“Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” Napoleon Bonaparte
April 2, 1931 – Chattanooga, Tennessee: Young Jackie Mitchell had been too excited to sleep the night before. Chattanooga Lookout owner Joe Engel told her that she might pitch in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees the next day. The Yankees, winners of three world championships in the previous decade, were on their way from spring training in Florida back to New York.
Jackie knew that her contract with the Chattanooga Lookouts, the Yankees’ AA minor league team, was part publicity stunt aimed at selling tickets. But she could pitch. For a 17-year-old girl who dreamed of pitching in the big leagues, it was a fairy tale moment.
Born in Chattanooga, Jackie was a toddler when her father began taking her to the baseball diamond and teaching her the game. She was an excellent athlete who swam and played both tennis and basketball, but baseball was the sport she loved.
Jackie was taught to pitch by her next-door neighbor, Dazzy Vance. The major league Hall of Fame pitcher had been the only pitcher to lead the National League in strikeouts for seven straight seasons. The former Dodger great took a liking to the little girl and spent hours giving her pitching pointers. He taught her a windmill-style wind-up, with a side-arm delivery, and a deceptive breaking pitch called a drop ball or sinker.
In 1930, 15-year-old Jackie joined an all-girls team in Chattanooga and played in tournaments across the South. It was at a baseball training school in Atlanta that her sinker caught the eye of Joe Engel. He signed her to pitch for the Lookouts, the second baseball contract ever awarded to a woman.
The exhibition game versus the Yankees on April 2 was Jackie’s first. The Lookouts started the game with pitcher Clyde Barfoot on the mound facing the Bronx Bombers. He promptly gave up a sharp single and a double off the wall. The Lookouts’ manager, Bert Niehoff, came to the mound and motioned for the bullpen to send Jackie in.
In a moment almost beyond imagination, the tall, slim teenager would be facing two of the most fearsome hitters of all time. On deck were two of Jackie’s childhood stars, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, the greatest hitting duo in baseball history.
Ruth walked to the plate, smiled, and doffed his cap. The first pitch was a sinker, which he took for a ball. The Homerun King swung wildly at the next two sinkers, missing both by a foot. Ruth asked the umpire to check the ball for tampering. Jackie’s fourth pitch dropped over the outside corner. Strike three! An embarrassed Babe had several choice words for the umpire before heading to the dugout.
Gehrig took a couple extra swings in the on-deck circle before walking to the batters’ box. He took big swings at three darting sinker balls and missed them all. Mitchell walked the next batter, also a future Hall of Famer, Tony Lazzeri, on four pitches before being taken out of the game. The 4,000 fans in attendance gave Jackie Mitchell a rousing two-minute standing ovation.
The Lookouts went on to lose 14-4, but that wasn’t the story. A five-foot-eight female striking out two of baseball’s greatest hitters made headlines across the country.
A week later, perhaps embarrassed by a girl striking out two of his superstars, Major League Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis nullified Jackie’s contract, citing that baseball was “too strenuous for women.” After being banned, she continued to play with barnstorming teams, once being the winning pitcher in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. Jackie retired from baseball in 1937 and joined her father’s optometry business.
For almost 100 years, baseball historians and fans alike have questioned whether the two strikeouts had been a pre-planned stunt or if a young girl really struck out the two Yankee legends on seven pitches. Neither of them ever admitted to whiffing on purpose.
Up until the day that she died, Jackie insisted that she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig for real. “Hell, yeah, they were trying,” said the feisty former pitcher. “Ruth and Gehrig had no intention of striking out. They couldn’t hit my sinker.” In 1992, five years after her death, the ban on women in baseball was lifted.
At the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in the small women’s exhibit is a picture of two iconic Yankee legends and a young girl in a baseball uniform shaking Ruth’s hand. Jackie Mitchell never made it to the big leagues, but she will always be remembered as the 17-year-old girl who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig on a cool, cloudy afternoon in April 1931.