Sensation of the Season

There were women in baseball long before A League of Their Own. The young ladies in this 1884 New York Clipper ad first played baseball in Philadelphia in 1883, according to Baseball History From Outside the Lines by John E. Dreifort. The 500 people in the audience laughed as they tried to figure out what to do. They played for about 2 years, sometimes against men's teams (they were supposed to play other women). It seems that they were somewhere between serious athletes and a sort of traveling vaudeville act.

In 1893 the New York Times reported that some young society ladies had played baseball against the young men in Lenox, Massachusetts - and they played so well that "the boys got the worst of it." The young men and women were "so evenly matched," in fact, that everyone enjoyed it thoroughly; so much so, that they were going to play again. One of the "brightest young ladies" hit a home run, when the male pitcher was not looking, "much to the amusement of the spectators."

The wonderful photo is from San Francisco State University College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. It is of another team, known as Franklin's Young Ladies' Baseball Club, and was taken about 1890.

SOURCES

Dreifort, John E. Baseball History From Outside the Lines (U of Nebraska Press, 2001), pp. 203-4.

"Girls Who Play Baseball," New York Times, Sept. 3, 1893, p. 12.