Jean Hastings Ardell selected as 2025 SABR Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award winner
The late author Jean Hastings Ardell was honored on Saturday, September 20, 2025, with the Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award during the SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference.
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.
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.
Before her death in 2022, 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.
In addition to Ardell, the other finalists for the 2025 award were professional umpire Lisa Turbitt and Maud Nelson, an early 20th-century star pitcher and promoter.
Click here for a list of previous award recipients.
Originally published: September 22, 2025. Last Updated: September 22, 2025.