Jackie and the Juniors vs. Margaret and the Bloomers by Barbara Gregorich
NOTE: This confirms the Kid Elberfeld was Jackie Mitchell's coach in Chattanooga.
On Apri12, 1931, a 17-year-old southpaw for the minor league Chattanooga Lookouts faced the New York Yankees in an exhibition game. Before a packed Engel Stadium, Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig as 4,000 fans thundered their approval. Mitchell then walked Tony Lazzeri and was pulled by manager Bert Niehoff. Despite Mitchell's heroics, the Yankees triumphed over the Lookouts, 14-4.
Mitchell's stay on the mound was a harbinger of her stay in the minor leagues: dreadfully short. Within two days Baseball Commissioner Landis voided Jackie's contract on the grounds that baseball was too strenuous for a woman. Jackie was devastated: she had hoped to pitch in a World Series and buy a roadster-not necessarily in that order.
Many a baseball fan knows the story. Few know that Mitchell continued to play baseball, and that the following month she pitched in Engel Stadium once again, before another sell-out crowd. Her opponents this time were also "Yorkers"-not the Yankees, but the New York Bloomer Girls. In this second game, Mitchell was again pitching for the Lookouts. Not the Class-AA Lookouts, but a group mustered from former and would-be minor leaguers players who had no place to go because the Depression had reduced the number of minor league teams. Slapped together by Kid Elberfeld, the totality was dubbed the Junior Lookouts, or Lookout Juniors.
Norman Elberfeld had spent 17 ,years in the major leagues starting with Philadelphia in 1898, but spending Barbara Gregorich is the author of Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, Harcourt Brace. most of his career with the New York Highlanders. A shortstop who occasionally played the hot corner, he compiled a lifetime batting average of .271. "Kid" was a shortened nickname, the full one being "The Tabasco Kid." Elberfeld's sizzling temper is revealed by the incident in which he and umpire Tim Hurst exchanged blows. Elberfeld had hit a long ball and slid into second safely, only to have Hurst, the home plate umpire, call the hit a foul ball. The Tobasco.Kid got into such a furious argument with the umpire, repeatedly poking Hurst in the belly to make his point, that Hurst tore off his mask and smashed Elberfeld across the nose with it. Both player and umpire were suspended.
Elberfeld's last year in the majors, 1914, saw him a 39- year-old veteran. He is said to .have mellowed, at least toward rookies-he went out of his way to give them tips and treat them well.
After retiring, the Kid opened a baseball camp in Atlanta. There, players such as Luke Appling honed their skills. Appling attended the Kid's camp in the spring of 1931to improve his hitting, maybe both fair andfoul. Although Jackie Mitchell claimed that Dazzy Vance taught her to pitch when she was six years old, she too attended the Kid's camp.to improve her baseball skills.·Mitchell was the school's first female graduate, and the Kid was proud of her.
With his newly-formed team of Lookout Juniors, Kid Elberfeld booked games throughout eastern Tennessee. Managed by the Kid, the Juniors played against town and semipro teams. As starting pitcher for practically every game, it was Jackie Mitchell who drew the crowds. The Juniors' first opponent was Alcoa, a Tennessee
town lying between Chattanooga and Knoxville. There, according to the paper, "batters were aiming for the fence, but with two away and a man on third, [Jackie] calmly fanned the strapping cleanup willow-wielder, who was swinging from his ankles and fouling them down the third base line like rifle shots."
Elberfeld's charges, as they were called, also won at Lenoir City.
With two victories, the Juniors headed home to face the Penn-Dixies, a top semipro team in the Chattanooga city league. In the first inning, Mitchell walked one. Two infield errors put two more runners on base, and a hit drove in two runs for the Penn-Dixies. But in the second and third innings, it was three up and three down as the Penn-Dixies faced Mitchell's one really good pitch. Described as "nasty" by some, "mean" by others, it was essentially a sinker. Although Jackie gave up one hit and two runs in the first inning, the Juniors blasted the Penn-Dixie pitching. By the eighth inning they were so far ahead that the 56-year old Kid put himself in as shortstop. When the dust had settled, the Penn-Dixies lay defeated, 12-5.
