Book Excerpt: The Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League
With the fifth installment of Inside the Dodgers book excerpt series, Anika Orrock and the AAGPBL take center stage. Orrock's work, "The Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League is a book of text and illustrations - lovely illustrations - published in March by Chronicle Books.
Continuing as we have with the others in the series, we begin with an author-in-her-own words description of the book, and the process of creating it.
Anika Orrock:
"This book about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League turned out very different from what I’d originally envisioned. Because Chronicle Books editor Julia Patrick saw potential for something more–and somehow believed I could pull it off– it’s incomparably better, as was the experience of making it. When it shifted from short, lightly-illustrated dabbling into a 162-page illustrated history (with roughly the same deadlines), I didn’t have time to test the water, I just had to cannonball in.
"In doing so, I got to explore areas of this country–areas where this league once existed–I’d never have seen otherwise, and on a romantically shoestring budget, experiencing the creepiest motels, weirdest Airbnbs, and the worst food the Midwest has to offer! I got to spend days immersed in glorious university and museum archives where the most incredible artifacts were delivered to me on pristine rolling metal carts.
"Most incredibly, I got to spend time with several of these women who made history. Over long phone conversations and in-person meetings in hotel bars, I listened to them recall their experiences– the closest thing imaginable to time travel. Their firsthand memories offered a tangible feeling of what it was like to play professional baseball as a woman in the 1940s and 50s.
"Baseball is a game of numbers and stats, and those things are important to the sport. But this chapter is about so much more than baseball; my goal was to pass along as much of that feeling as possible in the ways I know how.
"Reaching beyond my comfort zone and perceived capabilities to share these stories, I became a writer, an archivist, a historian, and a better illustrator. I learned as much about myself as I did the women of this league. Their trials prompted me to further question social, racial, and gender equity; they gave me a better sense of what it means to possess grit and grace. Their tenacity illuminated the importance of opportunity, how to take one and when to give one. Women, specifically in sports, are constantly required to prove themselves. What these women helped me understand, as catcher Jaqueline Mattson put it, is '"there isn’t anything better than proving yourself to yourself.'"
Excerpt begins here:
Doctors in the 1940s and ’50s were only just debunking the baseless medical assertion that women had a finite amount of energy to spend during their lives, and should any of that energy be expended on rigorous athletics, little would remain for pregnancy. While only a small percentage of All-Americans became mothers during their playing years, they proved they could provide for their families, and that matrimony and motherhood were certainly possible for the professional athlete.
Blue Sox pitcher Jean Faut married shortly after her first season with South Bend and became a mother just before her second, but neither hurt her playing one bit. Following the birth of her son, Faut posted a 1.44 ERA and batted .231 for the season, and she only got better, leading the league in wins and shutouts in 1949, with a whopping .291 batting average.
Like other wedded women in the league, when Faut wasn’t on the field, she carried out all the normal duties of a wife and mother at home. And when the Blue Sox hit the road, her husband, Karl Winsch, would cook, clean, and care for their young son, Larry—that is, until 1951, when their schedules and marriage hit a snag.
In 1951, Winsch, a former minor-league pitcher and Phillies prospect, got a new job—as the Blue Sox coach. Unfortunately, Winsch’s career move was not a happy surprise for Faut: “I never knew he was gonna be coach until I got to spring training the first day—it was a complete surprise to me. He never mentioned it, and he had signed the contract six months [prior] already. It was a shock. And it did make a difference.”
While he may have been a successful coach, Winsch was not a well-loved coach. Described as strict and punishing both on and off the field, his coaching methods drove an unwelcome wedge between Faut and her teammates, who didn’t want to hang around the coach’s wife for fear of favoritism or tattling.
But none of it made a difference in Faut’s game. Despite unique and isolating pressures, she was named 1951 Player of the Year, a year in which she pitched her first of two perfect games and helped the Blue Sox win the championship.
“You just block everything out, you just concentrate on the game,” explains Faut. “That pressure is always there.” That pressure escalated in late 1952, Faut’s strongest year.
As the result of an argument, Winsch fired one of his players, and six more walked out behind her in protest, leaving South Bend with a twelve-woman roster going into the playoffs.
“Yeah, we was the ‘Dutiful Dozen,’ that’s what the newspaper said,” recalled Mary “Wimp” Baumgartner, Blue Sox catcher. The shorthanded Dutiful Dozen went on to win the 1952 AAGBBL Championship, due in large part to Faut’s commanding contributions. She finished that season leading the league in strikeouts, posting twenty wins, two losses, and an astounding 0.93 ERA.
In the end, her husband’s derisiveness and the difficulty of his presence on the team just wasn’t worth it for Faut. She finished the 1953 season pitching a second perfect game, setting a league record with her 1.23 career ERA, and was again named Player of the Year. Though she would later express regret, Faut did not return for the league’s final season.
Jean Faut was one of many exceptional athletes who built a remarkable career as an All-American. Women who played several years often grew stronger as veterans, outdoing themselves with each passing season. Players like Lois “Flash” Florreich, Betsy “Sockum” Jochum, Edythe “Edie” Perlick, and Helen “Nicki” Nicol, had all been signed in the league’s inaugural year and would go on to set outstanding individual records, inspired team managers—eight of them at the time—to collectively vote on and assemble the league’s first All-Star team in 1946. The team then competed in an exhibition game against the championship-winning team of the season. Selected for outstanding performance, some of the league’s strongest players made multiple appearances on the annual All-Star roster.
About the author:
Anika Orrock is an award-winning illustrator, writer, designer, cartoonist, humorist, and baseball nerd from the California Bay Area.
Her illustration work is included in the Society of Illustrators 62nd Annual Exhibition and has been commissioned by the National Pastime Museum, Merrill Lynch, the International Women's Baseball Center, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Players Association, Major League Baseball organizations and international sports publications, as well as a variety of notable musicians and record labels. Anika grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah and the Bay Area of California. She currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Anika is also co-founder of the Pandemic Baseball Book Club.
The Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League is available wherever books are sold. To support a local independent bookstore, purchase from the Pandemic Baseball Book Club Bookstore.org storefront.
Purchase a signed copy of Incredible Women and see more of Anika’s work on her website: www.anikaorrock.com.
Follow her regular work on Instagram or Twitter: @anikadrawls.
Facebook: facebook.com/artofanika.
