All-American Girls Professional Ball League · Chicago, Illinois · 1944

Casey Is A Lady!

August 1944, in the Star's Sunday magazine: These gals are real ball players. Watch them. Nine players instead of softball's ten, underhand pitching that isn't soft pitching, salaries to 100 dollars a week, and the best closing question in sports writing: what's the old-time fan going to shout on a close play at the plate? Slide, Miss Kelly! Slide!

On August 27, 1944, readers of the Sunday Evening Star found this in This Week, the syndicated magazine folded into the paper: “Casey Is A Lady!” The deck under the title makes the argument up front: “These gals are real ball players. Watch them…”

George Berkowitz’s text is the best short explainer any paper had yet printed on what the All-American Girls’ Professional Ball League actually played. “There are half a dozen professional baseball teams in the Middle West that haven’t lost a player to Selective Service,” it begins, and then gets specific: “They play a game much like regular baseball, use nine players instead of the 10, standard for softball. Pitchers throw underhand, but it isn’t soft pitching. Witness the no-hit game turned in by Olive Little.” There it is, the hybrid game in one sentence: softball’s pitch, baseball’s roster, and results nobody could call gentle. Olive Little’s no-hitter was real, the first in league history.

The business news was good too. “The league opened up last year with four teams playing a 54-game schedule. Business was so good that this year they have six teams, are playing 120 games,” with salaries of “$40 to $100 a week” and baseball as “a full-time job.” And one line that matters for later this month: “Another pro girls’ league started this year, the National. It’s a part-time proposition now; players hold down other jobs between games.” Remember that name. The National kept its underhand softball and would spend a decade calling it baseball anyway.

The photos show why the writer believed: a batter who “swings like Joe DiMaggio,” shortstop Ellen Ahrndt corralling “a hot line drive” in midair, a bench frozen with the “score’s tied — it’s last of the ninth.” And then the ending, which deserves its plaque: “And what’s he going to shout when Baserunner Kelly tries to score on a close play at the plate: ‘Slide, Miss Kelly! Slide!’?” The league Max Carey had just signed on to help run was winning over the skeptics one Sunday supplement at a time.