Next Jackie and the Juniors pulverized Rockwood, 34- 6, as slugger Bill Wells, who would go on to the minors, hit his third and fourth homers.
Jackie and the Juniors took on all comers, winning a very high percentage of their games. The team was hot, and the news of its success spread to the North, where on Staten Island Margaret Nabel managed the barnstorming New York Bloomer Girls.
By 1931, Staten Island had been a hotbed of baseball activity for more than 60 years. In the early years, particularly the 1860s, the Island had been a cricket center, and was said to have the best cricket fields in the nation. By 1900, the Island was turning out ships and baseball teams, often from the same dock. The Siscos, sponsored by the Staten Island Shipbuilding Company, were a topnotch semipro team, as were the Alaskas and the Fleet. In 1928, there were 250 baseball teams on the Island, one team for every square mile of land. During the 1920s and 1930s, major league teams-among them the Giants, Dodgers, and Cardinals-came to the Island to play exhibition games.
In 1910, three old-time local players-Dan Whalen, Eddie Manning, and Joe Manning, formed a team in Stapleton, naming it the New York Bloomer Girls. While the New York Bloomer Girls were late in getting started (bloomer teams had been around since 1892) they made up for it by lasting until the end of the bloomer era. Briefly, bloomer girl teams were sexually integrated barnstormers, but most of the players were women. All bloomer teams carried at least one male player, the catcher. A few carried as many as five men. Rogers Hornsby and Smoky Joe Wood played on bloomer girl teams in their youth. Bloomers seldom played other bloomers: instead, they challenged men's town, semipro, or minor league teams.
When the New York Bloomer Girls were formed in 1910, Margaret Nabel was in eighth grade. She graduated from high school in 1914, having played baseball, field hockey, and tennis. It was after her graduation that she was asked by Pat Kelly, a catcher for the prominent Sisco Baseball Team, to pitch for the Siscos against the New York Bloomer Girls. Nabel accepted, but years later she recalled her relative lack of success that first outing: "I had poor Pat jumping all over the place, catching my slants, and the eight bases on balls I handed out sure do not speak well for my control in that game." Toward the end of that 1914 season, Nabel joined the New York Bloomer Girls.
While she continued as an occasional pitcher and outfielder, and while she was a good hitter in the clutch, it was really as a manager that Nabel gained her fame. In 1920, before she was even 25 years old, she took over the New York Bloomer Girls as manager, and from then on the team was always referred to as "Margaret Nabel and the New York Bloomer Girls."
Throughout Staten Island and the other four boroughs of New York City, Nabel was well-known. By playing approximately 50 games a summer up and down the East Coast, from Nova Scotia to Florida, she became well known along the seaboard, also. She was, second to Maud Nelson, the most important person in bloomer baseball, providing women with a chance to play baseball one season...two...five ...or, in the case of several players, fifteen years.
Nabel was very strict, tolerating no nonsense and exercising firm discipline. She had a keen eye for publicity and, as one man who played against her said, "wouldn't take crap from anybody." She was out to make a dollar with the team, and if she wasn't paid in advance of a game, she pulled the players off the field. Like many another barnstormer, she insisted that the playing field be fenced off to prevent freeloaders.
In 1921, her second season of managing, Nabel told a reporter that the New York Bloomer Girls, "use a male battery exclusively, as we feel that no female player can do justice to the pitcher's burden, and you will agree that the catching job belongs to a man, too." Thus Nabel usually fielded a team of seven women and two men.
Over the years, her philosophy on the necessity of a male battery changed, and several of the bloomer women, notably Helen Demarest and Ethel Condon, developed into pitchers. -But Nabel never changed her opinion that women couldn't play in the minor leagues, let alone the majors.
When Jackie Mitchell fanned Ruth and Gehrig on April 2, 1931, it made news everywhere. In Staten Island, Margaret Nabel was asked to comment. On April 4, she responded. "A girl can develop a slow curve, an effective floater, good control, and perhaps everything else that a good male player can show except speed.... While I wish my Tennessee colleague every success, it seems it is just another publicity stunt."
A day or two later, when Nabel read in the paper that Jackie Mitchell's contract had been voided by Commissioner Landis, she offered the young southpaw a contract to pitch for the New York Bloomer Girls. Mitchell turned down the offer.
