On the Brink

On the Brink

By Lauren McNulty

I didn’t think anything would come of it, but I did try to see Smoky Joe Wood after the exhibition game. I was in Chattanooga on April 2, 1931 to see it. In the aftermath, I headed home to Boston. It was a week and a half before the start of the season, and the Red Sox were practicing at Fenway. I knew it was a longshot, me getting in to see Smoky Joe.

“Please, we used to play against each other. He played for Kansas City, I played for Boston. I really need to talk to him.”

“You played for Boston?” they laughed. “The Red Sox?”

“No, Bloomer Girls.”

This made them laugh even harder. “Like Smoky Joe would ever play with a bunch of girls!” they howled. Even at forty, and not having played for fifteen years, the laughter and disbelief stung. The boys at the gate got a “Thanks for your time,” and I headed straight to the post office.

The telegram I sent to Chicago said something to the effect of “It’s been a long time, I’m coming to see you.” I closed it, “Big Sister Nellie.” I sent it along, went home and packed a suitcase, and then the next evening got on a train.

Rogers Hornsby was not my actual little brother, although at one point I had viewed him that way. I met him when he was sixteen. He had just dropped out of high school, and he was already hard to deal with. His refusal to read was as much a result of being bitter over having to give up school as it was about protecting his eyes. But Maud, our manager, took pity on this kid and hired him as one of our toppers, one of the boys who dressed up to look like a woman while playing baseball the summer we toured in Texas. He never filled out the bloomer pants quite right, and he hated the wig.

He used to drive Lucy nuts when she was pitching.

“He’s a good fielder,” Maud said to her back at the hotel.

“I don’t care if he is a good fielder, he’s too flashy and makes too many errors!” Lucy yelled. “When I get my ground ball, I want an out! Don’t get me started on his hitting.”

Celia, our first baseman, poked her head into the room.

“His hitting really is atrocious, Maud,” she said. “Can’t we do something?”

“Thank you!” said Lucy, gesturing to Celia. “I’d like a little run support, too. If he’s going to make all these errors, he better be able to make it up when we come to bat!”

I was leaning against the wall, watching, when Celia turned to me.

“Can’t you work with him, Nellie?” she asked me.

“Please don’t drag me into this,” I said, waving my hands as I took my weight off the wall.

“Actually, that would be helpful,” said Maud. “I know he’s a little snot, but he’s a Boston Bloomer Girl for the summer.”

Before our next game, I took Rogers out to the foul line near the outfield corner with a bag of balls and a bat.

“I don’t think I want to hit, I want to take ground balls,” he said to me.

“Hitting is your biggest issue right now,” I said.

“What do you know?” he said.

“This is coming from Maud, not me.”

Florence, our third baseman, overheard us as she was heading back to the dugout. She said, “Nellie’s been doing this way longer than you, so you better listen.”

I dropped the bag of balls near the line and turned to him.

“What do you think was your biggest problem at the plate last game?”

Rogers looked at the ground, but his eyes still bugged.

“My last game was fine.”

“Two strikeouts and a weak groundout to first are not ‘fine’,” I said, handing him the bat.

On the train, I glanced again at the newspaper article, the reason for my trip. “Disrespect to the game,” it said. “Baseball is already too feminine,” it declared. And the worst one. “Men like Rogers Hornsby would never have been responsible for bringing females into the game.”

It had only been a few days since Jackie Mitchell had pitched and struck out Ruth and Gehrig, then had her contract voided by Kennesaw Mountain Landis. I picked up the paper and set it down again.

I knew what I had to say to Rogers when I saw him.

“You really need to keep your weight back.”

“Why? I’ve never hit like that,” Rogers said. We were down the foul line again before a game.

“And have you been having success?”

“I don’t…”

“Maud says you need to start further back in the box. You will never start catching up to pitching at this level unless you make some changes,” I said. 

Rogers grunted. I picked up the bag of baseballs and turned in the direction of the dugout. The game would start soon.

“Just try it today. Start back in the box and give yourself more time. See if you have a better game. If you don’t, I’ll stop. If anything, it’ll get Maud off my back.”

Rogers was silent, but when I looked over, his brows were knit together.

His first at-bat, I nudged Maud. “Look! He’s starting back in the box!”

Maud was unfazed. “About time,” she said.

When Rogers singled and then doubled, Maud and the rest noticed.

“What did you do, bribe him?” Florence asked.

After the game, the Boston team was leaving the field, and Rogers caught up to me.

“You can’t say that was a bad game,” he said.

