Announcing finalists for 2024 Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award
JULY 31, 2024 — We are pleased to announce the finalists for the 2024 Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by SABR’s Women in Baseball Committee. Each of these finalists has made important contributions promoting the participation of women in baseball, on the field and off.
The winner of the 2024 award will be announced during the SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference on September 20-22.
Here are the finalists for the 2024 award:
Jean Hastings Ardell was born and raised in Queens, New York. Her mother’s love of books and her father’s love of baseball led her to become a baseball writer and journalist. Ardell’s 2005 book Breaking Into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime is a comprehensive overview of the topic from every perspective: the female fans, players, owners, umpires, media writers, and even “Baseball Annies.” Ardell’s second book, Making My Pitch: A Woman’s Baseball Odyssey, coauthored with Ila Borders, tells the story of a pioneering female pitcher of the 1990s. Ardell was also deeply involved with education and mentoring, working with SABR’s Women in Baseball Committee and organizing for many years the annual NINE Spring Training Conference and its journal of related articles. Ardell always made sure that NINE provided prominent inclusion of women as conference presenters and women as a primary topic category. She made significant and lasting contributions to the field both personally and as a role model and inspiration to others.
Barbara Gregorich is the author of Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, which won the MacMillan-SABR Research Award in 1993. She has also produced three volumes of notes about her work, Research Notes for Women at Play (2010, 2013, and 2015), which have been invaluable for other researchers. She grew up in a small town in Ohio before earning a B.A. at Kent State University and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin. Her first novel was She’s On First in 1987 and she has written many other books since. In 2012, she authored Jack and Larry, about Jack Graney of the Cleveland Indians and his dog Larry. In 2016 she donated all of her research materials from Women at Play to the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library. She has also written a wide range of articles on topics such as Jackie Mitchell, Bloomer Girl teams, and Maud Nelson, among others. She has also delivered a presentation called “When Women Played Baseball” all over the country, and continues to be an active scholar and mentor.
Maud Nelson, born Clementina Brida, played, managed, owned, and promoted women’s baseball from the late 19th century through the 1920s. She pitched and played third base for the Boston Bloomer Girls, Chicago Bloomer Girls, and the Star Bloomers of Indianapolis before joining a men’s team, the Cherokee Indian baseball club. Beginning in 1911 she became manager and scout for the Western Bloomer Girls, which she and her husband also owned. Though she stopped playing regularly around 1922, she continued to manage and promote women’s teams into the early 1930s. Her contributions to the game were recognized in 2001 with her election to the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame. Nelson’s long and illustrious career has led some researchers to push for her election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Lisa Turbitt is a professional baseball umpire who has called many national and international games over her long career. She was honored by Baseball Canada with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023 and inducted into the Burlington (Ontario) Sports Hall of Fame in 2024. She began umpiring at the age of 11 when an umpire didn’t show up for her brother’s baseball game. She has been showing up ever since. She worked the gold medal game at the inaugural Women’s Baseball World Cup in 2004 and became the first woman to work home plate at an international competition. She was the first woman to be honored with the Dick Willis Senior Umpire of the Year award. In 2012, she umpired at the Women’s Baseball World Cup. She was scheduled to work as the first female umpire at the World Baseball Classic in 2020 before those games were canceled due to the pandemic. Two years later, she joined an international roster of officials to work the WBC qualifier round in Panama City. She is also actively involved in the education and development of umpires, writing curriculum and planning development/training programs.
In 2017 SABR’s Women in Baseball Committee established the Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award — “The Dorothy” — named in honor of Dorothy Seymour Mills and her lifetime of contributions to promoting women’s baseball.
Eligible candidates for the Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award include any person with a sustained involvement in women’s baseball or any woman with a longtime involvement in baseball in any fashion — player, umpire, writer, executive, team owner, scout, etc. Candidates do not have to be living; it can be awarded posthumously. Self-nominations are accepted.
Previous award winners were Maybelle Blair (2023); Justine Siegal (2022); Claire Smith (2021); Effa Manley (2020); Rachel Robinson (2019); and Perry Barber (2018).
To learn more about the legendary baseball historian Dorothy Seymour Mills, click here.
Originally published: July 31, 2024. Last Updated: July 31, 2024.