Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball/ a Harvest Original

A comprehensive history of women in baseball chronicles the role of women in the sport from the game's inception in 1869 to the present. By the author of She's on First. 12,500 first printing.

Women's baseball did not begin--and certainly didn't end--with the 1940s short-skirted stars featured in the rousing film story A League of Their Own. Women were playing baseball at Vassar as early as the 1880s, and Ed Barrow, who would later bring Babe Ruth to New York, signed a woman pitcher named Lizzie Arlington to a minor-league contract in the late 1890s. Indeed, as presented here, the history of women in baseball is a long and colorful one; the exploits of Alta Weiss, Lizzie Murphy, and Jackie Mitchell, who struck out Ruth and Lou Gehrig back-to-back in a 1931 exhibition deserve to be remembered. Women at Play remembers well.