April 2, 1931 Teenager Mitchell strikes out baseball legend Babe Ruth
Hollywood must have lost its collective mind to ignore the tale of Jackie Mitchell’s golden day. The cast and plot have all the ingredients of a blockbuster: the most famous ballplayer who ever lived, two of his hall of fame contemporaries and, at the centre of it, a 17-year-old woman, only the second to play professional baseball, who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
Mitchell was a pitcher who had been coached as a young girl by her neighbour, Charles ‘Dazzy’ Vance. She would go on to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers and join Ruth and Gehrig in the game’s Valhalla at Cooperstown. She played women’s basketball as well as baseball and was summoned back from a basketball tour to Chattanooga, to sign for the Lookouts, a farm team for the Major League Washington Senators, on the eve of an exhibition match against the New York Yankees.
Joe Engel, the president of the Lookouts, filled his ballpark with a variety of stunts over the years and with dwindling ticket sales during the Depression hired the Yankees, fresh from spring training, to draw a sell-out crowd. Mitchell was a ‘lefty’, pitching with a side-arm technique and had perfected the sinking curveball.
Engel was not blind to the promotional, but if it was only a gimmick, it smacks of gilding the lily. This was the New York Yankees and ‘the Bambino’, ‘Iron Horse’ and ‘Poosh ‘Em Up’ Tony Lazzeri – three of the famous ‘Murderers’ Row’ batting line-up.
Still, the press treated Mitchell’s place in the team as a ruse in the build-up.
Indeed Mitchell was pictured in the previews playing up to the hype, powdering her nose and applying her make-up. Posing with Ruth and Gehrig for photographs, the two legends in Yankee pinstripe, the teenager almost drowned in her voluminous uniform.
Coming into the game as a reliever to pitch to Ruth, she threw one ball followed by two dipping strikes at which Ruth had swung hard. Next she threw in the corner of the strike zone and the pitch sailed past Ruth’s stroke. When the umpire called ‘Strike three’, Ruth threw his bat and stomped off.
Enter Gehrig, who also went hard at Mitchell, missing three straight pitches and he, too, struck out. After walking Lazzeri, she was pulled from the game. “Jackie probably remembered she was a woman, and after all that excitement she undoubtedly wanted to go off and have a good cry,” wrote the Washington Post.