The Baseball Adventure of Jackie Mitchell, Girl Pitcher vs. Babe Ruth


Book Description

During the biggest game of her life . . . a girl pitches to the world’s best slugger. Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1931. Jackie Mitchell is a girl pitcher on a minor-league baseball team, the Chattanooga Lookouts. In her day, few women played sports. But her skill earned her a spot on a men’s team. When the New York Yankees come to town, Jackie must face Babe Ruth at the plate. Can she strike out one of the greatest players in baseball?




Jackie Mitchell


Book Description

On March 26, 1931, the baseball world was stunned as a 18-year female pitcher named Virne Beatrice "Jackie" Mitchell of Chattanooga, TN, signed a minor league contract with the hometown Lookouts. Several days later, Mitchell took to the mound for an April 2 preseason game against the New York Yankees, striking out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. With her exploits reported the next day in newspapers across the United States, Jackie Mitchell became a household name Mitchell's story is detailed in a new book by women's baseball historian John Kovach. Jackie Mitchell: The Girl Who Loved Baseball. It is the most complete look at the life and career of Mitchell. As a young girl, Jackie and her family lived in Memphis, Tennessee. The family lived in close proximity to then minor league Memphis Chicks pitcher (and future Baseball Hall of Famer) Arthur Charles "Dazzy" Vance. It was Vance who reportedly taught a young Jackie to throw a baseball. While previous books about Mitchell center around her appearance against the Yankees, readers will learn a number of new things about Mitchell, both on and off the baseball field. Some of those things include: - Jackie playing for her first organized team, the Engelettes in 1930 - Jackie pitching for or against teams from eight different minor leagues - The only female pitcher to hold two major league teams scoreless - A first-ever, year-by-year record of Jackie's pitching career - Jackie's challenge to Babe Didrikson to pitch against her According to popular culture, the possibility that she would be soon a starting member of the Lookouts pitching staff was dashed when Baseball Commissioner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis reportedly banned females from playing professional baseball after her appearance. There is no written evidence of Landis ban according to Kovach. Following the game in Chattanooga, many of the teams she would play for would state that her contrast was "on loan" to their club from the Lookouts. As a female athlete in the 1930s, Mitchell played both baseball and basketball. Through her basketball playing, Mitchell encountered the legendary Mildred "Babe" Didrikson, playing on her "All American's Basketball Team" as well as the "Stars of The World", managed by Grover Cleveland Alexander. Kovach creates a unique chapter from interviews with Jackie between 1931-33. Readers will again hear Jackie in her own words tell what it was like to face Ruth and Gehrig; her love of baseball as well as what it was like to play with the bearded House of David team. The book also touches upon the post-athletic life of Mitchell until her death in 1987. Readers will learn about the deaths of her mother, father and younger sister as well as her brief marriage to Eugene A Gilbert.




Mighty Jackie


Book Description

In 1931, seventeen-year-old Jackie Mitchell pitches against Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game, becoming the first professional female pitcher in baseball history.




Encyclopedia of Women and Baseball


Book Description

Women have been involved in baseball from the game's early days, in a wide range of capacities. This ambitious encyclopedia provides information on women players, managers, teams, leagues, and issues since the mid-19th century. Players are listed by maiden name with married name, when known, in parentheses. Information provided includes birth date, death date, team, dates of play, career statistics and brief biographical notes when available. Related entries are noted for easy cross-reference. Appendices include the rosters of the World War II era All American Girls Professional Baseball League teams; the standings and championships from the AAGPBL; and all women's baseball teams and players identified to date.




