Lady’s day at the ballpark
Today marks the 72nd anniversary of the financially strapped and last-place Harrisburg Senators offering a player’s contract to stenographer-turned-shortstop Eleanor Engle.
Engle signs the contract worth between $250 and $300 per month, and then works out the next day with the Class B Interstate League team on Harrisburg’s City Island.
“She can hit the ball a lot better than some of the fellows on the club,” Senators team president Jay Smith says at the time.
Up to that point in time, the powers-to-be running the minors have an unwritten rule prohibiting women from playing in affiliated leagues, although the Negro Leagues hire three women – Toni Stone, Mamie “Peanuts” Johnson and Connie Morgan – as players from the late 1940s until the league's waning days in the early 1950s.
“There is no truth that this was a gimmick or a gag,” Senators general manager Howard Gordon says after signing Engle in 1952. “Actually, we were seeking to test an unwritten law for once and for all.”
Alas, the 26-year-old Engle never gets a chance to become the first woman to play in a pro game in affiliated baseball as Senators player-manager Buck Etchison refuses to let her do anything more than take batting practice and field a few ground balls.
“She was a very nice person to get along with,” says Harrisburg second baseman Ron Esrang. “There were no problems with the guys. When we went on the road and one of us booted a ball, the fans would yell, ‘Put Eleanor in there!’ But she didn’t travel with us.”
She never gets the chance.
Within 48 hours of Engle signing with the Senators in 1952, minor league president George Trautman and baseball commissioner Ford Frick void her contract and then officially bar teams from signing other women.
“I like to tell people Ford Frick threw me a curveball,” Engle later says, “and I struck out.”
Alas, even though she lives less than five miles from the ballpark in Harrisburg, Engle – who passes away in 2012 – never returns to City Island for the final 60 years of her life, instead preferring her privacy over the possibility of once again becoming a headline.
“Oh, I couldn’t go back there,” Engle says more than 50 years after signing her contract. “Somebody might recognize me.”