This either incensed Margaret Nabel or struck her as a golden opportunity. The New York Bloomer Girls, who had never before played in Tennessee, marched into the state and issued a challenge to the Juniors-a weekend game in Engel Stadium. Kid Elberfeld-himself no slouch when it came to making a baseball buck-immediately accepted and Saturday, May 30, was booked.
Perhaps Nabel intuitively sensed that Chattanooga fans, who had seen and heard about Jackie facing opposing male pitchers every day, would be more intrigued by the contest if the home-town hurler had to face a female pitcher. The newspapers loved this angle and played it up big, informing readers that Ethel Condon, 15-year-veteran second baseman and at the same time the Bloomers ace right-hander, was being rested for the big game against the Junior Lookouts. JACKIE HOPES TO ROUT PLAYERS OF HER OWN SEX, announced the headlines.
While the Chattanooga papers concentrated on Margaret Nabel and Ethel Condon, they didn't neglect the other Yorkers. A May 28 edition carried an article on Ginger Robinson. "One of the biggest drawing cards on the New York Bloomer Girls team is Ginger Robinson, a redheaded flash who patrols the hot corner. Ginger has long been known as one ofthe best girls in the baseball game. She picks up scorchers and pegs accurately to first and wields a wicked war club." And in the outfield, Nina "Babe" McCuttun was the team's slugger, good for seven to twelve home runs a year.
As anticipation built back in Chattanooga, Jackie and the Juniors mopped up eastern Tennessee and started in on the central part of the state. On May 25 they suffered a rare loss, to Tullahoma, 8-5, on a late-inning triple. Mitchell, possibly tiring, had given up three runs on three hits and two infield errors.
But three days later, as Chattanoogans were reading about Ginger Robinson, the Juniors were back in form, clobbering Sewanee 13-3, with Jackie surrendering only two singles.
Friday, May 29, the day before the game, the headlines declared,
BLOOMER GIRLS HAVE BEST SLABBER READY FOR LOCALS. NEW YORK TEAM, WITH SPLENDID RECORD, HOPES TO CARRY JACKIE'S TEAM OVER THE FALLS.
Finally, Saturday, May 30: the day of reckoning, Chattanooga vs. Gotham. The game drew a sellout crowd of 4,000-the same number that had attended the Lookouts vs. Yankees game on April 2. Once again, the fans had come came to see the locals against the "invaders from the North."
Jackie Mitchell pitched three innings and held the Bloomers hitless, while her own Juniors got to Ethel Condon for one run in the first and one in the third. At the end of three, the score stood 2-0, Juniors. Unlike Mitchell, Condon went the distance. In the fourth she was hammered for four runs while Stanfield, the Juniors pitcher, held the Bloomers off. In the bottom of the fifth, the Juniors scored another run, but then Condon settled down. With a man on third, Condon fanned slugger Bill Wells. The appreciative Lookout crowd rose to its feet in applause. And the fans applauded for Ginger Robinson when she leaped into the air and snared what looked like a sure base hit to keep the Juniors from scoring.
Stanfield, meanwhile, lost his control and began to walk the Bloomers, resulting in three Bloomer runs in the fifth. At the end of six innings, the score stood 7~3 for the home team.
The seventh and eighth innings were scoreless. In the top of the ninth, the Bloomers threatened, but managed to score only one run.
The line score shows that the Lookout Juniors scored seven runs on eleven hits and five Bloomer Girl errors. The Bloomers, on the other hand, scored four runs on two hits and three Lookout errors. This time, the South stood victorious, defeating the invading Yorkers 7-4. After the big game, Jackie Mitchell continued to play with the Junior Lookouts until mid-July, when she left the team to pitch in the North. After she left, Elberfeld dissolved the Juniors and returned to his baseball camp. Bill Wells went on to play in the Nebraska State League. Other Lookout players returned to city semipro leagues. In 1933 Jackie Mitchell signed with the House of David. She pitched for the bearded ones for four years, then retired from baseball in 1937 at the age of 23.
