Making My Pitch Read online

  “At last! The moving story of Ila Borders, as told to the gifted author and researcher Jean Ardell, will make readers wonder how much longer the baseball establishment can afford to disregard the skilled women players who should long ago have been recruited for the Minors and the Majors.”

  —Dorothy Seymour Mills, baseball historian and author of Drawing Card: A Baseball Novel

  “As a girl, Ila Borders had a dream. That dream became a desire, and that desire blossomed into a crusade: she would play baseball. Not softball. Baseball. She would throw the hard stuff past brawny male sluggers. Jean Hastings Ardell tells the story of this twilight figure coming out of the shadows to join a not always receptive mainstream. You may laugh. You may shed a tear. But surely you will applaud.”

  —Arnold Hano, author of A Day in the Bleachers

  “Ila Borders pitched her way through the special hell reserved for women who play baseball in America and has returned with enough inside baseball knowledge to please the most passionate fan. . . . [Making My Pitch is] a riveting, deeply personal story and a compelling addition to the fast-growing literature on American women in baseball.”

  —Jennifer Ring, author of A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball

  “This book is a walk through baseball history as Ila brings the reader with her on her journey from Little League to independent ball and beyond. Ila’s story is not a typical baseball story, and everyone needs to read this book.”

  —Leslie Heaphy, associate professor of history at Kent State University at Stark and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Women and Baseball

  “This book is a must-read for understanding what it’s like to be a baseball first. Ila’s courage to keep going forward against all odds is both inspiring and meaningful.”

  —Justine Siegal, founder of Baseball For All

  “The best baseball books are about more than the game. In this evocative memoir, lefthander Ila Borders recounts her struggles in the male world of professional baseball.”

  —George Gmelch, author of Playing with Tigers: A Minor League Chronicle of the Sixties

  “Ila Borders is a role model. As the father of two daughters, both of whom have played, watched, and read about sports for as long as they have been able to do so, I have long awaited her memoir.”

  —Steve Gietschier, associate professor of history at Lindenwood University

  Making My Pitch

  Making My Pitch

  A Woman’s Baseball Odyssey

  Ila Jane Borders with Jean Hastings Ardell

  Foreword by Mike Veeck

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln & London

  © 2017 by Ila Jane Borders and Jean Hastings Ardell

  Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image © Annie Leibovitz / Contact Press Images.

  Borders author photo courtesy of Ila Jane Borders.

  Ardell author photo by Joe Mozdzen.

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Borders, Ila Jane, 1975– author. | Ardell, Jean Hastings, 1943– co-author.

  Title: Making my pitch: a woman’s baseball odyssey / Ila Jane Borders with Jean Hastings Ardell; foreword by Mike Veeck.

  Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016029037 (print)

  LCCN 2016035649 (ebook)

  ISBN 9780803285309 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN 9781496200204 (epub)

  ISBN 9781496200211 (mobi)

  ISBN 9781496200228 (pdf)

  Subjects: LCSH: Borders, Ila Jane, 1975– | Women baseball players—United States—Biography. | Pitchers (Baseball)—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC GV865.B675 A3 2017 (print) | LCC GV865.B675 (ebook) | DDC 796.357092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2016029037

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Delores Ann Carter

  June 22, 1930–April 14, 1980

  This book is for you, Grandma. I grew up to become a baseball player and, later, a firefighter and paramedic. I couldn’t save you on that awful day in 1980, but I have learned how to save myself, and others.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword

  Acknowledgments

  Note to the Reader

  Prologue

  1. Beginnings: Little League

  2. Lipstick Adolescence

  3. College: Pitching through Adversity

  4. Mike Veeck and the St. Paul Saints

  5. Duluth-Superior Dukes: Being “Babe”

  6. The Dukes: Nailing a Win

  7. Another Team, Another Town

  8. Out of the Game

  9. Loss

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Illustrations

  1. Dad, Mom, and me, 1975

  2. My first year of Little League

  3. Media interview at age twelve

  4. High school graduation, 1993

  5. Making the front cover of my college magazine

  6. High anxiety on the mound in college

  7. Swift Current Indians in the back of the bubble bus

  8. Rookie baseball card, St. Paul Saints

  9. Mural on Midway Stadium

  10. Bicycling with the Saints groundskeeper Connie Rudolph

  11. Mike Wallace in the stands

  12. With Mike Veeck

  13. With Dukes teammate Dave Glick

  14. With Dad and photographer Annie Leibovitz

  15. Up in lights at the Corcoran Gallery of Art

  16. With Sadaharu Oh at the World Children’s Baseball Fair

  17. With Shannon Chesnos

  18. With Saints co-owner Bill Murray

  19. The B shift members of the Cornelius Fire Department

  20. With Jenni Westphal

  21. Letter from Dusty Baker

  Foreword

  Mike Veeck

  Autumn 1999. Riding through Washington, DC, in the back of a cab in the middle of the night, I felt my eyes beginning to close. All of a sudden the Corcoran Gallery of Art came into view. Photographer Annie Leibovitz had a show there. On the facade of the building was a twenty-foot image of Ila Borders at the top of her windup.

