Gregorich, Barbara. Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball (p. 48). Philbar Publishing. Kindle Edition.
NOTE: This confirms the Kid Elberfeld was Jackie Mitchell's coach in Chattanooga.
Jackie Mitchell
In the cold, wet spring of 1931, young Virne Beatrice “Jackie” Mitchell became the second woman ever signed to a minor league contract. Reporters at the time, not knowing about Lizzie Arlington, hailed the signing as a first. Much news that once would have remained local, as did Arlington’s story in 1898, now reached a national audience through radio. The story of a young woman overcoming barriers excited people trapped in the midst of the Great Depression.
The story began in Chattanooga, with a Class AA minor league team owned by Joe Engel, a former pitcher for the Washington Senators. A man who loved promotions and publicity, Engel filled the ballpark on one occasion by raffling off a house; on another, by staging an elephant hunt. In March 1931, Joe Engel signed Jackie Mitchell to a minor league contract; her father, Dr. Joe Mitchell, acted as her agent. Local papers immediately picked up the story, and at first Jackie confessed, “To tell the truth, all I want is to stay in professional baseball long enough to get money to buy a roadster.” Later, she amended that statement: “I hope to pitch for years to come and shall try to get into a World Series.”
As soon as Engel announced that the rookie southpaw would pitch in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees, who were making their way north from spring training, other papers picked up the story. Only the conservative Sporting News refused to carry it, wiring back to a local reporter: “Quit your kidding. What is Chattanooga trying to do? Burlesque the game?” But Jackie Mitchell was the real thing. At age seventeen, she stood five feet, seven inches tall and weighed 130 pounds. She had not always been so robust: a premature baby, she had weighed four pounds at birth. Because the family doctor had advised her parents to give her fresh air and exercise, she grew up athletic. “I was out at the sandlots with father from as long as I can remember,” she once explained. When she was seven or eight years old, Dazzy Vance, star pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, taught her how to pitch.
As a teenager, Jackie played baseball in Chattanooga and in one amateur game struck out nine men. In March 1931 she attended Norman “Kid” Elberfeld’s baseball camp in Atlanta, the only baseball school of its kind at the time, frequented by beginners as well as by major-leaguers such as Luke Appling. Revealing all these details in countless stories, reporters dug for more. Dr. Joseph Mitchell told them that his daughter was “a curve-ball pitcher, not a smoke-ball pitcher,” but he assured them she could do the job against the Yankees. When Babe Ruth was interviewed, he shook his head in bewilderment. “By the way,” he asked reporters, “how big is she?” When told Jackie’s height and weight, the Sultan of Swat muttered, “Well, I don’t know what things are coming to.” The Yankees-Lookouts game was scheduled for April 1, but a downpour soaked the field and pushed the game to April 2. On that cloudy and cool Thursday, both teams took pregame practice at Engel Stadium (a mere three blocks from Jackie’s home) while a crowd of four thousand flooded through the turnstiles and filled every available seat. With scores of reporters, wire services, and even a film crew from Universal Newsreel on hand, the game began. Manager Bert Niehoff sent Clyde Barfoot to the mound against the Yankees.
The Lookout pitcher immediately gave up a double and a single: after the first two batters, the score stood at 1-0. Niehoff then strode to the hill, yanked his starter, and put in Jackie Mitchell to face Babe Ruth. Clad in a baggy white uniform specially sewn for her by Spalding Company, a large C visible on her cap, Mitchell took a few warmup pitches before Ruth, batting third, stepped into the batter’s box. A southpaw, Jackie had only one pitch—“a mean drop pitch.” Ruth took ball one, then swung at the next two pitches and missed. Jackie’s fourth pitch was a called strike. The Babe, possibly hamming it up, “kicked the dirt, called the umpire a few dirty names, gave his bat a wild heave and stomped off to the Yanks’ dugout.” The Chattanooga News reported that “Mr. Ruth . . . acted in a rude manner which would never have done for the Lees and the Randolphs of the old South.” Lou Gehrig then came to the plate. Mitchell threw him three pitches and he swung at each, connecting with nothing but Chattanooga mountaintop air. Seventeen-year-old Jackie Mitchell had just fanned Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back-to-back. Grinning and shaking his head, Gehrig larruped back to the dugout while Tony Lazzeri, who had been watching from the on-deck circle with every intention of hitting the rookie pitcher, stepped to the plate. Lazzeri swung at Mitchell’s first pitch, fouling it off. He took the next four and drew a base on balls. At this point Niehoff marched to the mound again, pulling Mitchell and reinstating Barfoot. The Yankees won, 14-4.
