Baseball Can Make Us Laugh
The Bloomer Girls
Smokey Joe Wood
The popular movie, A League of Their Own (1992), was based on the players of the All American Association of Girls Professional Baseball League which was formed during the war years of the 1940s. But girls were playing professional baseball long before then. The Bloomer Girls started playing in the early 1900s. In the book The Glory of Their Time, Smokey Joe Wood, a dominant fast ball pitcher for the Boston Red Sox from 1908 to 1915, tells his story of his first professional baseball game in Ness City, Kansas. Back in his era community baseball team games were a source of immense entertainment in small towns. .
“I might as well just take a deep breath and come right out and put the matter bluntly: the team I started with was the Bloomer Girls.
One day in September, this Bloomer Girl team came to Ness City, Kansas. The girls were advertised in posters all around Ness City for weeks before they arrived, you know,and they finally came to town and we played them. Well, after the game, the fellow who managed them asked me if I’d like to join them and finish the tour with them. There was only three weeks left on the trip, and he offered me $20 if I’d play the infield with them the last three weeks.
“Are you kidding me,’ I asked. ‘Are you off your rocker?”
“Listen,” he said. “You know as well as I do that all those Bloomer Girls are not girls.
The third baseman’s real name is Bill Compton, not Dolly Madison. And the pitcher, Lady Waddell, sure isn’t Rube Waddell’s sister. If anything, he’s his brother.”
“Well, I figured as much,” I said. “But these guys are wearing wigs. If you think I’m going to put a wig on you’re crazy.
“No need to,” he said. “With your baby face, you won’t need one anyway.”
“Fact is there were four boys on the team: me, Lady Waddell, Dolly Madison, and one other. The other ones were girls. In case you are interested, by the way, the first team, Rogers Hornsby (Hall of Fame third baseman) played on was a Bloomer Girls team too. So I am not in such bad company.”
Going forward to 1931, the barnstorming Bloomers of Lookout Mountain were still playing and took on the New York Yankees in an exhibition game in Chattanooga. A relief pitcher named Jackie Mitchell was called in to face Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. Jackie threw a high arching drop ball and struck out Gehrig in four pitches. Up stepped the mighty Babe. Three times he swung and three times he missed.
Babe Ruth was not happy. He allegedly yelled at the umpire, kicked the dirt, and threw his bat after being called out on strikes. After the game, Ruth is quoted as saying, “I don’t know what’s going to happen if they begin to let women in baseball. Of course, they will never make good. Why? Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play ball everyday.” Major League Baseball Commissioner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, took Ruth’s side on the issue and voided Mitchell’s contract to play with the Lookouts, claiming baseball to be “too strenuous” for women.
Jackie Mitchell, Bloomer Girls