After the memorable game, Margaret Nabel and the New York Bloomer Girls barnstormed their way back to the Eastern Seaboard. Within three years, Nabel would retire herself and her team. Not just this long-lived team, but all bloomer teams would cease to exist, replaced by softball players. With the ending of the bloomer era came the end of sexually integrated baseball teams-and the end of exciting encounters such as that between Jackie Mitchell and Margaret Nabel.
Mitchell's stay on the mound was a harbinger of her stay in the minor leagues: dreadfully short. Within two days Baseball Commissioner Landis voided Jackie's contract on the grounds that baseball was too strenuous for a woman. Jackie was devastated: she had hoped to pitch in a World Series and buy a roadster-not necessarily in that order.
Many a baseball fan knows the story. Few know that Mitchell continued to play baseball, and that the following month she pitched in Engel Stadium once again, before another sell-out crowd. Her opponents this time were also "Yorkers"-not the Yankees, but the New York Bloomer Girls. In this second game, Mitchell was again pitching for the Lookouts. Not the Class-AA Lookouts, but a group mustered from former and would-be minor leaguers players who had no place to go because the Depression had reduced the number of minor league teams. Slapped together by Kid Elberfeld, the totality was dubbed the Junior Lookouts, or Lookout Juniors.
Norman Elberfeld had spent 17 ,years in the major leagues starting with Philadelphia in 1898, but spending Barbara Gregorich is the author of Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, Harcourt Brace. most of his career with the New York Highlanders. A shortstop who occasionally played the hot corner, he compiled a lifetime batting average of .271. "Kid" was a shortened nickname, the full one being "The Tabasco Kid." Elberfeld's sizzling temper is revealed by the incident in which he and umpire Tim Hurst exchanged blows. Elberfeld had hit a long ball and slid into second safely, only to have Hurst, the home plate umpire, call the hit a foul ball. The Tobasco.Kid got into such a furious argument with the umpire, repeatedly poking Hurst in the belly to make his point, that Hurst tore off his mask and smashed Elberfeld across the nose with it. Both player and umpire were suspended.
Elberfeld's last year in the majors, 1914, saw him a 39- year-old veteran. He is said to .have mellowed, at least toward rookies-he went out of his way to give them tips and treat them well.
After retiring, the Kid opened a baseball camp in Atlanta. There, players such as Luke Appling honed their skills. Appling attended the Kid's camp in the spring of 1931to improve his hitting, maybe both fair andfoul. Although Jackie Mitchell claimed that Dazzy Vance taught her to pitch when she was six years old, she too attended the Kid's camp.to improve her baseball skills.·Mitchell was the school's first female graduate, and the Kid was proud of her.
With his newly-formed team of Lookout Juniors, Kid Elberfeld booked games throughout eastern Tennessee. Managed by the Kid, the Juniors played against town and semipro teams. As starting pitcher for practically every game, it was Jackie Mitchell who drew the crowds. The Juniors' first opponent was Alcoa, a Tennessee
town lying between Chattanooga and Knoxville. There, according to the paper, "batters were aiming for the fence, but with two away and a man on third, [Jackie] calmly fanned the strapping cleanup willow-wielder, who was swinging from his ankles and fouling them down the third base line like rifle shots."
Elberfeld's charges, as they were called, also won at Lenoir City.
With two victories, the Juniors headed home to face the Penn-Dixies, a top semipro team in the Chattanooga city league. In the first inning, Mitchell walked one. Two infield errors put two more runners on base, and a hit drove in two runs for the Penn-Dixies. But in the second and third innings, it was three up and three down as the Penn-Dixies faced Mitchell's one really good pitch. Described as "nasty" by some, "mean" by others, it was essentially a sinker. Although Jackie gave up one hit and two runs in the first inning, the Juniors blasted the Penn-Dixie pitching. By the eighth inning they were so far ahead that the 56-year old Kid put himself in as shortstop. When the dust had settled, the Penn-Dixies lay defeated, 12-5.
Next Jackie and the Juniors pulverized Rockwood, 34- 6, as slugger Bill Wells, who would go on to the minors, hit his third and fourth homers.
Jackie and the Juniors took on all comers, winning a very high percentage of their games. The team was hot, and the news of its success spread to the North, where on Staten Island Margaret Nabel managed the barnstorming New York Bloomer Girls.