Years later, Jackie Mitchell recalled that after she struck out Gehrig, it “set off a standing ovation . . . that must have lasted ten minutes.” Most likely she was exaggerating. But the amount of fan mail she received after the feat was staggering. From around the nation people took her side. So much mail came addressed to “The Girl Who Struck Out Ruth and Gehrig, Chattanooga, Tennessee,” that the post office delivered it in bulk mail bags. “I had so much mail coming in, my daddy had to hire a secretary to answer it all,” she remembered.
On the day the Yankees fanned, the debate began: Was it real, or was it a stunt? The world would never know, for Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis stepped in, voiding Jackie’s contract on the grounds that life in baseball was “too strenuous” for a woman. Jackie was crushed. Ice-cold water had been poured over her dreams of material wealth (the roadster) and glory (the World Series). Nobody prominent protested or came to her defense: not Joe Engel, not Dr. Mitchell, not the media. In those days, the rulings of baseball’s czar were absolute. The czar, however, ruled only the major and minor leagues. Within a month of Landis’ ruling, Jackie Mitchell was back in baseball as the star attraction of a hastily improvised team called the Junior Lookouts (sometimes dubbed the Lookout Juniors). Managed by ex-major-leaguer Kid Elberfeld, the Juniors fielded had-been and would-be minor leaguers. Elberfeld easily booked games throughout eastern Tennessee as town and semipro teams accepted the challenge from Jackie and the Juniors.
With Jackie pitching the first two or three innings of each game, the Juniors were quite successful, winning five out of six games on one trip, twelve out of sixteen on another. Win or lose, however, the principal draw was the young woman pitcher. She even returned to Chattanooga where, at the end of May, she and the Lookout Juniors faced Margaret Nabel and the New York Bloomer Girls. Like the game against the Yankees, this one was also a sellout. And the four thousand fans who packed the stadium weren’t disappointed. Pitching three innings, the young local held the “Yorkers” hitless, and the Juniors defeated the Bloomers, 7-4. By July 1931, Jackie Mitchell had so many offers to pitch in exhibition games that she left the Juniors and headed north. Her first stop was Cleveland, Ohio, where she pitched under arc lights. Throughout 1932 she continued to tour, traveling with her father and mother and pitching at exhibition games. Then, in 1933, The New York Times reported that nineteen-year-old Jackie Mitchell was signed to “occupy the pitcher’s mound [with the] bearded and long-locked House of David” and that she would receive $1,000 a month through the rest of the season. House of David teams, originating out of Benton Harbor, Michigan, had been barnstorming since the turn of the century and were known to baseball fans everywhere.
A life of banishment from baseball’s best circuits was hard on Mitchell. There was nowhere for her to go but sideways. From 1933 through 1937 she traveled with the House, pitching an inning or two every day. While taking on local teams must have been fun, there was a silly and demeaning side to some of the promotions—playing baseball while riding donkeys, for example. After seven years, Jackie tired of it and returned to Chattanooga, where she worked in her father’s office. When she was in her fifties she married Eugene Gilbert, a man she had known most of her life. To her neighbors, she was known simply as Jackie Gilbert and few, if any, remembered her story.
Not even Alan Morris, sports editor of the Chattanooga News-Free Press, knew what had happened to Jackie Mitchell when in 1975 he received a letter from California asking, “Whatever happened to the girl who struck out Babe Ruth?” When Jackie saw Morris’s column, she called him up. Her story was retold and suddenly a new generation was interested. Once again, she received congratulatory letters by the hundreds, letters from average people who, amazed and impressed, wanted the Jackies of the world to win. To the satisfaction of her fans, Mitchell proved as feisty and controversial as ever. “I’m interested in keeping up with what’s happening in female athletics and efforts of the girls to play against the boys,” she told reporters. “There is one woman umpire in professional baseball now and maybe some day there will be a player in the big leagues.” Jackie Mitchell died in 1987, at the age of seventy-three.
