Fort Wayne Daisies · Washington, D.C. · 1951

High-Class Baseball Promised As Girl Teams Battle Tonight

May 1951: the All-American Girls League plays Griffith Stadium itself. Max Carey hands the ball to his Cuban rookie southpaw Isabel Alvarez, Maxine Kline brings a 47-14 record for the Belles, and Betty Foss brings a .346 bat. Carey, who knew something about big league play, says it plainly: they play sound, smart ball, as good as most minor league teams.

By May 3, 1951, the All-American Girls League was booking the biggest room in Washington: Griffith Stadium, home of the Senators. The Evening Star’s preview opens with a nice piece of local logic: “Washington baseball fans are used to seeing Cuban pitchers on the mound at Griffith Stadium and tonight’s girls exhibition game between the Fort Wayne Daisies and the Racine Belles at 8:15 will be in keeping.”

That’s because “Manager Max Carey is expected to use his two Cuban hurlers, Mirta Marrero (no relation to Conrado) and Isabel Alvarez, rookie southpaw.” Conrado Marrero was the Senators’ beloved Cuban pitcher, and the joke only works because the women’s league was recruiting the same island. Alvarez, whose photo runs beside the story over the caption “Pitches tonight,” had come from Havana as a teenager. The opposition brings credentials of its own: “Maxine Kline, the leading hurler in the All-American Girls League with a 47-14 two-year record,” starts for the Belles.

The story is refreshingly full of baseball. Betty Foss, “the league’s leading hitter last season with a .346 average,” smacked three hits in last night’s game at Baltimore. Fort Wayne has “a fine double-play combination” in shortstop Dottie Schroeder and second-sacker Evelyn Wawryshyn, and Thelma Eisen “stole 75 bases last year.” The paper does pause to file Schroeder under “pretty shortstop with blond pigtails,” so we’ll add what it left out: Schroeder played all twelve seasons of the league’s existence, more games than anyone who ever wore the uniform. On the sliding question, Fort Wayne’s players are practical: short skirts “don’t give much protection,” and as Schroeder explains of sliding pads, “they don’t cover the legs and that’s where you hit the ground most of the time.”

The last word goes to the man who spent seventeen seasons in the National League and had been running this league since 1944. “Carey, former star of the Pittsburgh Pirates, claims the girls play really good baseball. ‘They play sound, smart ball—as good as most minor league teams,’ he says. ‘We’ll give the fans a good show and they’ll see some good baseball, too.’” Eight years earlier the papers were filing this league under Softy Girls. Now it was high-class baseball at Griffith Stadium, and nobody was calling that a stretch.