Diamonds Are a Gal’s Worst Friend: Women in Baseball History and Fiction

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume IV (1989).

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“In the vast range of baseball novels boys’ books written by men like John Tunis to adult novels written by men like Bernard Malamud, women for the most part have been either complaisant wives or stupid bimbos — or perhaps sexual threats. Rarely…does a woman appear as someone intelligent or valuable.” — Eric Solomon (1985).

 

Lindy Sunshine is the hottest big-league prospect in a dozen seasons — a crack shortstop with great range and shotgun arm, a clutch .300 hitter, a firebrand sparkplug who almost singlehandedly lifts the doormat Chicago Eagles back into the thick of a pennant race. But Lindy is also dogged by endless controversy and embroiled in riotous conflict. Sunshine’s teammates threaten revolt if the much ballyhooed rookie remains in the lineup, and fans jeer Sunshine’s every appearance on the field. Opposing baserunners slide at second base with spikes high and blood in the eye, while opposing moundsmen brush the rookie back at each at-bat with high hard ones calculated to dispatch Lindy directly to the disabled list.

Not since the fabled Jackie Robinson, in fact, has any rookie been greeted with such universal animosity and treated to such relentless indignities. Like Robinson, Lindy Sunshine carries a deeply personal and utterly inescapable burden onto the big-league diamond — one destined to spur deeper hatred and kindle greater bigotry than even the ebony skin and African features that were Robinson’s legacy in his rookie Dodger season of 1947. Ms. Lindy Sunshine, star rookie shortstop for the Chicago Eagles, is, after all, a woman — the first female player to make it into the Bigs. And as the game’s first female star, Sunshine provides — for teammate, fan, and reader alike — the ultimate assault upon that last pure male bastion which masquerades as America’s national pastime. Yet Lindy Sunshine is also driven — with an inward fire that matches even Robinson’s — to succeed alone on her considerable merits as a ballplayer. In the process of winning ballgames she aims to push aside, perhaps forever, that last great hypocrisy tainting America’s most democratic of all institutions — professional baseball.

This is the ingenious plot and convoluted circumstance underpinning the narrative structure of Barbara Gregorich’s intriguing first novel, a rookie work which sparkles throughout with realistic diamond action and engages the baseball reader with its dramatic tension and finely drawn cast of big-league characters. Gregorich surprises her predominantly male readership with one of the most accomplished fictional celebrations to date of our hyper-literary national pastime. “She’s on First” it turns out, is a novel which merits attention as much for its successful baseball ambience as for its unconventional subject matter. As intriguing fictional theme, after all, the notion of a pioneer woman big-leaguer is not at all unique to previous baseball literature. Five novels, at least, have been drawn to this theme during previous seasons, and Gregorich’s novel ironically appears here head-to-head in 1987 against Michael Bowen’s “Can’t Miss,” a much less accomplished treatment seizing upon the same unconventional plot, yet falling as flat as the Chicago Cubs in late August.

Where Gregorich’s fictional ballplayers are generally believable if sometimes overdrawn, and her contemporary adaptations of Branch Rickey’s noble experiment add poignant significance to her plot, Bowen’s characters are cardboard, his diamond actions highly contrived, his dialogue almost always juvenile. But what really distinguishes these two novels with such similar plot lines is that one takes its revisionist-feminist theme as the prophetic stuff of baseball myth and lore, while the other simply reinforces the reigning stereotype of an ill-equipped feminine intruder upon baseball’s male sanctity. Lindy Sunshine is a baseball pioneer cut in the mold of real-life rebels Jackie Robinson, Pete Gray, this season’s Jim Abbott; Bowen’s Chris Tilden is little more than a grown-up Sensible Kate, uncomfortable in spikes and ballcap, the stuff of juvenile Horatio Alger fiction stuffed uncomfortably into the mere trappings of serious adult fiction.

Women have had little visible impact upon professional baseball across the century, though they have not been entirely absent from the game either. In the world of baseball fiction, women characters have played a much more visible, albeit predictable, role. The treatment of women in baseball novels — from juvenile fictions in the mold of John Tunis to sophisticated adult novels from Malamud to Kinsella — has fallen repeatedly into three distinct categories.

