All-American Girls Baseball League · Newark, New Jersey · 1948

Flick of Wrist Tells Max Carey If a Girl Has Baseball Talent

March 1948: league president Max Carey scouts hundreds of hopefuls from West to East for the All-American Girls' Baseball League. The way she swings at the ball shows if a girl has potentialities, he explains. Training runs 7 to 5 at Opa Locka, the pay runs to 100 dollars a week, and the dress code is four words: slacks are out, but lipstick is a must.

“Max Carey, former Brooklyn Dodger manager, can tell by the flick of her wrist if a girl’s got talent,” the Associated Press reported from Newark on March 31, 1948. “Talent for professional baseball, he explained.”

Four years after signing on to manage the Milwaukee Chicks, Carey now ran the whole operation, and the story finds him doing the president’s spring rounds: “shuttling from West to East during the last few weeks looking over hundreds of girls who want to get into the big time,” including tryouts in Newark “for 100 girls from six Eastern States.” His method was simple: “The way she swings at the ball shows if a girl has potentialities as a player.” When he spotted one, he checked “his ratings with Johnny Rawlings, a league manager and one-time New York Giant ballplayer,” peering “over heavy horn-rimmed eyeglasses.” The chosen 180 would “convene at Miami, Fla., for a 30-day spring training period” at Opa Locka.

The paper calls the league “the All-American Girls’ Baseball League, the only feminine professional baseball circuit in the country,” a phrasing Chicago’s underhand National league might have disputed, but 1948 was the year the All-Americans earned the word outright: this was the season the league moved to full overhand pitching. Grand Rapids Chicks shortstop Teeny Petras supplies the working conditions: training “no picnic,” running 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a four-hour morning workout, then a season from May 9 to September 6 playing “five weekday games and two on Sunday.” The pay: “$55 to $100 a week.” The uniform: “short athletic skirts, knee-length socks, baseball caps and spiked shoes.”

And then the sentence that sums up the league’s whole lopsided bargain, delivered by Carey himself: “Slacks are out, but lipstick is a must.” Ten-hour training days, a four-month season, big-league scouting standards, and the front office still spent its worry on cosmetics. The players held up their end of that bargain and then some. Five years in, this league was scouting like the majors, training like the majors and finally throwing like the majors, and the women doing it deserve the last word over the dress code: they’re the reason anybody was buying tickets.