A People's History of Baseball


Book Description

Baseball is much more than the national pastime. It has become an emblem of America itself. From its initial popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, the game has reflected national values and beliefs and promoted what it means to be an American. Stories abound that illustrate baseball's significance in eradicating racial barriers, bringing neighborhoods together, building civic pride, and creating on the field of play an instructive civics lesson for immigrants on the national character. In A People's History of Baseball, Mitchell Nathanson probes the less well-known but no less meaningful other side of baseball: episodes not involving equality, patriotism, heroism, and virtuous capitalism, but power--how it is obtained, and how it perpetuates itself. Through the growth and development of baseball Nathanson shows that, if only we choose to look for it, we can see the petty power struggles as well as the large and consequential ones that have likewise defined our nation. By offering a fresh perspective on the firmly embedded tales of baseball as America, a new and unexpected story emerges of both the game and what it represents. Exploring the founding of the National League, Nathanson focuses on the newer Americans who sought club ownership to promote their own social status in the increasingly closed caste of nineteenth-century America. His perspective on the rise and public rebuke of the Players Association shows that these baseball events reflect both the collective spirit of working and middle-class America in the mid-twentieth century as well as the countervailing forces that sought to beat back this emerging movement that threatened the status quo. And his take on baseball’s racial integration that began with Branch Rickey’s “Great Experiment” reveals the debilitating effects of the harsh double standard that resulted, requiring a black player to have unimpeachable character merely to take the field in a Major League game, a standard no white player was required to meet. Told with passion and occasional outrage, A People's History of Baseball challenges the perspective of the well-known, deeply entrenched, hyper-patriotic stories of baseball and offers an incisive alternative history of America's much-loved national pastime.




Long-Armed Ludy and the First Women's Olympics


Book Description

Lucile “Ludy” Godbold was six feet tall and skinnier than a Carolina pine and an exceptional athlete. In her ?nal year on the track team at Winthrop College in South Carolina, Ludy tried the shot put and she made that iron ball sail with her long, skinny arms. But when Ludy qualified for the first Women's Olympics in 1922, Ludy had no money to go. Thanks to the help of her college and classmates, Ludy traveled to Paris and won the gold medal with more than a foot to spare. Hooray for Ludy! Based on a true story about a little-known athlete and a unique event in women's sports history.




Let Beauty Speak


Book Description

"From the time of the great Greek philosophers, the good, true, and beautiful were seen as inseparable. Beauty is always good and true. It can be the still, small voice crying in the wilderness, calling us to higher things. Jimmy Mitchell communicates this with an eloquence and elegance which is itself a thing of beauty." — Joseph Pearce, Biographer of Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, Tolkien, and Chesterton In an era marked by rampant secularism and endless noise, the ten principles of Let Beauty Speak empower Christians to evangelize the world by bringing beauty to the forefront of their lives and reminding the world what it means to be human. This book is particularly timely given the social unrest, political upheaval, and cultural strife of our times. The world's problems cannot be solved by worldly solutions. Politics, medicine, technology, and other secular fields have their place in society, but the deepest existential questions of the human heart can only be answered by the beauty of holiness found in the lives of the saints. From cave diving in Austria to summer camps in New Zealand, Let Beauty Speak is full of personal stories and rich theology that will inspire you to become a great saint as you apply the book's principles to your own life. Each chapter is organized into beautiful, bite-size sections that make it easy for non-academics to enjoy. Each chapter also concludes with practical tips and recommendations that give you an opportunity to further personalize the principles and transform your day-to-day life. From embracing childlike wonder to integrating prayer, work, and leisure into your everyday life, this is your how-to guide for evangelizing others by first living your humanity well. If not you, then who? If not now, then when? Turn these principles into a way of life, and you'll join the long line of saints whose holiness was the remedy for the isolation, confusion, and meaninglessness of their times.




A Dragon in the Family


Book Description

Darek and Zantor work to convince everyone that dragons and humans can get along in this second book in the fantastical Dragonling chapter book series! Ever since Darek saved Zantor the dragonling, they’ve been inseparable. Darek is the only family Zantor has ever known. But now Darek is bringing Zantor home from the Valley of the Dragons, and the villagers are up in arms! He and his brother Clep are called traitors. Their best friends are turning against them. Even Darek’s father has been threatened for allowing the enemy in their midst. How can Darek prove that dragons are good neighbors to the villagers?




City of Incurable Women


Book Description

In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored “City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through “Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.




Carceral Capitalism


Book Description

Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing. What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police? —from Carceral Capitalism In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible. Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.