Review of "Belles of the Ballpark," by Diana Star Helmer

 Review of

Belles of the Ballpark, by Diana Star Helmer, ISBN 1562942301

Five out of five stars

Women played baseball hard and well

 While it has taken the production of the 1992 movie, “A League of Their Own” to place the history of women’s baseball in the public consciousness, the history is very real. A league called the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) was formed in 1943 when World War II was raging and ran until 1954. Initially a social and financial success, a series of poor financial decisions ultimately doomed the league.

 This book covers the formation of the league until it ended. The league was primarily created by the owner of the Chicago Cubs, P. K. Wrigley. A notorious skinflint with the Cubs, Wrigley was relatively free spending when it came to the AAGPBL. The salaries that the female players received were very high compared to what they could earn otherwise. The most memorable sentence in the book was uttered by Wrigley in the early forties. “I’m probably the only one in professional baseball in the last forty or more years that has never felt that the reserve clause as written in baseball contracts was really essential.” His contractual treatment of his female players was so liberal that major league baseball did not reach that point until the 1970s.

This book is a very interesting look back at a time when there were female professional athletes that actually made a living at it. For the first time, large numbers of people attended and cheered for women that played hard at a sport. It is unfortunate that the AAGPBL failed, and it took decades before major female professional sports to come into existence again.

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