The first and most frequently encountered is the notion of women as creatures totally foreign to baseball’s world, as to the larger world of competitive sports in general. This is the tradition established at the outset with juvenile sports novels: the woman is either protective mother, virtuous girlfriend, or silly pigtailed classmate — in all cases a bothersome distraction from the noble game itself. The second role assigned women throughout sports fiction is that of cardboard symbol for insidious forces of good and evil. This is the familiar Hollywood motif of the lucky player finding virtuous woman companion and enjoying immediate diamond success; by contrast, the foolhardy players are seduced by dark ladies and suffer prolonged batting slumps as an inevitable consequence. The prototype here is Malamud’s Roy Hobbs, yet the theme is spun out with endless variation in nearly every literary and cinematic rendition of the timeworn baseball plot, from “Damn Yankees” to “Bull Durham.”

Finally, there is the more daring theme of the first woman ballplayer, the female Jackie Robinson breaking the last great barrier to true baseball equality. This theme has itself received two contrasting treatments — as minor plot element and comic escapade, or as the stuff of serious baseball mythology. This article first surveys historical perspectives on women’s general treatment in historical baseball and throughout baseball fiction. We then look more closely at the fictional potential of stories involving the first woman major leaguer, a theme which has led to some of baseball’s lamest writing — with Rothweiler and Bowen — as well as to some of its most gripping diamond action — in the spritely treatment of Barbara Gregorich.

While Gregorich and Bowen are first to devote an entire novel to serious fictional treatment of the female rookie’s diamond debut, other novelists have exploited this idea as either minor subplot or excuse for titillating sexual escapade. The waters are first tested with the least meritorious effort in this vain, Ray Peuchner’s “Grand Slam” (1973), a less than mildly amusing sports novel about a gorgeous tough-talking second baseperson on an obscure minor league club. Swinging sex all too quickly pads out the sparse narrative action for Peuchner, and dramatic boredom descends rapidly into intellectual banality. Paul Rothweiler’s shabbily constructed and even more poorly received 1976 novel, “The Sensuous Southpaw,” continues the small sub-genre of women’s baseball fiction with an equally uneven and frivolous tale about Jeri “Red” Walker, knuckleballing ace of the minor league Portland Beavers. The team nickname itself should be sufficient to alert readers to Rothweiler’s lust for the cheap literary joke. David Ritz in his more inventive work, “The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn” (1981), features a fastballing Jewish female Sandy Koufax as improbable ace of his fictional Dodgers, just as improbably resurrected in Brooklyn of the 1980s. Donald Hays’ slapstick Dixie Association Arkansas Reds boast a female infielder in their oddball lineup as do the fictional Portland Mavericks (same team yet more tasteful nickname than Rothweiler’s novel) of Merritt Clifton’s counter-culture novelette “A Baseball Classic” (1978). If this plot device of woman major leaguer or minor leaguer is still somewhat surprising to the casual reader of sports fiction, it is not at all unfamiliar to the true devotees of more obscure baseball novels.

That women should play baseball, and play it competently, is of course not in itself an altogether absurd notion, unfamiliar as that notion might be to spectatorship at large. Women’s baseball — real hardball — has, after all, existed sporadically outside the pages of novels and the flickering images of film. Yet from 1943 to 1954 the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League operated successfully in a half-dozen cities spread through the midwest, often drawing standing room crowds (perhaps as many as 10,000) for much of its 120-game schedule. Formed at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and financially underwritten by several major league owners — principally P.K. Wrigley of the Cubs — the AAGPBL would boast as many as ten teams at the height of its popularity and pay a respectable average salary of $75 weekly. AAGPBL ballplayers drew fans as much for their diamond wizardry as for the prurient male desire of seeing tuniclike uniforms and feminine legs loose upon the basepaths. The AAGPBL baseballs were real, the distances of the diamond were big-league measure, the pitching was overhand, and the base hits were solid as they come.

Other women over the years have managed to crack the world of male professional and semi-professional baseball, although for brief and often little-noticed careers. Today’s fading memories of these brief glorious moments for women in pro baseball are now kept alive by recent unveiling of the permanent Women’s Baseball Exhibit, erected in conjunction with this season’s Golden Anniversary of baseball’s sacred shrine in Cooperstown. And renewed interest in the subject has led to both a major television documentary (“A League of Their Own”, 1986) treating AAGPBL baseball history, as well as a book-length feminist chronicle of women’s role in the national pastime (Zipter, “Diamonds Are A Dyke’s Best Friend,” 1989).