  “Stop! Stop the cab,” I yelled at the hack. “That’s Ila. Stop right here.”

  The cabbie was frightened. “You owe me thirty-five bucks,” he said.

  “Keep the meter running,” I said. “Just stop. I have to get out.”

  I had been looking for a ballplayer like Ila Borders for much of my life. I joined my father, Bill Veeck Jr., who then owned the Chicago White Sox, as the club’s director of promotions in 1976. I remember our hosting a softball game and picnic for the front office staff. During the game, a woman who worked in the accounting department launched a triple off the left-field wall. Dad and I immediately looked at one another with the same thought: Somewhere out there, in Keokuk, Iowa, perhaps, was a woman with the talent to play professional baseball.

  If only we could find her.

  Twenty years later I did.

  In the spring of 1997 I was running the St. Paul Saints of the independent Northern League, when our pitching coach, Barry Moss, called. Barry also scouted for us in Southern California. He wanted me to know that he had found a young woman who was, he said, “the real thing, competitive and talented.” Her name was Ila Borders. Should we give her a tryout? If she made the team, she would be the first woman to play men’s professional baseb
all since the 1950s, when Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, Connie Morgan, and Marcenia “Toni” Stone played in the Negro Leagues, most notably with the Indianapolis Clowns. With a smile and a glance heavenward, where my father now dwells, I picked up the phone.

  Ila flew into town on May 14 and came straight to my office. In my most avuncular manner, I said, “Let’s take a walk around the parking lot.” That was the only place we could get away from our cramped quarters in the front offices of Midway Stadium.

  “Ila,” I began, “we are about to embark on a great adventure. It will be fun. It will be all that we both could hope for. But it’ll have its moments.” I struggled to find the appropriate words. “You will be castigated, ridiculed, and called ‘a promotion,’ even though the Saints are already sold out for the season.”

  I had been raised to think of women as equals but knew it would take a strong woman in every sense of the word to play professional baseball. Breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball is considered one of the defining moments in American history. I had never forgotten the stories Dad told me about his signing of Larry Doby in 1947 and the indignities the young center fielder had suffered as the American League’s first black player. Perhaps it wasn’t going to be the same scope for Ila, but the heckling, the name-calling, and the sexist comments that would come her way meant that she needed to be mentally and emotionally stronger than nearly anyone else who was going to set foot on the field that season.

  Very quietly, very kindly, Ila responded. “Mr. Veeck, I know exactly what we’re in for. I have been cursed, spat upon, beaned, and hit with all manner of missiles. I’m not afraid. I know what we’re up against. Do you?”

  She said it so softly, I wasn’t quite certain I had heard her right. I laughed—what else could I do?—and said, “I guess this walk wasn’t really necessary.”

  She waited; I whimpered. I had grown up one of nine children in a household with four opinionated sisters—one a child psychologist, one a writer, another an artist—and I was asking whether Ila could hold her own? Hey, women have survived us men for ages.

  Eventually Ila smiled and said, “I just want to play ball, Mr. Veeck. Thank you for giving me the opportunity.”

  When Ila made the team out of camp, the reception she got from young girls—not just in the Twin Cities but around the country—was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Here was this woman who had a goal, something no female had ever done, and despite all the doors that had been slammed in her face prior to her time in St. Paul, she never gave up. What Ila did for girls all over this country was create a tremendous connection. That the St. Paul crowd gave her a standing ovation time after time is something I will long remember. She was the embodiment of strength and courage. People said I exploited her—there’s no question about that—but as I have pointed out, she exploited me, too, because no one was standing in line behind me. Yet to me she was a ballplayer first and then a woman, and I think she responded to that.

  At the time of her signing, I recall that my daughter, Rebecca (before retinitis pigmentosa robbed her of her sight), would flip through the newspapers, especially the sports section.

  “What are you looking for,” I asked her.

  “I’m looking for Ila,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Rebecca was looking for the picture of Ila in uniform with her ponytail—and goodness knows my daughter was extremely upset with me when I traded Ila a few weeks into the season. After all, Rebecca was only six years old, too young to understand that St. Paul had become a media circus with Ila in the center ring, or that the Saints were in the pennant race, while Duluth was not. So I thought Ila would get more playing time in up there. But she wasn’t just a role model for young girls everywhere. She was the ideal role model for anyone who has ever had a dream but took the easy way out and didn’t see it through.

  Not Ila. She had developed a sort of polyester finish: the hard stuff just rolled off her back. She had almost flawless mechanics, some of the purest I’d ever seen. Yet I recall that she could have a problem with her fastball. It wasn’t her out pitch. I thought she needed to find one of the Niekro brothers and learn the knuckleball, or track down Gaylord Perry and learn the spitball. She just needed a variety of pitches to go along with her willful determination. And the guys she reached, she taught beautifully.

  May 31, 1997. Ila Borders . . . first appearance . . . Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Sitting on my porch in St. Paul, staring at my radio.

  “What do you think, Libby?” I asked my wife.

