin, among others, for Washington into the 1920s — but he was also a showman, Bill Veeck before Bill Veeck. When he heard about Mitchell, he knew exactly what he would do. He would sign her for his Chattanooga team. And because he had already arranged for the Yankees to come through Chattanooga for a 1931 exhibition game, he would have her pitch against Ruth.
The game was scheduled for April 1 — April Fools’ Day.
“Curves?” one reporter wrote about Mitchell in the lead-up to the game. “Yes, sir!”
“(She) has a swell change of pace and swings a mean lipstick,” wrote another.
When Ruth was asked about Mitchell, he did not hold back.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen if they begin to let women in baseball,” he said. “Of course, they will never make good. Why? Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play ball every day.”
Ruth then asked how big Mitchell was, and when told her size he yawned and stepped out of his chair.
“Well, I don’t know what things are coming to,” he said.
It rained on April Fools’ Day in Chattanooga so the game was pushed to April 2. Mitchell entered the game in the first inning to face Ruth.
Ruth tipped his cap.
Mitchell powdered her nose.
Her first pitch was high and outside, a nervous pitch. But the next two were in the strike zone, and Ruth swung wildly and missed both. He turned to the umpire to complain that she was putting something on the ball, but the umpire said play on. With the count 1-2, Mitchell flung some sort of pitch high and outside. The umpire called strike three. Ruth threw his bat to the ground.*
*Video of the strikeout pitch (go to 4:30 to see the at-bat) makes it look like the pitch was definitely high and pretty far outside.
After Ruth went back to the dugout, Mitchell struck out Lou Gehrig on three straight pitches, all swinging strikes. She walked Tony Lazzeri on four pitches before being pulled from the game. Ben Chapman waited on deck; he would say that he wanted to get up there and wanted to hit away.
In the days after striking out Ruth and Gehrig, Mitchell was briefly famous. She was in all the papers. There were offers for her to pitch across America. There, in the midst of the Great Depression, she represented a bit of fun news, a diversion from the daily struggle.
And from the first minute all the way to today, almost 90 years later, the same question has tantalized, haunted, infuriated and tormented: Did Mitchell really strike out Ruth and Gehrig, or did they whiff on purpose?
You will be unsurprised to know that Elizabeth was not especially interested in exploring that line of thinking. Why do people want to ruin something so fun, so cool, so good for women in a sport that has had so few women involved?
“Twas a great show,” a Nashville newspaperman with the unlikely name of Blinkey Horn wrote. “But the curtain has fallen now. Miss Jackie Mitchell can go back to reading the comic strip in which ’tis said she takes such a keen delight. But likely she belongs doing that. A girl pitcher is funny. Her literature ought to be in the funny papers.”
“She couldn’t pitch hay to a cow,” Engel said after he cashed in at the gate. “But both of them let her strike ’em out.”
“Of course it was,” Chapman said when asked if it was a setup.
“The Yankees prepared to quit Chattanooga tonight, convinced that feminine domination of baseball still is a long way off,” the Nashville Tennessean reported. “They look over Jackie Mitchell, girl pitcher, and their judgment of her was that she was a nice girl who ought to go back to jack straws and basketball.”
“Don’t you say anything to hurt this little girl,” Ruth said. “She’s all right.”
Mitchell herself was unshaken by it all.
“Well, hell, they were trying, damn right,” she said. “Hell, better hitters than them couldn’t hit me. Why should they’ve been any different?”
One of the stories to come out of the Mitchell game is that commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis himself voided Mitchell’s contract the day after, stating that baseball was “too strenuous” for women. That is something interesting about Landis: A whole lot of the lousy things that happened in baseball get blamed on him. Segregation. Disallowing women from playing the game. Etc.
But upon closer inspection, it seems possible that Landis wasn’t responsible for a lot of that stuff. I’m not saying Landis was some sort of progressive. He most certainly was not. But in this case — like in numerous others — there seems no proof at all that Landis ever had anything to say about Mitchell’s or women’s place in baseball. It’s much more likely that Engel, having gotten what he wanted out of Mitchell, wanted a good reason to release her. And so he simply used Landis as an excuse.
In fact, two weeks after Mitchell struck out Ruth and Gehrig, another woman named Vada Corbus signed a contract to play baseball for the team in Joplin, Mo.
“Babe Ruth was right when he said there ought to be a law or something about women becoming professional baseball players,” wrote one columnist. “What’s the game coming to? … Maybe the old-timers are right when they say the game is being softened up by modern methods.”
Corbus, alas, was signed as a publicity stunt. She was a well-known actress and singer around Joplin and the team signed her to bring in a few fans.
Mitchell continued to play baseball on the fringes; she spent some time playing for the famous House of David team. The House of David was a religious society and commune in Benton Harbor, Mich.; its founder, Benjamin Purnell, believed that sports — and in particular, baseball — offered an opportunity to learn discipline.
Its players were famous not only for their long hair and long beards, but because they were good. Mitchell held her own, according to the newspaper accounts. She also wore a fake beard at times.
“I predict a future for women in baseball,” she said in 1934. “The day isn’t far off when many women’s teams will be organized. I hope, though, that the feminine contenders will manage to retain their femininity in the sport as I have been able to do.”
In 1937, she grew tired of the road and the sexism and the whole thing. Mitchell quit baseball when she was just 24. She was asked to come back and play in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, but she refused. She felt burned by baseball. She had only wanted to play ball. She died in 1987.
As mentioned, Elizabeth is entirely uninterested in the arguments about how legitimate the whole thing was. She doesn’t care if Ruth was baffled by an unorthodox lefty windup or was just playing around until he actually got fooled by an outside breaking ball or if he fully intended to strike out all along. What difference does any of that make?
What matters is that a young girl in the 1930s, barely a decade after women were given the right to vote, dreamed of playing professional baseball, and against all odds, against all the snickers, against all the prejudice a nation could muster, she made it onto a men’s baseball team and she struck out Babe Ruth! Then she struck out Lou Gehrig! Imagine the awesomeness of that.
That’s what matters. Not long after we wrote this story together, Elizabeth got to meet the great Dale Murphy, a two-time MVP. Elizabeth usually was overwhelmed by such moments, but not this time. She had a question and she was going to ask it:
“Do you think there will be a women’s baseball player in the major leagues?” she asked with a force in her voice I had not often heard before. Murphy smiled; he admired the passion.
“I think it will happen in your lifetime,” he said.
“Definitely,” Elizabeth said.
By Joe Posnanski
