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17-Year-Old Jackie Mitchell Struck Out Lou Gehrig And Babe Ruth On Seven Pitches. Did It Really Happen?
Bettmann/Contributor via Getty ImagesJackie Mitchell, taken on July 14, 1933.
During an exhibition game on April 2, 1931, Babe Ruth struck out in four pitches. This wasn’t all that unusual — even the “Great Bambino” whiffed sometimes. But this strikeout was particularly noteworthy because the pitcher who struck out Ruth was a 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell.
Not only that, but Mitchell then struck out Lou Gehrig as well.
Though the New York Yankees won the game against her team, the Chattanooga Lookouts, newspapers focused on a different aspect. As The New York Times reported, “Ruth and Gehrig Struck Out by Girl Pitcher.”
But did Jackie Mitchell really strike out the sluggers – or was it staged?
Who Was Jackie Mitchell?
Born on Aug. 29, 1913, Virne Beatrice “Jackie” Mitchell had an ordinary childhood in Memphis, Tennessee. Encouraged by her father, an optician, Mitchell gravitated toward sports. She played baseball, basketball, and tennis, and enjoyed swimming. She also spent time with her neighbor, Dodgers pitcher and National League MVP Charles Arthur “Dazzy” Vance.
Library of CongressJackie Mitchell learned how to throw her signature drop ball from her neighbor, a National League MVP.
According to the Society for American Baseball Research, Vance taught Mitchell how to pitch. He showed her how to throw a drop ball, known a sinker, and this deceptive pitch soon became Mitchell’s signature throw.
When she was a teenager, her family moved to Chattanooga. And it was here that Joel Engel, the new owner of the minor league team the Chattanooga Lookouts, first saw Mitchell pitching.
Engel had just set up two exhibition games between the Lookouts and the New York Yankees (who were passing by after spring training) and he enlisted Mitchell to pitch in one of them. This made Jackie Mitchell the second woman in American history to sign with a professional baseball team.
And as the Lookouts prepared to face the Yankees in April 1931, speculation about Mitchell reached a fever pitch. As Smithsonian Magazine reported, one newspaper, describing Mitchell as “pretty,” quipped: “The curves won’t be all on the ball.” Another paper declared that the 17-year-old pitcher had “a swell change of pace and swings a mean lipstick.”
Yankees star Babe Ruth was even asked about Mitchell ahead of the exhibition match — and he responded by saying that he didn’t believe women should be allowed in professional baseball games.
Public DomainYankees legend Babe Ruth in 1919.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen if they begin to let women in baseball,” he told The New York Times the day of the match. “Of course, they will never make good. Why? Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play ball every day… I don’t know what things are coming to.”
Jackie Mitchell Versus The Yankees
Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics, Getty ImagesBabe Ruth, second from left, and Lou Gehrig, far left, watch Jackie Mitchell demonstrate her fast ball at Chattanooga, Tennessee during a spring training stop.
On April 2, 1931, Jackie Mitchell walked to the mound before a crowd of 4,000 fans. The Lookout’s starting pitcher had given up two hits, so Mitchell had been called in to face the Yankees’ third batter: Babe Ruth.
“While most girls would have been so excited that they would have thrown the ball in the stands, Jackie was four degrees cooler than the proverbial cucumber,” reported the Chattanooga Daily Times.
Ruth tipped his hat to Mitchell, who began winding her arm “as if she were turning a coffee grinder,” according to a journalist who witnessed the exchange. Then Mitchell threw. The first pitch was a ball.
But Ruth swung hard and missed the second pitch — and then the third. With a 1-2 count, Mitchell threw a strike and the “Great Bambino” struck out, tossing away his bat, and “registering disgust with his shoulder and chin,” according to contemporaneous reporting by The New York Times.
Chattanooga Regional History Museum“Girl pitcher” Jackie Mitchell faced the Yankees lineup and came away with two big strike outs.
Though she’d struck out Ruth, Mitchell still had to face Lou Gehrig. But she made quick work of this Yankees legend as well, striking him out in just three pitches.
Mitchell was then pulled out of the game, and her team ultimately lost to the Yankees 14-4. But few remembered the score — most were stunned by the news that Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had been struck out by a 17-year-old girl.
Or had they?
A Publicity Stunt Or A True Double Strikeout?
In the years since Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, some have claimed that her performance was nothing more than a publicity stunt arranged by her boss, Engel.
Indeed, Engel was no stranger to stunts. Once, he traded a shortstop for a turkey (which he then cooked and served). Another time, he raffled off a house to a fan. And he had signed Jackie Mitchell just days after arranging the exhibition games against the Yankees.
Engels surely knew that the “girl pitcher” would fill the stands. And he may have even meant for Jackie Mitchell to be part of an April Fool’s joke, since the Lookout’s exhibition game against the Yankees had originally been scheduled for April 1, before cold weather delayed it until April 2.
The New York TimesThe New York Times reported that Babe Ruth was furious at the called strike.
But did Engel stage the strikeouts?
Babe Ruth certainly reacted as if Mitchell struck him out. And neither he nor Gehrig ever suggested that Mitchell’s pitching had been a publicity stunt.
And what about Mitchell? At 17 years old, she had seemingly struck out two of baseball’s most dominant hitters. But just days later, the baseball commissioner purportedly voided Mitchell’s contract. “Girl pitchers” were no longer welcome, and Mitchell, who briefly continued to play in exhibition games, ultimately went to work in her father’s optometry office.
Indeed, girls would not even be allowed to join Little League until 1970 — and no female player has ever reached the major leagues.
But Jackie Mitchell seemingly proved that women could compete at the highest levels of baseball. Even decades later, she defended her record, denying that her performance had been a publicity stunt.
“Why, hell, [Ruth and Gehrig] were trying, damn right,” Mitchell declared in 1987, shortly before she died at the age of 74. “Hell, better hitters than them couldn’t hit me. Why should they’ve been any different?”
After reading about Jackie Mitchell, the 17-year-old who purportedly struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, discover the sad story of Babe Ruth’s death at the age of just 53. Or, learn about Arnold Rothstein, the drug kingpin who fixed the 1919 World Series.
The post 17-Year-Old Jackie Mitchell Struck Out Lou Gehrig And Babe Ruth On Seven Pitches. Did It Really Happen? appeared first on All That's Interesting.
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