“She uses an odd, side-armed delivery, and puts both speed and curve on the ball. Her greatest asset, however, is control. She can place the ball where she pleases, and her knack at guessing the weakness of a batter is uncanny. . . . “She doesn’t hope to enter the big show this season, but she believes that with careful training she may soon be the first woman to pitch in the big leagues. In that event she sees no reason why she shouldn’t command as great a salary as Babe Ruth now draws.” —The Chattanooga News, March 31, 1931 “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 every day.” —Babe Ruth “[The Yankees] will meet a club here that has a girl pitcher named Jackie Mitchell, who has a swell change of pace and swings a mean lipstick.
“I suppose that in the next town the Yankees enter they will find a squad that has a female impersonator in left field, a sword swallower at short and a trained seal behind the plate. Times in the South are not only tough but silly.” —New York Daily News, April 2, 1931 “Cynics may contend that on the diamond as elsewhere it is place aux dames. Perhaps Miss Jackie hasn’t quite enough on the ball yet to bewilder Ruth and Gehrig in a serious game. But there are no such sluggers in the Southern Association, and she may win laurels this season which cannot be ascribed to mere gallantry. The prospect grows gloomier for misogynists.”
—The New York Times, April 4, 1931
In Perspective David Jenkins, sports reporter for the Chattanooga News-Free Press, got to know Jackie Mitchell in the last few years of her life, even traveling with her to her first major league baseball game in Atlanta. He saw the film of her striking out Ruth and Gehrig and feels that it “isn’t really conclusive.” But, he says, “She threw well enough to have the ball do things. It was a drop ball, a sinker. She [knew] what to do with it. The players may have gone along with the thing in good fun, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t struck out. She might have been doing more than they expected her to do.”
Mitchell was the kind of person, says Jenkins, who had strong opinions and feelings. “For Engel, it was just a promotion, that’s all. It could have been real or not, but it was just a promotion. For Jackie it was very real. She had a very active mind. Women’s rights appealed to her. She was victimized by Landis. She had wanted a career in athletics. “If Engel had backed Jackie in trying to assert her right to play baseball—in asserting the validity of the contract—she would probably have gone ahead and fought against the rescinding of the contract. But nobody backed her.” To Jenkins, the woman who struck out Ruth and Gehrig represented the possibility of better things. “Her pioneer spirit was her greatest achievement,” he concludes. “Jackie didn’t care what people thought. She was truly a peer of Babe Didrikson, Helen Wills, and other great women athletes of the time.”
Gregorich, Barbara. Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball (p. 48). Philbar Publishing. Kindle Edition.
In the cold, wet spring of 1931, young Virne Beatrice “Jackie” Mitchell became the second woman ever signed to a minor league contract. Reporters at the time, not knowing about Lizzie Arlington, hailed the signing as a first. Much news that once would have remained local, as did Arlington’s story in 1898, now reached a national audience through radio. The story of a young woman overcoming barriers excited people trapped in the midst of the Great Depression.
The story began in Chattanooga, with a Class AA minor league team owned by Joe Engel, a former pitcher for the Washington Senators. A man who loved promotions and publicity, Engel filled the ballpark on one occasion by raffling off a house; on another, by staging an elephant hunt. In March 1931, Joe Engel signed Jackie Mitchell to a minor league contract; her father, Dr. Joe Mitchell, acted as her agent. Local papers immediately picked up the story, and at first Jackie confessed, “To tell the truth, all I want is to stay in professional baseball long enough to get money to buy a roadster.” Later, she amended that statement: “I hope to pitch for years to come and shall try to get into a World Series.”
As soon as Engel announced that the rookie southpaw would pitch in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees, who were making their way north from spring training, other papers picked up the story. Only the conservative Sporting News refused to carry it, wiring back to a local reporter: “Quit your kidding. What is Chattanooga trying to do? Burlesque the game?” But Jackie Mitchell was the real thing. At age seventeen, she stood five feet, seven inches tall and weighed 130 pounds. She had not always been so robust: a premature baby, she had weighed four pounds at birth. Because the family doctor had advised her parents to give her fresh air and exercise, she grew up athletic. “I was out at the sandlots with father from as long as I can remember,” she once explained. When she was seven or eight years old, Dazzy Vance, star pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, taught her how to pitch.