By 1931, Staten Island had been a hotbed of baseball activity for more than 60 years. In the early years, particularly the 1860s, the Island had been a cricket center, and was said to have the best cricket fields in the nation. By 1900, the Island was turning out ships and baseball teams, often from the same dock. The Siscos, sponsored by the Staten Island Shipbuilding Company, were a topnotch semipro team, as were the Alaskas and the Fleet. In 1928, there were 250 baseball teams on the Island, one team for every square mile of land. During the 1920s and 1930s, major league teams-among them the Giants, Dodgers, and Cardinals-came to the Island to play exhibition games.
In 1910, three old-time local players-Dan Whalen, Eddie Manning, and Joe Manning, formed a team in Stapleton, naming it the New York Bloomer Girls. While the New York Bloomer Girls were late in getting started (bloomer teams had been around since 1892) they made up for it by lasting until the end of the bloomer era. Briefly, bloomer girl teams were sexually integrated barnstormers, but most of the players were women. All bloomer teams carried at least one male player, the catcher. A few carried as many as five men. Rogers Hornsby and Smoky Joe Wood played on bloomer girl teams in their youth. Bloomers seldom played other bloomers: instead, they challenged men's town, semipro, or minor league teams.
When the New York Bloomer Girls were formed in 1910, Margaret Nabel was in eighth grade. She graduated from high school in 1914, having played baseball, field hockey, and tennis. It was after her graduation that she was asked by Pat Kelly, a catcher for the prominent Sisco Baseball Team, to pitch for the Siscos against the New York Bloomer Girls. Nabel accepted, but years later she recalled her relative lack of success that first outing: "I had poor Pat jumping all over the place, catching my slants, and the eight bases on balls I handed out sure do not speak well for my control in that game." Toward the end of that 1914 season, Nabel joined the New York Bloomer Girls.
While she continued as an occasional pitcher and outfielder, and while she was a good hitter in the clutch, it was really as a manager that Nabel gained her fame. In 1920, before she was even 25 years old, she took over the New York Bloomer Girls as manager, and from then on the team was always referred to as "Margaret Nabel and the New York Bloomer Girls."
Throughout Staten Island and the other four boroughs of New York City, Nabel was well-known. By playing approximately 50 games a summer up and down the East Coast, from Nova Scotia to Florida, she became well known along the seaboard, also. She was, second to Maud Nelson, the most important person in bloomer baseball, providing women with a chance to play baseball one season...two...five ...or, in the case of several players, fifteen years.
Nabel was very strict, tolerating no nonsense and exercising firm discipline. She had a keen eye for publicity and, as one man who played against her said, "wouldn't take crap from anybody." She was out to make a dollar with the team, and if she wasn't paid in advance of a game, she pulled the players off the field. Like many another barnstormer, she insisted that the playing field be fenced off to prevent freeloaders.
In 1921, her second season of managing, Nabel told a reporter that the New York Bloomer Girls, "use a male battery exclusively, as we feel that no female player can do justice to the pitcher's burden, and you will agree that the catching job belongs to a man, too." Thus Nabel usually fielded a team of seven women and two men.
Over the years, her philosophy on the necessity of a male battery changed, and several of the bloomer women, notably Helen Demarest and Ethel Condon, developed into pitchers. -But Nabel never changed her opinion that women couldn't play in the minor leagues, let alone the majors.
When Jackie Mitchell fanned Ruth and Gehrig on April 2, 1931, it made news everywhere. In Staten Island, Margaret Nabel was asked to comment. On April 4, she responded. "A girl can develop a slow curve, an effective floater, good control, and perhaps everything else that a good male player can show except speed.... While I wish my Tennessee colleague every success, it seems it is just another publicity stunt."
A day or two later, when Nabel read in the paper that Jackie Mitchell's contract had been voided by Commissioner Landis, she offered the young southpaw a contract to pitch for the New York Bloomer Girls. Mitchell turned down the offer.
This either incensed Margaret Nabel or struck her as a golden opportunity. The New York Bloomer Girls, who had never before played in Tennessee, marched into the state and issued a challenge to the Juniors-a weekend game in Engel Stadium. Kid Elberfeld-himself no slouch when it came to making a baseball buck-immediately accepted and Saturday, May 30, was booked.
