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

The Colorado Silver Bullets

The Colorado Silver Bullets were the result of a “dream” of Bob Hope (no, not that Bob Hope), who had tried in the early ’80s to field a minor league team made up entirely of women. However, the team he hoped to call the Sun Sox were barred from play by the organized minor league system.

Roughly ten years later, Hope partnered with Paul Beckham in Atlanta to form the Silver Bullets, with a sponsorship by Coors, to promote women’s participation in baseball, and to finally make women’s professional baseball a reality. The team’s manager was eventual Hall of Famer Phil Niekro.

Hope had come to know Niekro when he had been the VP for promotions with the Atlanta Braves. Eventually, other former MLB players, including Al Bumbry and Phil’s brother, Joe, were coaches with the team.

In early 1994, Bullets management set about holding camps in order to identify the best possible women players, and according to an unofficial website dedicated to the team, some 1300 women tried out. Eventually 55 were called back for their first spring training.

The team competed from 1994 through ’97, but eventually folded when they lost their sponsorship with Coors, which had spent over $8 million on the team during their four years of existence.

A glance at their stats shows that the ladies were badly overmatched, especially in their first two years of play, when they compiled 6-38 and 11-33 records, always on the road in the manner of old barnstorming teams.

The leading batter on Bullets hit .200 in ’94, and the top average in ’95 was .246. The team average their first year was .141; the second year it moved to .183. Opponents hit an aggregate .336 and .294, in those respective years.

But they got better. In their last year they finally had a winning record, going 23-22, and that year they actually engaged in an all-out brawl in June 12, when Kim Braatz-Voisard charged the mound in Albany, GA after being hit with a pitch by a  pitcher who then laughed at her. (Another report asserted the pitcher “smiled.”)

Mark Lastinger, a writer for the Albany Herald, described Braatz-Voisard’s attack memorably: “She was on him like a cat on a pork chop.”

The Bullets weren’t messing around by ’97. Braatz-Voisard had been a .291 hitter the year before, collecting 12 doubles, two triples, and a homer. She had raised her BA by 70 points from the previous season. Stats for ’97 for the team are lost in the mists of time, but another player on the team who played at least three of the four years, Sunny Stacy, improved her BA by 46 points, then 14 more points in three campaigns.

However, our weekend in Scranton was during the woeful inaugural season.