Women in MLB: Sadly, don’t bet a pile of money on that

An often asked question is why there have been no MLB women players. Understanding that reality needs a little history and a little experience.

All right, the question from one of the bosses was, “Serious question…why haven’t we seen a woman play in MLB?” It was attached to a video tweet of an impressive young lady banging softballs into the stratosphere off a pitcher throwing underhanded off a stool.

The question is really a two-part matter, one having to do with the history of a person named Eleanor Engle, and the other having to do with a wider matter, the notion of men and women competing at baseball.

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Eleanor was a secretary and apparent baseball nut, who also happened to be a pretty good athlete. Unlike many other – no, make that all other women in the 1950s – she decided she wanted to play professional baseball.

As memorialized on a ’91 Topps Archive baseball card bringing to life (or cardboard) “the cards that never were” from 1953, Engle was signed in June of ’52 by the Harrisburg (PA) Senators, an affiliate at the time of the MLB Philadelphia A’s. The photo on the front of the card captures a lithe, dark-haired woman sitting at least two seats away from her male teammates in a dugout.

The back of Engle’s card succinctly summarizes her career as follows, “She worked out at shortstop with the club, but on June 21, 1952, Organized Baseball officially barred all feminine performers from playing professional baseball.”

And that, as a practical matter, was that.

Fast forward 40-plus years: My wife and I and another couple are sitting down to dinner in Scranton, PA before going over to the scheduled Colorado Silver Bullets game that evening. We were making a weekend of this together, and spirits were high.

Supposedly, if memory serves, the ladies making up the Silver Bullets were originally going to play a sort of All-Star team of lower minor leaguers from the region, but that plan changed at the last minute. We discovered the change in plans after tickets had already been bought.

“So, who are they going to play?” asked the young lady with us. Her boyfriend wasn’t that interested in baseball, but this woman was enough of an athlete to play several games for our co-ed slow-pitch softball team at shortstop, and women in this league never played shortstop. (Co-ed softball in Philadelphia was taken far more seriously in the ’90s that you might think, particularly among hospital workers.)

“I don’t know,” I said. “That was sort of fuzzy from what I saw. It sounds like semi-pros, whatever that means.”

“In other words, Acme, the Meat Counter.”

“Pretty much.”

We didn’t care. It would still be a unique viewing experience. Not MLB, but who cared? Everyone had another drink.

Let’s back up a moment and discuss the Silver Bullets origin for a moment, though.