Yet old prejudice dies hard, and baseball (like most team sports of wide spectator appeal) remains the most exclusive among male-dominated venues. Football and basketball at least have sideline cheerleaders, as blatantly sexist as their symbolic role may be. There is no sanctioned on-field position for women in baseball, and this sport alone maintains a written stricture against women signing professional contracts with men’s teams, a clause adopted by organized baseball on June 21, 1952 and remaining in full force to this day. By definition, sports which admit women participants are by that fact alone dismissed as constituting minor sports.

Lindy Sunshine’s fictional treatment at the hands of teammates and fans of the Chicago Eagles is therefore as inevitable within the frame of Gregorich’s novel as it would be on the diamonds of real-life baseball. For generations of ballplayers (usually athletes of rural southern roots) a black man in the national game was almost unthinkable; yet once integration had been forced upon professional sport in the wake of the second great war, however, it suddenly seemed as though it had somehow been there for all time.

For women to intrude upon this all-male realm of sport is quite another matter altogether; the sexual barriers run deepest of all. Anthropologist Mario Bick astutely observes that “sports conversations often effectively exclude women, and sporting events remain one of the few bastions of aggressive male manifestations of superiority, as reflected in the stereotypical behavior of males in explaining sports events to their women companions.” Women in baseball, from the first, have been as antithetical to the national game itself as, say, betting scandals or time clocks. Females found little enough welcome even within their normal ballpark domain — the grandstand — until well into the game’s fifth or sixth decade. The reigning attitude of baseball’s male world – from Abner Doubleday to Bart Giamatti — has always seemingly been that of the unknown 1911 author of the Reach Official American League Guide. It was this author who apparently first suggested (in print) that the idea of women actually playing baseball was, after all, “positively repugnant”.

From the outset women have been treated at least as unkindly in baseball fiction as they have by the big-league game itself. Critic Michael Oriard lays bare the issue by capsulizing the familiar role of female characters throughout baseball novels — throughout sports novels in general — as that of either complaisant wife, inspirational yet little-seen mother, admiring girlfriend who inspires the hero with her moral uprightness, or (in later adult fiction) unwelcomed yet irresistible sexual threat. This troublesome ideal of dominant masculinity and seductive contaminating femininity in the sports world is launched with the earliest of juvenile sports fiction. The schoolboy hero of such novels always has an unimportant and largely absent mother, or perhaps an adoring and encouraging girlfriend as reward for virtuous athletic prowess. But such relationships are never erotic and female characters are as often entirely absent from the scene.

The stereotype of masculine exclusivity in sport is not only reflected in boys’ juveniles but thoroughly reinforced as well by subsequent sports fiction of all types. Qualities which lead to success in the sporting arena are those which define our national masculine ideal: strength, agility, speed, mental toughness and unbridled aggressiveness. These are the skills by which the American frontier was won; and as Oriard stresses, the modern-day absence of action-packed frontier living necessitates the athletic field as a last refuge for preserving and validating our illusions of this ingrained masculine ideal.

The exclusive nature of the male athlete, as portrayed in American sports fiction, has long dictated the necessary roles assigned women in such works of fiction. The linking of American 2Oth-century sport with American 19th-century frontier life assures that male/female stereotypes will pervade the diamonds, gridirons and indoor arenas of fictional sporting contests. Such fictions supply the storehouse for American myths of modernday folk-hero survival. As symbolic hunters, warriors, and protectors of women and children, our athletes perform ritualized tribal defense by meeting and conquering their athletic opponents and thus protecting hometown rooters from the dreaded enemy team. But while men tenaciously protect the narrow masculine character of their sports, a central theme of sports fiction remains the always irreconcilable incompatibility between women and the game itself. Men must eschew the softness of females and femininity to score victory on the athletic field; women serve to encourage (as lovers, fans, symbolic cheerleaders) male aggressiveness, or to weaken (as dark temptress or silly bystander) the inherent nobility of such male contests. When female characters in the sports novel do not act out the predictable roles of “terrible, emasculating mother,” (as Memo in Malamud’s “The Natural”), or practical arbiter of worldly affairs (as Holly Wiggen in Mark Harris’ Henry Wiggen trilogy), they are likely reduced to “silly girls” swooning at masculine athletic prowess or cheapening “the game” with their inability to understand its simplest rules or most obvious rationales (as with Judith Winthrop, in her first trip to the local ballpark in Heywood Broun’s 1923 baseball novel, “The Sun Field”). One of the most insightful of Oriard’s observations about the inherent male-female dichotomy of American frontier life is the notion that “the American counterpart to the Victorian ethic made women the arbiters of culture and morality and men the entrepreneurs in industry and commerce.”

