"A Harvest original."

Includes index.

Girls and women have played baseball (hardball: the real thing) from the beginning. Soon after professional baseball started up in 1869, women formed "base ball clubs" and - wearing heavy stockings and striped, shortened dresses - challenged men's teams across the country. One star pitcher, Maud Nelson, often struck out four or five men in the first few innings of a game. After World War I, these "Bloomer Girl" teams, such as the Philadelphia Bobbies and the Chicago All-Star Ranger Girls, proliferated. During the 1930s women such as Jackie Mitchell pitched against major leaguers; in one memorable exhibition game, Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

In 1943 the first and only women's professional baseball league was born, the one featured in the hit movie A League of Their Own. Nearly 600 women, all of them skilled athletes, earned a living by playing on all-female baseball teams in the All-American Girls Baseball League. Sophie Kurys of the Racine Belles was one such player, an aggressive infielder who in 1946 stole a phenomenal 201 bases. After the AAGBL's demise in 1954, women's baseball entered a period of doldrums, but with the successful integration of Little League, coaches began to help girls develop their baseball talents. With the admission of women to umpire ranks in the minors and the sexual integration of baseball on the college level, some say that the first woman baseball player in the majors is only now a matter of time. Is a woman's place at home ... plate?

Women at Play is the first book to tell the whole fascinating story. Drawing on pioneering original research and interviews with many of the women who made - and are now making - baseball history, with some 70 photographs and illustrations, this is a handsome and thoroughly entertaining book that will prove an eye-opener to even the most informed baseball fan.

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