On one side of the photo stood Babe Ruth, his portly frame draped in familiar Yankee pinstripes. Next to him was a small woman dressed in two-toned stirrups and a baggy baseball jersey, a ball cap shielding her dark, curly hair. The disparate pair was shaking hands. Joseph Wallace—author of two baseball history books and working on a third—had no clue what he was looking at. He was deep in the archives at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, thumbing through a generic file about women in baseball. He wanted to know more about the mystery lady ballplayer.
So he tracked down Tim Wiles, the Hall of Fame’s Director of Research. Wiles took one look at the snapshot and led Wallace to a small bookstore outside the library’s front door. On a shelf in the children's section sat a picture book, and its cover featured a cartoon pitcher who looked identical to the woman in Wallace’s photograph, down to the hat. Wiles said the woman’s name was Jackie Mitchell. A blunt title—The Girl Who Struck Out Babe Ruth—was splashed across the top in big blue letters.
The book told an amazing story. In the spring of 1931, a 17-year-old female signed a professional contract with a men’s minor league team in Chattanooga and, in the first inning of her first professional game, struck out Ruth and slugger Lou Gehrig consecutively. “She could put speed on the ball,” the book read. “She had control. And somehow, she could always guess a batter’s weakness.” Flipping through the pages, Wallace wondered how he’d never heard about Mitchell before, and why her triumphant outing wasn’t one of those canonical anecdotes fans of America’s most nostalgic game commit to memory. Eventually, a second thought entered his mind: Is there any way in hell this story could be true?
Andy Broome was similarly skeptical. A baseball card grader for Beckett Media and a Chattanooga native, Broome first heard about Mitchell’s feat from his great-grandfather, who talked about seeing the teen toe the rubber while he was a young man. In 2000, Broome became consumed by what he guessed was a tall tale. For half a decade, he scanned newspaper clippings, sought out collectibles from the April 2, 1931 game, and crisscrossed the country interviewing players who were still alive and had played with her, as well as friends and acquaintances who knew her later in life.“I was trying to find out, as much as I could, what was true and what had grown over the years from being retold countless times,” he says. “I went into it expecting to dig up the absolute truth about how everybody was in on it, and it was just a publicity deal.” After spending more time studying Mitchell’s life than anyone ever had, Broome reached a pair of conclusions. First, given the magnitude of the alleged achievement, the Mitchell paper trail was shorter than he expected. What evidence he could find didn’t necessarily support a hoax theory. “I went down as far as anyone has,” he says, “and I think it was a real deal.”
Here, thanks to decades-old newspaper reports, is what we know generally about the girl who struck out the Iron Horse and the Babe. Virne Beatrice “Jackie” Mitchell was born on August 29, 1913. (The 1920 U.S. Census indicates she was born in 1912, but there’s no reason to believe she would lie about her age as a young adult.) She was raised by her mother, who sold hosiery, and her father, a supportive and athletically minded optician who encouraged his daughter to swim and play ball at an early age. When Jackie was a toddler, the Mitchells moved to Memphis, and by coincidence, into the same building as Dazzy Vance, a Dodger great who won the NL MVP award in 1924 and struck out over 2,000 hitters in his 16-year career. Vance—then playing for the Memphis Chicks—took a liking to his tiny neighbor, teaching her how to throw a “drop ball,” now known as a sinker, among other tricks.
by Adam Doster, The Daily Beast | Read more:
Image:Library of Congress