Women writing about baseball have done little themselves to reverse the stereotypical images of woman in the game. Most often, it is the woman baseball novelist or baseball beat writer who, with her own work, is the strongest reinforcer of such stereotypes. Women authors of juvenile sports fiction consistently maintained the formulae expected of such boy’s pulp novels. Furthermore, they reinforced the dominant notion of the closed male domain by writing under male pseudonyms (Beth Bradford Gilchrist = John Prescott Earl; Elsie Wright = Jack Wright; Constance H. Irwin = C.H. Frick) or hiding behind sexless initials (B.J. Chute, M.G. Bonner, H.D. Francis). Disaffected baseball wives Bobbie Bouton, Nancy Marshall, and Danielle Torrez have produced silly and carping exposes which only reinforce our perception of women as hopeless uninitiates, outsiders incapable of grasping the true beauties of a man’s game. Charline Gibson, in writing “A Wife’s Guide to Baseball” (with ghost author Michael Rich) assumes that women as a class hold not even the slightest modicum of appreciation for the national pastime.

Even baseball’s two brightest women commentators unintentionally reinforce the limiting role of “women as outside reporters”. Kathryn Parker (“We Won Today: My Season with the Mets”) and Alison Gordon (“Foul Ball! Five Years in the American League”) cast themselves unknowingly as “the intrusive female scribe,” more interested in the awkwardness of her unwelcomed position in the locker room than in the on-field game she is covering. Parker devotes the heart of her 1977 book to chapters on a baseball wife’s perceptions of the game, the plight of female “ballboys”, and the predictably negative comments of selected Mets’ players about the possibility of future female major leaguers. Gordon as well underscores the common theme: that the most difficult obstacle she had to overcome was her appearance as a woman sportswriter in the locker room.

Gordon and Parker are indisputably skilled baseball writers who often capture the subtleties of diamond myth and poetry; Alison Gordon’s chapter on the mythic surroundings of big-league ballparks is a minor diamond classic. But journalistic insight is all-too-often muted by the notion that — as self-conscious female reporters — their reportership is their only sanctioned role in an otherwise hostile baseball world. It is primarily the notion that they can only appreciate baseball as clubhouse reporters, women reporters at that, that in the end detracts from both Gordon’s and Parker’s otherwise astute accounts of the game.

One of the few serious adult baseball novels of the pre-1950s also unexpectedly focuses on the role of women in baseball and intentionally probes the silliness of women who try to grasp the male world of competitive team sport. Heywood Broun’s “The Sun Field” (1923) provides archetypical illustration of this reigning image of woman as naive observer of the mysterious world of baseball and as dangerous temptress of the dedicated men who play the game. Yankee slugger Tiny Tyler — a Babe Ruth prototype already a few seasons past his fading prime — is enticed into an ill-fated amorous encounter with an equally prototypical female baseball groupie — romantic and intellectually chic Judith Winthrop. In her initial visit to a big-league park, Judith is first repelled by the vicarious nature of fan enthusiasm, the silliness of savage male competition, and the general inaneness she perceives in the contest itself. But when her attention is directed to Tiny Tyler, she sees suddenly only the highly romanticized “titanic efforts” of the slugger’s play. Tyler takes tremendous whiffs when he strikes out rather than those little pokes which provide less romantic players (like Ty Cobb) with cherished base hits. When Judith falls in love with Tyler and he returns her advances, her ultimate influence upon the swooning slugger is that of convincing him to strike those romantic poses of Greek sculpture she so admires in his outfield play. Tyler’s resulting preoccupation (like any slumping ballplayer, he begins to think too much) predictably wreaks havoc upon his baseball play. This is, of course, one of the earliest yet most sophisticated versions of a familiar baseball theme — unfortunate players who earn the love of a good woman perform well upon the field; those seduced by a dark temptress are visited by the most terrible of slumps. Broun’s novel lacks the mythic qualities which elevate Malamud’s treatment of this theme; yet “The Sun Field” is indeed important in historical perspective. It offers one of the starkest renditions of a standby of the American sports novel — the useless woman as silly spectator and evil temptress, encroaching with disastrous consequence upon the idyllic male baseball world.