As a teenager, Jackie played baseball in Chattanooga and in one amateur game struck out nine men. In March 1931 she attended Norman “Kid” Elberfeld’s baseball camp in Atlanta, the only baseball school of its kind at the time, frequented by beginners as well as by major-leaguers such as Luke Appling. Revealing all these details in countless stories, reporters dug for more. Dr. Joseph Mitchell told them that his daughter was “a curve-ball pitcher, not a smoke-ball pitcher,” but he assured them she could do the job against the Yankees. When Babe Ruth was interviewed, he shook his head in bewilderment. “By the way,” he asked reporters, “how big is she?” When told Jackie’s height and weight, the Sultan of Swat muttered, “Well, I don’t know what things are coming to.” The Yankees-Lookouts game was scheduled for April 1, but a downpour soaked the field and pushed the game to April 2. On that cloudy and cool Thursday, both teams took pregame practice at Engel Stadium (a mere three blocks from Jackie’s home) while a crowd of four thousand flooded through the turnstiles and filled every available seat. With scores of reporters, wire services, and even a film crew from Universal Newsreel on hand, the game began. Manager Bert Niehoff sent Clyde Barfoot to the mound against the Yankees.
The Lookout pitcher immediately gave up a double and a single: after the first two batters, the score stood at 1-0. Niehoff then strode to the hill, yanked his starter, and put in Jackie Mitchell to face Babe Ruth. Clad in a baggy white uniform specially sewn for her by Spalding Company, a large C visible on her cap, Mitchell took a few warmup pitches before Ruth, batting third, stepped into the batter’s box. A southpaw, Jackie had only one pitch—“a mean drop pitch.” Ruth took ball one, then swung at the next two pitches and missed. Jackie’s fourth pitch was a called strike. The Babe, possibly hamming it up, “kicked the dirt, called the umpire a few dirty names, gave his bat a wild heave and stomped off to the Yanks’ dugout.” The Chattanooga News reported that “Mr. Ruth . . . acted in a rude manner which would never have done for the Lees and the Randolphs of the old South.” Lou Gehrig then came to the plate. Mitchell threw him three pitches and he swung at each, connecting with nothing but Chattanooga mountaintop air. Seventeen-year-old Jackie Mitchell had just fanned Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back-to-back. Grinning and shaking his head, Gehrig larruped back to the dugout while Tony Lazzeri, who had been watching from the on-deck circle with every intention of hitting the rookie pitcher, stepped to the plate. Lazzeri swung at Mitchell’s first pitch, fouling it off. He took the next four and drew a base on balls. At this point Niehoff marched to the mound again, pulling Mitchell and reinstating Barfoot. The Yankees won, 14-4.
Years later, Jackie Mitchell recalled that after she struck out Gehrig, it “set off a standing ovation . . . that must have lasted ten minutes.” Most likely she was exaggerating. But the amount of fan mail she received after the feat was staggering. From around the nation people took her side. So much mail came addressed to “The Girl Who Struck Out Ruth and Gehrig, Chattanooga, Tennessee,” that the post office delivered it in bulk mail bags. “I had so much mail coming in, my daddy had to hire a secretary to answer it all,” she remembered.
On the day the Yankees fanned, the debate began: Was it real, or was it a stunt? The world would never know, for Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis stepped in, voiding Jackie’s contract on the grounds that life in baseball was “too strenuous” for a woman. Jackie was crushed. Ice-cold water had been poured over her dreams of material wealth (the roadster) and glory (the World Series). Nobody prominent protested or came to her defense: not Joe Engel, not Dr. Mitchell, not the media. In those days, the rulings of baseball’s czar were absolute. The czar, however, ruled only the major and minor leagues. Within a month of Landis’ ruling, Jackie Mitchell was back in baseball as the star attraction of a hastily improvised team called the Junior Lookouts (sometimes dubbed the Lookout Juniors). Managed by ex-major-leaguer Kid Elberfeld, the Juniors fielded had-been and would-be minor leaguers. Elberfeld easily booked games throughout eastern Tennessee as town and semipro teams accepted the challenge from Jackie and the Juniors.
With Jackie pitching the first two or three innings of each game, the Juniors were quite successful, winning five out of six games on one trip, twelve out of sixteen on another. Win or lose, however, the principal draw was the young woman pitcher. She even returned to Chattanooga where, at the end of May, she and the Lookout Juniors faced Margaret Nabel and the New York Bloomer Girls. Like the game against the Yankees, this one was also a sellout. And the four thousand fans who packed the stadium weren’t disappointed. Pitching three innings, the young local held the “Yorkers” hitless, and the Juniors defeated the Bloomers, 7-4. By July 1931, Jackie Mitchell had so many offers to pitch in exhibition games that she left the Juniors and headed north. Her first stop was Cleveland, Ohio, where she pitched under arc lights. Throughout 1932 she continued to tour, traveling with her father and mother and pitching at exhibition games. Then, in 1933, The New York Times reported that nineteen-year-old Jackie Mitchell was signed to “occupy the pitcher’s mound [with the] bearded and long-locked House of David” and that she would receive $1,000 a month through the rest of the season. House of David teams, originating out of Benton Harbor, Michigan, had been barnstorming since the turn of the century and were known to baseball fans everywhere.
