Amazon.com Review
Women's baseball did not begin--and certainly didn't end--with the 1940s short-skirted stars featured in the rousing film story A League of Their Own. Women were playing baseball at Vassar as early as the 1880s, and Ed Barrow, who would later bring Babe Ruth to New York, signed a woman pitcher named Lizzie Arlington to a minor-league contract in the late 1890s. Indeed, as presented here, the history of women in baseball is a long and colorful one; the exploits of Alta Weiss, Lizzie Murphy, and Jackie Mitchell, who struck out Ruth and Lou Gehrig back-to-back in a 1931 exhibition deserve to be remembered. Women at Play remembers well.