Baseball fans — generally a fair lot — will likely accept Pam Postema’s female encroachment upon baseball — in her role as big-league umpire — since here we encounter an image of woman (as moral arbiter) consistent with at least one facet of Michael Oriard’s description of familiar roles assigned female characters in the closed world of sports fiction and sports culture. The woman umpire, however, is still something of a female intrusion upon the male baseball world, and as such it will not sit altogether easy with multitudes of fans and legions of the game’s professional players. Women “players” are even more deeply threatening, of course, and two most egregious assaults on the male baseball world — albeit in the somewhat harmless guise of fiction — are those launched by Gregorich and Bowen in 1987. Gregorich’s is the most dramatic affront to sexually exclusive baseball, partly because it is actually written by a woman, partly because it is a markedly better baseball novel. Gregorich’s Lindy Sunshine is, after all, as far from the rigid cultural stereotypes of woman (as nurturing homebodies and seductive outsiders) as she is from Michael Bowen’s flaccid and one dimensional Chris Tilden of the Denver Marshalls. Here is a real flesh-and-blood ballplayer, one straight out of the best tradition of Mark Harris’ Henry Wiggen and his colorful Mammoth teammates. As one critic has aptly phrased it, having scrapped her way into the literary baseball lineup, Lindy Sunshine could be around for awhile. And sooner or later she will perhaps indeed look prophetic as well.

Gregorich’s novel is indeed more threatening to baseball traditionalists than superficially similar forerunners which satirize the notion of woman big-league ballplayer, or “baseball novels” by women which focus on recreational softball play (e.g., Cooney, Vogan), or on the woman’s lot as baseball spectator, well removed from the male arena of the locker room and field of play (e.g., Tennenbaum, Willard).

For such tradition-bound baseball readers, Rothweiler, Peuchner, Ritz and Hays might also seem a good deal less objectionable in their consistently cavalier treatments of the first-woman-ballplayer theme. In these earlier works baseball is always pure fantasy, and the treatment is relentlessly humorous if not downright slapstick. The story element of “woman in baseball” is either subplot or lark with all four earlier novels. Then too, all four (like Bowen’s “Can’t Miss”) can be easily dismissed as not very good baseball novels, fictions offering little more than exploitation of America’s pastime for cheap second-rate flights of imaginative fantasy. Rothweiler’s female ballplayer, for one, is drawn as the stuff of male sex fantasies, as his title underscores, and Jeri “Red” Walker’s own constant sexual daydreams assure from cover to cover that “The Sensuous Southpaw” is always more potboiler than mythic episode. A single passage alone captures the pejorative feminine stereotypes of Rothweiler’s exploitative novel:

The crowd stood and stomped and cheered. Then I was walking to the mound and the p.a. announced me: “NOW PITCHING: NUMBER 44, JERI ‘RED’ WALKER!” Dusty handed me a brand-new National League ball and mumbled something about the bases being loaded and I should be careful. I threw in a couple of warmups — right down the pipes — and the crowd began chanting my name. Then I was facing one of the most awesome guys I’d ever seen, seven feet tall, with a bat that must’ve been cut from a telephone pole. He swung it like it was a Styrofoam toy … I went into a full windup, gritted my teeth, and threw him a curve, low and outside. His big face broke into a grin as his bat came round. My heart sank as the ball made contact with the bat and took off like a rocket toward left field. I was crying … Suddenly a horse raced across the outfield, headed straight for the mound. It was white — pure white — and riding it was a huge handsome guy with windblown hair. Before I could do anything, he’d swept me up behind him, and we were galloping straight up over the stadium.