“It wasn’t,” I said. “But you know what that means, right?”

“I have to keep doing my batting stance that way.”

“That’s right,” I said, almost laughing at how somber his face was.

“Alright,” he said. “At least the others aren’t laughing at me anymore,” he said.

By all accounts, Rogers had a decent summer. His hitting got continuously better, and he even seemed to look forward to the extra batting practice I provided for him before games. With Maud breathing down his neck, his fielding even improved some, and by summer’s end, I felt comfortable with him being my double-play partner at second. Florence agreed.

“Every time I come up with the ball, I look up, and there’s that little boy getting to the bag just in time,” she said. Even Celia finally approved once his throwing errors went down a little. After one particularly nice play of his, I patted him on the back with my glove on the way back to the dugout, and it was the first time he smiled at me.

Maud liked him enough to keep him on for a second year. By then, he knew our teammates better, but he was always closest to me.

“Are you sure you aren’t related?” Lucy asked us, “You even look something alike at this point,” and Rogers actually laughed.

And the year after that, he was playing in the Minor Leagues. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but Lucy was especially bitter this time around.

“He dressed as a woman to play with us! Imagine if I had gone to that tryout, too, and dressed like a man?”

Maud rubbed Lucy’s shoulders until she calmed down.

Rogers and I did keep in touch. A couple of letters a year and a card sometime in December. I watched him age through his photographs in the newspaper. Different teams and then finally the Cubs.

Rogers met me at the train station with a smile and a hug. Even though it had been nineteen years, I remarked on how much he’d grown, and he laughed.

It was late morning. We stopped at a food stand for an early lunch, then took our sandwiches to a bench in a nearby park.

“How’s Sarah?” I asked as we sat down.

“It’s Jeannette now,” he said. “My wife’s name is Jeannette.”

“I know.”

“Oh. Oh, right. Sarah. Yes, she’s fine. Junior lives with her.”

We were quiet for a minute.

“So, what brings you to Chicago?” he asked.

“I couldn’t put this in a letter. I need to talk to you about Jackie.”

Rogers seemed nonplussed. “Who?”

I put my sandwich down in my lap. “Jackie Mitchell. She pitched against the Yankees last week in that exhibition game down in Chattanooga. Struck out Ruth and Gehrig. You must have seen it in the papers.”

“Oh, right. Yes, of course. Actually, she reminded me of Lucy,” he said.

“Landis has voided her contract. She can’t sign with another team, and Chattanooga will have to pay her under the table if she keeps playing. Have you seen this?” I handed him the newspaper I’d carried with me from Boston. Rogers’ eyes crinkled as he took it.

His eyes moved back and forth at the paper, but his expression did not change. When he finished the column, he handed it back to me, a stiffness appearing in his shoulders.

“Well?” I asked. “They name you. You, as someone who would never allow the game to be tainted by femininity. But this is who you are. This is what you came from. You were once a Bloomer Girl. You can’t ever forget that.”

Rogers winced. “What do you want me to do?”

“Respond to this. Smokey Joe Wood played for the Kansas City Bloomer Girls, but the article specifically mentions you. This is happening because no one takes women players seriously, including Landis. But there are Major Leaguers who used to play for our teams.”

“But Nellie, there isn’t really anything I can do.”

“Rogers, I’m begging you to speak up. Jackie’s career has just been destroyed. Think of all the women you played with who could have gone farther. Think of all the girls coming after her.”

Rogers had stopped eating his sandwich, too, and just shook his head.

“You don’t want people to know that you were once a Bloomer.” I said, and he looked at me, the stiffness spreading to his back.

His eyes moved away again. “It just wasn’t that important.”

I put my sandwich away, the crinkling of a paper bag.

I hadn’t expected to be going back to Boston so soon. I had expected to get a room for the night, maybe help Rogers with his response letter since he didn’t like to read or write. But soon I was buying a ticket, waiting for a train, and then boarding.

Soon the city was whipping by and then the countryside. It took me a while to realize my shoulders were shaking, and then I had to close my eyes.

I had gone to try to see Jackie before I left Chattanooga a few days before. After Landis had handed down his decision, I hadn’t decided what to tell her. I guess I wanted her to see there had been others before her. The hotel attendants where she was staying told me she was indisposed, but I managed to get by them and upstairs to her floor. I could hear her before I saw her. A dejected, prostrate figure on the bed, her manager standing helplessly by, the telegram still in his hand.

Lauren McNulty has coached baseball (hardball) at the high school level for over 10 years. This is her fourth publication in The Twin Bill.  

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