  “I think it’s great . . . and exciting,” she responded.

  “Now pitching, Ila Borders,” is what I heard in the background on the radio broadcast. I could hear that everyone in the stands stood to cheer this courageous young person. It seemed like the whole world was cheering, and most were. However, Ila got roughed up that day.

  She kept on pitching.

  Ila Borders. St. Paul . . . camera crews everywhere. Leno. Letterman. The Today Show. She turned them all down. She just wanted to pitch. We didn’t need her to sell tickets. I just wanted her to pitch.

  And she did. For four seasons she not only played professional men’s baseball but also did it with dignity and class.

  Somebody was paying attention. Women in Baseball is one of the most visited exhibits in Cooperstown’s National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Over the years, Ila’s memorabilia—her cap, jersey, and baseball from her days at Southern California College; the uniform she wore in her debut with the St. Paul Saints; an autographed baseball, the lineup card, and a ticket from the game that was her first win for the Duluth-Superior Dukes against the Sioux Falls Canaries—have been displayed at the museum.

  I think that speaks well for having a woman play in the majors. I think it’s going to happen. I think it should happen. Women are a source of new talent. This book is an extraordinary addition to baseball history. It should be read not just by young women who dream of playing hardball and by women fans but also by the men who run the game.

  I’ve always been an Ila Borders fan and suspect that I always will be.

  Acknowledgments

  Jackie Robinson had Branch Rickey to thank for opening his way into the game. Throughout my years in baseball, there have been many Branch Rickeys. No matter how many people said no, there was always one guy who stepped up and said yes at an important point: first, my father, who thought it perfectly fine and good that I wanted to play baseball; my coaches in Little League; coach Rolland Esslinger, whose steady encouragement at Whittier Christian Junior High School meant so much; coaches Tom Caffrey and Steve Randall at Whittier Christian High School; coach Charlie Phillips, who signed me to a baseball scholarship—and with it, a college education—at Southern California College (now Vanguard University); and Coach Jim Pigott of Whittier College, who made me feel welcome on and off the field during my last year of college baseball.

  I am grateful to scout Barry Moss for recommending me to the St. Paul Saints and for teaching me more about pitching technique than some players learn in their entire careers; to Marty Scott, my manager at the Saints, who put me on the roster in 1997; to Mike Veeck, the owner of the Saints and my ultimate Branch Rickey, who took a chance and signed me to the professional baseball contract I had dreamed of; and to Al Gallagher, my manager at the Madison BlackWolf, whose encouragement restored my confidence.

  I also am grateful to photographer Annie Leibovitz, who demonstrated abiding graciousness and kindness at a time when I dearly needed them; to Connie Rudolph and Dave Glick for their friendship; and to Annie Huidekoper for her help with all manner of details from my weeks with the St. Paul Saints.

  Ila Jane Borders

  The number of people who gave invaluable assistance and encouragement in the making of this book would likely fill the Grandstand Theater at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Matt Rothenberg, Tim Wiles, and the staff of the museum’s Giamatti Research Center, including Mary Bellew, Michael Fink, Sue MacKay, and John O’Dell, offered
essential archival support. Jim Gates, Bill Simons, and the annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture gave support, fresh ideas, and so much more.

  To Bill Kirwin, the founder of the NINE Spring Training Conference, who liked the idea for this book early on, and the Gang of NINE, as the board of directors is known—Larry Gerlach, Steve Gietschier, Lee Lowenfish, Roberta Newman, Anna Newton, Geri Strecker, and Trey Strecker—thank you for reminding us that baseball comes to us fresh each spring and that it is best enjoyed in the company of fellow believers. I also thank the men and women of the Society for American Baseball Research; David Kemp, for Northern League data; the Pettigrew Archives, Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Josh Buchholz, the general manager of the Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks; and the athletic department and archivist-librarian Pam Crenshaw of Vanguard University.

  Gratitude is due the baseball historians who helped along the way: Adi Angel, Perry Barber, David Block, Richard Crepeau, Lee Lowenfish, Dorothy Jane Mills, Bill Ressler, Willie Steele, and John Thorn. Gratitude also goes to the virtual village of writers who offered counsel and friendship along the way: the Allegores Writers Circle (Mark Davis, Dave Ferrell, Sandy Giedeman, Micaela Myers, and Sue Parman); Ron Carlson of the Program in Writing at the University of California at Irvine, who articulates so skillfully the value of telling the story well; Gordon McAlpine; Richard Simon; David Smith; and Marcia Sterling. Due a special note of thanks are friends who were particularly generous with their insights during the writing of this book: Sharon and George Gmelch, Bonnie and Arnold Hano, and Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink.

  Our literary agent, Rob Wilson, was everything you’d hope to find in one: enthusiastic about the story, persevering in finding the right publishing house, and sensible about authorial digressions. It was a pleasure to work with Rob Taylor, Courtney Ochsner, Sabrina Stellrecht, copy editor Wayne Larsen, and the staff of the University of Nebraska Press. A special thank you to Teri Rider, whose diligence on the images is deeply appreciated.