Ritz writes a much better baseball novel than Rothweiler, one which plays effectively on the shared culture of deep-rooted baseball nostalgia for neighborhood teams of our past — in this case the mythical Brooklyn Dodgers of the Jackie Robinson era — rather than on shallow adolescent fantasies of sexual exploitation. Yet Ritz reserves the female big-leaguer element of his novel as minor plot device; Ruth Smelkinson (as Jewish as the Sandy Koufax she emulates) provides one of the more improbable elements surrounding a Dodger team which is here miraculously resurrected in Brooklyn three decades after O’Malley’s infamous flight to California. Smelkinson adds an intriguing romantic element, being predictably coupled with one of the novel’s two day-dreaming protagonists who have together somehow pulled off one of baseball’s ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasies. Yet ballplaying Ruth Smelkinson is clearly the lesser of two important female characters in this novel; sportswriter Oran Ellis, in her more appropriate and sanctioned female role as detached baseball observer and scribe, is indisputably the more memorable female character of Ritz’ fine baseball fantasy.

Hays, in turn, also buries his attention-catching female infielder — here of the fictional Double-A Arkansas Reds — under a windfall of bizarre and thinly drawn literary stereotypes: two Cuban refugees on loan from Fidel Castro, a folk-singing starting pitcher, a broken-down alcoholic relief pitcher with the familiar “unhittable knuckler,” an ex-con slugging first baseman doubling as the story’s narrator, and a one-armed former big-leaguer turned university professor, who doubles as the team’s socialist manager. More than one critical commentator has noted that Hays’ lineup in “The Dixie Association” seems remarkably like “literary APBA cards, playing on a rigged game board.” Hays’ first woman big-leaguer, Susan Pankhurst — “tall and long-legged and blond-headed, with eyes the color of the Colorado sky; Hitler would’ve made her his poster girl” — hardly escapes the cartoon-character treatment which substitutes for serious characterization throughout “The Dixie Association.”

Against this established minor tradition of cameo female appearances in baseball fiction, Gregorich and Bowen’s novels are the more remarkable for coming directly to grips with serious treatment of the women-in-baseball theme. Both “She’s on First” and “Can’t Miss” are somewhat uneven as first novels; both (as is the wont of the typical baseball novel) sacrifice depth for fluent action; both are often all-too-predictable in on-field baseball event as well as unfolding plot-line. Bowen’s novel has far less to recommend it, however. In the phrase of reviewer Harry, Reed, this book is indeed a baseball anomaly — “a boring book about a natural hitter”. The largest fault with Bowen’s slow-moving novel is perhaps the degree to which it leaves all the crucial actions open-ended: Cindy Briggs, enigmatic publicity director, and her unresolved relationship with the team’s star left-handed pitcher; Chris Tilden’s ambiguous love-affair with a lifeless older sportswriter; Tilden’s post-rookie baseball career; the fate of the novel’s best-developed character, utility infielder Mace Dickson, caught at the tail-end of an undistinguished career — all are left unresolved with novel’s close. In the end, Bowen’s novel is dismissed as second rate in its baseball scenes and largely unenticing in its treatment of female efforts at cracking baseball’s rigid sexual barrier. It differs from Rothweiler’s and Hays’ lightweight treatments of this engaging theme only in the degree to which his female ballplayer is consistent focus for the novel’s central actions.

While novels featuring the first women big-league player — from Rothweiler to Gregorich — conspire to bury familiar stereotypes of woman as intruder in the national game, these novels themselves are not without their own special cache of carefully hewn literary stereotypes. Alongside ingrained notions of baseball women as seductive temptress (Lola sent by the devil to lure Joe Hardy from more noble diamond pursuits) and stupid bimbo (Judith Winthrop’s view of baseball as “sillier than patriotism” and of an outfielder as a Greek sculpture) which comprise the familiar treatment of women in more traditional baseball fiction, even novels daring the first woman big-leaguer are notable for their own set of rigid diamond stereotypes. For Gregorich, Bowen and Rothweiler the first distaff big-leaguer must be a daughter of an ex-major leaguer; all such novels seize in one fashion or another (and with varying degrees of literary success) on explicit parallels to Jackie Robinson and the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. The sexuality of our female ballplayer is always seemingly a prevalent issue and in the three novels focusing explicitly on the first woman big-leaguer our heroine must struggle to remain sexually pure (never seemingly an issue for male jocks of standard adult baseball fiction).

