Customer Reviews

A Whole New Ball Game: The Story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League

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There has been some recent publicity regarding the women's professional baseball league of the late forties and fifties. However, at the time this book was published (1993), few people knew that there had once been such a league. Started in the latter years of World War II to provide entertainment for the hard-working people on the home front, it survived for twelve seasons. By all reasonable accounts it was a success, the women played very hard and there was a great deal of fan interest. In the end, it failed due to a change in the country. Once the national emergency of the war was over, the public mood turned against the idea of women engaging in such an "unfeminine" activity.
This book is a chronicle of those times, although the focus is on the business strategies the league officials carried out. There is very little about how the players lived their lives as baseball players. Three main themes are clear.

*) The players worked very hard, their schedule was grueling. During the season they almost never had a day off and many days they played two games.
*) Keeping with the spirit of the times, the women were required to maintain a feminine appearance. They wore makeup on the field and were constantly coached in proper female deportment. Of course, the best photos in the book show the players hitting, sliding and fielding. My favorite photo is on page 38. It shows Faye Dancer sliding hard into a base. The angle is from her feet, her skirt is up around her waist, dirt is flying everywhere and there is a fierce look of determination on her face. My second favorite is on page 48, where Merle Keagle is arguing with the home plate umpire. These are images that baseball fans appreciate and respect.
*) The level of the game was very high. One major league scout called one of the players the best fielding first "baseman" he had ever seen. Some of the players occasionally went up against men and did rather well.

Along with nearly every other area of society, women have made great strides in the athletic arena over the past three decades. In this book, it is easy to see that the problem with women's athletics has always been a societal one. Hopefully, women's sports are now fully entrenched and there will not be a reversal on the magnitude of the one that led to the death of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1954.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book from an adult's perspective. I enjoy baseball a lot, especially when it comes to women playing ball. If you're interested in learning about the AAPGBL and enjoying a trip back in time then Sue Macy's book is a good read!

A Whole New Ballgame by Sue Macy was a great book. It told what some of the women did during World War 2 to help out in their communities. Some women played baseball. Baseball helped raise the spirits of the town. The women made some fabulous plays and were just as good as the men who were now overseas. They were great players and I'm sorry that the league wasn't able to hold on. I definitely recommend this book to girls who like baseball or softball.

This was a good read, short and full of great information. Lots of references to followup on. In fact, we intend to visit the museum in South Bend, Indiana on our vacation this summer where they are supposed to have the largest collection of AAGPBL materials. Met one of these gals this winter in Florida and found her very interesting and fun to talk to. She gave us her card and autographed it for us and we took a picture with her, too. A great baseball fan like me. If you want to hear how it all started and a lot of inside info, this is a good book for you. Spells out the climate for women during that time pretty accurately, too. Thank goodness times have changed. But we still don't have women making millions in baseball.