A life of banishment from baseball’s best circuits was hard on Mitchell. There was nowhere for her to go but sideways. From 1933 through 1937 she traveled with the House, pitching an inning or two every day. While taking on local teams must have been fun, there was a silly and demeaning side to some of the promotions—playing baseball while riding donkeys, for example. After seven years, Jackie tired of it and returned to Chattanooga, where she worked in her father’s office. When she was in her fifties she married Eugene Gilbert, a man she had known most of her life. To her neighbors, she was known simply as Jackie Gilbert and few, if any, remembered her story.
Not even Alan Morris, sports editor of the Chattanooga News-Free Press, knew what had happened to Jackie Mitchell when in 1975 he received a letter from California asking, “Whatever happened to the girl who struck out Babe Ruth?” When Jackie saw Morris’s column, she called him up. Her story was retold and suddenly a new generation was interested. Once again, she received congratulatory letters by the hundreds, letters from average people who, amazed and impressed, wanted the Jackies of the world to win. To the satisfaction of her fans, Mitchell proved as feisty and controversial as ever. “I’m interested in keeping up with what’s happening in female athletics and efforts of the girls to play against the boys,” she told reporters. “There is one woman umpire in professional baseball now and maybe some day there will be a player in the big leagues.” Jackie Mitchell died in 1987, at the age of seventy-three.
“She uses an odd, side-armed delivery, and puts both speed and curve on the ball. Her greatest asset, however, is control. She can place the ball where she pleases, and her knack at guessing the weakness of a batter is uncanny. . . . “She doesn’t hope to enter the big show this season, but she believes that with careful training she may soon be the first woman to pitch in the big leagues. In that event she sees no reason why she shouldn’t command as great a salary as Babe Ruth now draws.” —The Chattanooga News, March 31, 1931 “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 every day.” —Babe Ruth “[The Yankees] will meet a club here that has a girl pitcher named Jackie Mitchell, who has a swell change of pace and swings a mean lipstick.
“I suppose that in the next town the Yankees enter they will find a squad that has a female impersonator in left field, a sword swallower at short and a trained seal behind the plate. Times in the South are not only tough but silly.” —New York Daily News, April 2, 1931 “Cynics may contend that on the diamond as elsewhere it is place aux dames. Perhaps Miss Jackie hasn’t quite enough on the ball yet to bewilder Ruth and Gehrig in a serious game. But there are no such sluggers in the Southern Association, and she may win laurels this season which cannot be ascribed to mere gallantry. The prospect grows gloomier for misogynists.”
—The New York Times, April 4, 1931
In Perspective David Jenkins, sports reporter for the Chattanooga News-Free Press, got to know Jackie Mitchell in the last few years of her life, even traveling with her to her first major league baseball game in Atlanta. He saw the film of her striking out Ruth and Gehrig and feels that it “isn’t really conclusive.” But, he says, “She threw well enough to have the ball do things. It was a drop ball, a sinker. She [knew] what to do with it. The players may have gone along with the thing in good fun, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t struck out. She might have been doing more than they expected her to do.”
Mitchell was the kind of person, says Jenkins, who had strong opinions and feelings. “For Engel, it was just a promotion, that’s all. It could have been real or not, but it was just a promotion. For Jackie it was very real. She had a very active mind. Women’s rights appealed to her. She was victimized by Landis. She had wanted a career in athletics. “If Engel had backed Jackie in trying to assert her right to play baseball—in asserting the validity of the contract—she would probably have gone ahead and fought against the rescinding of the contract. But nobody backed her.” To Jenkins, the woman who struck out Ruth and Gehrig represented the possibility of better things. “Her pioneer spirit was her greatest achievement,” he concludes. “Jackie didn’t care what people thought. She was truly a peer of Babe Didrikson, Helen Wills, and other great women athletes of the time.”
Gregorich, Barbara. Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball (p. 48). Philbar Publishing. Kindle Edition.