Watch highlights from Jean Fruth’s keynote presentation at 2024 SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference
At the sixth annual SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference on September 21, 2024, author and photographer Jean Fruth delivered the keynote presentation.
Fruth is a co-founder of Grassroots Baseball, an organization that celebrates the amateur game around the world and encourages kids to play ball. Fruth is the author of three books in the Grassroots Baseball series, the forthcoming See Her Be Her (2024), along with Route 66 (2022) and Where Legends Begin (2019). She is also the traveling photographer for La Vida Baseball. She has been a baseball photographer for nearly two decades with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
- Video: Click here to watch a replay of Jean Fruth’s keynote presentation (YouTube)
Here are some highlights:
ON HER PHOTOGRAPHY ROLE MODELS
- “One of my photography heroes is Henri Cartier-Bresson, who is a surrealist photographer from the 1940s. Which might be unusual for a sports photographer, and you may be asking well what does a surrealist photographer have to do with a modern-day sports photographer? But for me, it’s everything because you can’t make a great picture unless you know what one is.”
ON PHOTOGRAPHING GIRLS AND WOMEN AT ALL LEVELS OF BASEBALL
- “Seeing the college game grow and seeing the level of play grow, and more schools participating [in the College Club Championship]. And then of course, the youth [level] has been so exciting to document with over 1,000 girls in programs like Baseball for All around the country, and seeing the younger level come up and the level of play start younger, girls staying in the game longer, and the level of play getting better.”
ON THE NEW BOOK: SEE HER, BE HER
- “In addition [to the photographs], we have players who wrote terrific essays, and this is what makes the book special for me is these essays from not only from Billie Jean King and her participating, and Cal [Ripken] and Claire [Smith], but the players like Ayami Sato, and all that she has done for the women’s game.”
Transcription assistance by Jacob Shanker.
For more coverage of the 2024 SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference, visit SABR.org/women-in-baseball-conference/2024.
Originally published: September 25, 2024. Last Updated: September 25, 2024.