Mitchell, Jackie (1914–1987)

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Mitchell, Jackie (1914–1987)

American baseball player who was a minor-league pitcher for the Chattanooga Lookouts when she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Born Virne Beatrice Mitchell in 1914; died in 1987; daughter of Joe Mitchell (a physician); married Eugene Gilbert; no children.

The second woman ever to sign a men's minor-league baseball contract (Lizzie Arlington being the first), pitcher Jackie Mitchell may have had one of the briefest careers as a minorleague player ever recorded. She signed with the Chattanooga (Tennessee) Lookouts in March 1931, and her contract was rescinded just one month later, after she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back-to-back in a controversial exhibition game between the Lookouts and the New York Yankees on April 2, 1931. While debate raged as to whether Mitchell's appearance in the game was legitimate or merely a publicity stunt, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Landis stepped in and stripped Mitchell of her contract and banned her from further major and minorleague play, claiming that life in baseball was simply "too strenuous" for a woman. It was a serious blow to Mitchell, who was a talented athlete and might well have had a pioneering career in professional baseball.

Jackie Mitchell was born in 1914 and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where her father was a physician. A premature baby weighing only four pounds at birth, she was raised on a regimen of fresh air and exercise to build up her strength. "I was out at the sandlots with father from as long as I can remember," she once recalled. At the age of seven or eight, Mitchell was taught to pitch by Dazzy Vance of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and as a teenager she once struck out nine men in an amateur game. In March 1931, fresh from Norman Elberfeld's baseball camp in Atlanta, and with her father acting as her agent, Mitchell signed with Joe Engel, a former pitcher for the Washington Senators and owner of the Class AA Chattanooga Lookouts. A master of promotion, Engel once raffled off a house to increase attendance at his team's games, and on another occasion staged an elephant hunt, so signing Mitchell may indeed have been just another gimmick. For the 17-year-old Mitchell, however, the contract promised instant riches. "To tell the truth, all I want is to stay in professional baseball long enough to get money to buy a roadster," she told a local paper. In a later statement, however, she expressed more serious goals: "I hope to pitch for years to come and shall try to get into a World Series."

When Engel announced that his rookie southpaw would play in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees, who were returning home from spring training, sports columnists were outraged. "I suppose that in the next town the Yankees enter they will find a squad that has a female impersonator in left field, a sword swallower at short and a trained seal behind the plate," sniped the New York Daily News. "Times in the South are not only tough but silly." The conservative Sporting News refused even to carry the story. "Quit your

kidding," they wrote back to a local reporter. "What is Chattanooga trying to do? Burlesque the game?"

As it turned out, the much-anticipated Yankees-Lookouts match-up on April 1 was postponed to April 2 because of rain, which only added to the drama. Four thousand fans filed into Engel Stadium to witness the event, along with scores of reporters, men from wire services, and even a film crew. Manager Bert Neihoff did not start Mitchell, but sent her to the mound early in the first inning, after pitcher Clyde Barfoot gave up a double and a single, giving the Yankees a 1–0 lead after the first two batters. Third in the lineup was the formidable "Sultan of Swat," Babe Ruth.

Sporting a white uniform made especially for her by the Spalding Company, Mitchell took a few warm-up throws before Ruth stepped to the plate. Ruth took ball one, Mitchell's deadly drop ball, then swung and missed the next two pitches. The fourth pitch was a called strike. In what may have been a staged performance, Ruth "kicked the dirt, called the umpire a few dirty names, gave his bat a wild heave and stomped off to the Yanks' dugout." Famed Lou Gehrig followed Ruth to the plate, striking out on the first three pitches. He seemed to take his hitless turn at bat in stride, however, shaking his head and grinning on his way back to the dugout, while Tony Lazzeri made his way to the plate. Lazzeri fouled off Mitchell's first pitch and took the next four, drawing a base on balls. At that point, Neihoff pulled Mitchell off the mound and reinstated Barfoot. The Yankees ultimately won the game 14–4.

For a brief time, Mitchell was a celebrity. Hailed as "the girl who struck out Ruth and Gehrig," she received so many letters of congratulations that her father had to hire a secretary to answer them. As might be expected, the teenager took Commissioner Landis' pronouncement hard, especially when no one—not even her parents—protested his ban or came to her defense. Within a month, however, she was back on the field as the star attraction of the new Junior Lookouts, a team hastily put together to capitalize on her fame. Mitchell toured eastern Tennessee with the team, pitching the first two or three innings of each game and proving quite a draw. When she returned to Chattanooga in May 1931 to face Margaret Nabel and the New York Bloomer Girls, the game was another sellout. Mitchell held the Bloomers hitless during her three innings at the mound, and the Juniors won the game, 7–4.

By the summer of 1931, Mitchell had so many offers to pitch in exhibition games that she decided to quit the Junior Lookouts and tour. After two years on the road (with her mother and father chaperoning), she signed with the House of David, a series of barnstorming teams that originated out of Benton Harbor, Michigan, and were popular with baseball fans across the country. Mitchell traveled with the House for seven years, pitching an inning or two a day against local teams. She eventually returned to Chattanooga and went to work in her father's office. When she was in her 50s, she married Eugene Gilbert, a man she had known since childhood, and slipped into obscurity.

In 1975, Mitchell's story reemerged when a California man wrote to Alan Morris, sports editor of the Chattanooga News-Free Press, asking what had happened to Jackie Mitchell, the girl who struck out Babe Ruth. Morris then recounted the story in an article, after which Mitchell received another round of congratulatory letters from people who found her story remarkable. At the time, she was still hopeful about women in baseball. "I'm interested in keeping up with what's happening in female athletics and efforts of the girls to play against the boys," she told reporters. "There is one woman umpire in professional baseball now and maybe some day there will be a player in the big leagues."

David Jenkins, another sports reporter for the Chattanooga News-Free Press, who befriended Mitchell during the last years of her life, viewed the film of her striking out Ruth and Gehrig and felt that it was inconclusive. "She threw well enough to have the ball do things," he said. "It was a drop ball, a sinker…. The players may have gone along with the thing in good fun, but that doesn't mean they weren't struck out. She might have been doing more than they expected her to do." Jenkins also expressed the belief that Mitchell was victimized by Landis and might have battled for her career with a little support. "If Engel had backed Jackie in trying to assert her right to play baseball—in asserting the validity of the contract—she would probably have gone ahead and fought against the rescinding of the contract. But nobody backed her." Jackie Mitchell died in 1987, at the age of 73.