Perhaps Nabel intuitively sensed that Chattanooga fans, who had seen and heard about Jackie facing opposing male pitchers every day, would be more intrigued by the contest if the home-town hurler had to face a female pitcher. The newspapers loved this angle and played it up big, informing readers that Ethel Condon, 15-year-veteran second baseman and at the same time the Bloomers ace right-hander, was being rested for the big game against the Junior Lookouts. JACKIE HOPES TO ROUT PLAYERS OF HER OWN SEX, announced the headlines.
While the Chattanooga papers concentrated on Margaret Nabel and Ethel Condon, they didn't neglect the other Yorkers. A May 28 edition carried an article on Ginger Robinson. "One of the biggest drawing cards on the New York Bloomer Girls team is Ginger Robinson, a redheaded flash who patrols the hot corner. Ginger has long been known as one ofthe best girls in the baseball game. She picks up scorchers and pegs accurately to first and wields a wicked war club." And in the outfield, Nina "Babe" McCuttun was the team's slugger, good for seven to twelve home runs a year.
As anticipation built back in Chattanooga, Jackie and the Juniors mopped up eastern Tennessee and started in on the central part of the state. On May 25 they suffered a rare loss, to Tullahoma, 8-5, on a late-inning triple. Mitchell, possibly tiring, had given up three runs on three hits and two infield errors.
But three days later, as Chattanoogans were reading about Ginger Robinson, the Juniors were back in form, clobbering Sewanee 13-3, with Jackie surrendering only two singles.
Friday, May 29, the day before the game, the headlines declared,
BLOOMER GIRLS HAVE BEST SLABBER READY FOR LOCALS. NEW YORK TEAM, WITH SPLENDID RECORD, HOPES TO CARRY JACKIE'S TEAM OVER THE FALLS.
Finally, Saturday, May 30: the day of reckoning, Chattanooga vs. Gotham. The game drew a sellout crowd of 4,000-the same number that had attended the Lookouts vs. Yankees game on April 2. Once again, the fans had come came to see the locals against the "invaders from the North."
Jackie Mitchell pitched three innings and held the Bloomers hitless, while her own Juniors got to Ethel Condon for one run in the first and one in the third. At the end of three, the score stood 2-0, Juniors. Unlike Mitchell, Condon went the distance. In the fourth she was hammered for four runs while Stanfield, the Juniors pitcher, held the Bloomers off. In the bottom of the fifth, the Juniors scored another run, but then Condon settled down. With a man on third, Condon fanned slugger Bill Wells. The appreciative Lookout crowd rose to its feet in applause. And the fans applauded for Ginger Robinson when she leaped into the air and snared what looked like a sure base hit to keep the Juniors from scoring.
Stanfield, meanwhile, lost his control and began to walk the Bloomers, resulting in three Bloomer runs in the fifth. At the end of six innings, the score stood 7~3 for the home team.
The seventh and eighth innings were scoreless. In the top of the ninth, the Bloomers threatened, but managed to score only one run.
The line score shows that the Lookout Juniors scored seven runs on eleven hits and five Bloomer Girl errors. The Bloomers, on the other hand, scored four runs on two hits and three Lookout errors. This time, the South stood victorious, defeating the invading Yorkers 7-4. After the big game, Jackie Mitchell continued to play with the Junior Lookouts until mid-July, when she left the team to pitch in the North. After she left, Elberfeld dissolved the Juniors and returned to his baseball camp. Bill Wells went on to play in the Nebraska State League. Other Lookout players returned to city semipro leagues. In 1933 Jackie Mitchell signed with the House of David. She pitched for the bearded ones for four years, then retired from baseball in 1937 at the age of 23.
After the memorable game, Margaret Nabel and the New York Bloomer Girls barnstormed their way back to the Eastern Seaboard. Within three years, Nabel would retire herself and her team. Not just this long-lived team, but all bloomer teams would cease to exist, replaced by softball players. With the ending of the bloomer era came the end of sexually integrated baseball teams-and the end of exciting encounters such as that between Jackie Mitchell and Margaret Nabel.