A related matter is a second, more curious paradox: that love affairs for our woman major leaguer are regularly plotted to involve a dashing male sportswriter (Gregorich and Bowen) or enticing big-league manager (Rothweiler and Ritz), but never another available ballplayer. It is a final curiosity that three such novels set the locale of the female rookie’s baseball debut in minor league settings (Hays, Rothweiler and Clifton, with the latter two obviously recalling the colorful Triple-A Portland Beavers of the 1970s), while the three major league novels (Gregorich, Bowen, Ritz) select non-existent big-league teams — the Chicago Eagles, Denver Marshalls, and resurrected 1981 Brooklyn Dodgers. Each of these last two plot devices seem calculated io assure safe distancing from baseball reality as setting for such seemingly outrageous baseball circumstance.

In the genre of female rookie baseball fiction, Gregorich provides both the best baseball writing and the most palatable rebuttal to the male-dominated baseball novel of American sports tradition. Parodying the standard baseball plot Gregorich finds her feminine ballplayer involved romantically with a male sportswriter covering the Eagles, and Sunshine’s slowly evolving affair with Neal Vanderlin has none of the exploitative trappings of the expected lust-ridden scenes between sexy feminine ballplayer and locker room jockeys. Here, in fact, Gregorich neatly reverses the time-worn paradigm by exchanging the expected sexual roles of participant and observer. Lindy Sunshine is the ballplayer, the insider intimate with nuts and bolts of the game; Neal is the sportswriter, always held one step away from baseball’s inner-circle by his outsider’s status, barred by his profession from the game’s select fraternal order of players. This neat reversal of male sportswriter (outside observer) and female player (inside the game’s protective circle) is ultimately the maior achievement of Barbara Gregorich’s unusual novel.

With “She’s on First,” the fast-moving plot appears both natural and yet delightfully original throughout, in the finest tradition of our most readable baseball fiction. Lindy Sunshine is (unknown to herself) the illegitimate child of two professional baseball superstars, former Chicago Eagle slugger (and now club owner) Al Mowerinski, and the late Amanda Quitman, star infielder for the AAGPBL Hammond Chicks in the late 1940s. Living with adoptive parents, Sunshine exploits the advantages of heredity and environment (she’s unusually tall and long-armed, even as a child) and progresses rapidly toward baseball stardom, performing as a stellar shortstop and breaking the male hold on baseball all the way from Little League through the Collegiate World Series. From the day that Al Mowerinski first coerces former teammate and current Eagle scout T.M. Curry into seeing Lindy perform on a backroad Pennsylvania Little League diamond, Curry senses that something strange lurks behind Mowerinski’s apparent fascination with this talented female ballplayer; but Curry wants no part of being associated with bringing a woman into the game and balks repeatedly when later sent to scout and sign the female college star. Mowerinski gambles on signing Sunshine straight off the college campus and a subsequent scene in the owner’s Chicago office poignantly echoes the famous first meeting between Rickey and Robinson which is today the familiar stuff of baseball’s noblest legend.

From here the plot unfolds rapidly and predictably: Sunshine progresses quickly through the minors, despite hatred and taunting from teammates and fans alike; Sunshine is brought to Chicago to save the floundering Eagles with her talented arm and bat and her expected celebrity status; Sunshine develops a romantic attachment with intellectual sportswriter Neal Vanderlin, after shunning the crude advances of self-serving teammates; Eagle players are divided on the issue of a female intruder in the locker room and eventually threaten boycott if Sunshine stays; Lindy rudely discovers that Mowerinski is her actual father and leaves the team in dismay, now feeling her ascent to the majors resulted from something other than her obvious baseball talents; finally, through the gentle efforts of Vanderlin, Sunshine is brought to her senses and returns to Chicago to play out the season and accomplish her mission of breaking baseball’s male stranglehold. The action is fast-paced and except for the unforgettable fact that Sunshine is female, this novel is from first to last the basic outline of all those many gripping stories about baseball rookies. Drawn in the finest tradition of John Tunis or Mark Harris — or hundreds of sportswriters each new spring season — this “prospect make good against overwhelming odds” plotline is the baseball version of that too-familiar coming-of-age fiction which still constitutes one of the staple trademarks of western literature.

Among women’s baseball and softball novels — especially among the baseball books authored by women — Barbara Gregorich’s novel is the undisputed all-star selection. Only Nancy Willard comes close to Gregorich’s true fan’s appreciation for the game, or to her talents for capturing baseball’s inherent narrative potential; yet Willard’s “Things Invisible To See” is a novel cast more in baseball’s mythical-surrealistic tradition. And in this sense, especially, Willard is again reminiscent of the familiar baseball tradition of women reporters who poeticize and romanticize the game, ultimately at the expense of dramatic big-league action.

Gregorich’s baseball scenes, by contrast, are the stuff of real baseball. Her treatment of the game is, in fact, unique from three distinct perspectives. Here is a woman, we sense, who intimately knows and loves the hardball game. No embarrassing technical errors here (except one instance on page 103-104 almost too slight to mention, where four batters come to the plate in what is described as a one-two-three inning); no embarrassing female transmogrifications of ballplayers into fuzzy Greek statues or ephemeral literary symbols. Also, the baseball descriptions are true-to-life and almost always enthralling; few male authors and virtually no female writers have actually matched them. Numerous descriptions of Sunshine’s mental adventures at the plate approximate the best baseball fiction writing:

Behind her she heard the soft shuffling sound of the catcher’s feet, sensed him settle into place and lift his glove. She watched the pitcher intently. It’ll be a strike. Coming right at me. I’m waiting for a fastball, low and on the outside corner. That’s my pitch. Here it comes. Focusing on the release point, she saw the white blur appear above the pitcher’s shoulder, coming out of his hand. Almost here, it’s a fastball, hit it! She hammered it through to left. The ball fell into the hole for a single, advancing Ulysses to second. (107)

Perhaps only the loving views from the Shea Stadium grandstand offered by Sylvia Tennenbaum in “Rachel, The Rabbi’s Wife,” come close to Gregorich for appreciation of the details and poetry of the game. As with all the best chronicles of baseball’s on-field play, Gregorich repeatedly sacrifices depth of portrait for demands of fluid action, a decision calculated to appeal to most casual readers and fans of hardball fiction. Finally, with Gregorich all the previous stereotypes of the woman’s dimwitted regard for baseball are rudely dispatched. By transforming the love interest of her star female player into a male sportswriter — himself an outsider to the game — Gregorich provides a single brilliant final irony underscoring her fictional treatment of baseball’s sexual barriers. This final irony is, in fact, the heart of her achievement. While Michael Bowen seizes upon the identical set of fitting circumstances, his own narrative account of Chris Tilden’s affair with Nathan Morris is as flat and uninspired as everything else in “Can’t Miss.” Morris is not even a central figure in the latter novel, whose only two fully drawn portraits — broken-down utility man Mace Dickson and hard-as-nails female publicity director Cindy Briggs — are much closer to familiar stereotypes of baseball fiction than they are to the liberated characters of Gregorich’s fictional baseball world.

Gregorich’s novel may also be one of baseball’s most prophetic literary fantasies. Julie Croteau’s history-making appearance in Division III NCAA baseball this spring — seen against the backdrop of Gregorich’s entertaining novel — may strike something of a portentous note for the patrons of the national game. In today’s world of greedy sports owners, lusting after surefire gate attractions and clamoring for celebrity superstars — a world of pure hype and insubstantial image at the expense of substance and lasting quality — Al Mowerinski seems an altogether plausible Steinbrenner or Veeck or Finley. All it would take, perhaps, is a petite shortstop who can hit and throw like Sunshine, a Tony Fernandez with hidden pigtails and rifle arm. For those who find this notion farfetched, recall only that baseball’s rich and often bizare history has always been far more often the stuff of fantasy and myth — Ruth calling his shot, Eddie Waitkus lying wounded in a Chicago hotel room, Pete Gray and Jim Abbott in big-league uniform. Baseball fiction itself has never been as bound to real-world events as has baseball history to flights of unlimited fancy. And Barbara Gregorich’s bright novel is not, after all, the first to prefigure baseball history in the flesh. There was J. Henry Waugh’s illusionary world of baseball board games; Bernard Malamud’s 38-year-old rookie phenom Roy Hobbs; Donald Hays’ one-armed Lefty Marks; John Hough’s despondent gay umpire. Baseball fiction, as much as baseball history, time and again has provided both mirror and crystal ball for life itself.