Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star by Kat D. Williams (review)

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) operated from 1943 through 1954, giving over six hundred female athletes the opportunity to play professional baseball. Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez was one of those women, and Marshall University Professor Kat D. Williams tells her remarkable story, revealing the courageous struggle Lefty overcame to make it in America.

“. . . on July 4, 1992, A League of Their Own opened and it opened the eyes of the world to the women who had played professional baseball. Interest in the league grew, and finally after nearly forty years, women’s professional baseball reentered the American consciousness” (116). By this time, Lefty Alvarez was nearly sixty years old, having overcome so much to make her life’s journey truly remarkable. Williams details her struggle to escape familial abuse and the hardship of growing up in Cuba’s prerevolution dictatorship. The book covers her inability to find satisfying employment outside of baseball due to her lack of education and English skills, her post baseball career marked by alcoholism and depression, and the impact that sport, especially baseball, had upon her life. In fact, a recurring theme throughout Lefty’s life, from her childhood through her reconnection with former teammates from her AAGPBL days is the impact her sport identity played in helping her survive a difficult life.

The many years of research and in-depth interviews Williams conducted enable us to recognize the abusive family environment she endured in Cuba. Lefty Alvarez summoned the courage to be able to enter the United States at age fifteen. She had very poor English skills, but because of her personality, her ability to connect with her teammates and establish relationships, she learned to adapt and developed many lifelong friendships with her teammates.

As a child, Lefty was a talented athlete, playing sports with the boys on the streets of her Cuban neighborhood where she earned the name “the Rascal of El Cerro.” In an effort to help Lefty find her ticket out of poverty and escape the island, her mother encouraged her participation in beauty pageants, which she hated, and then athletics which she loved, especially soccer, basketball, volleyball, fencing, and finally baseball. Alvarez was very close to her mother who always wanted the best for her daughter but was overly concerned about image, and frequently put Lefty in uncomfortable, even dangerous situations for someone in her early teens. Lefty was good at all sports, “but she loved baseball, loved to play it, watch it, and learn about it . . .” (34). Eventually, her mother “realized that baseball was not only her daughter’s ticket out of poverty but also her ticket to happiness. . . .” During her long journey from the streets of Havana to the pitcher’s mound at Wrigley Field in Chicago, Lefty relied on good “sporting stock” (34). It was this sporting stock, sport identity, and pursuit of her passion for baseball that enabled Lefty a lifetime of happiness and strength, albeit with interruptions and missteps along the way.

Upon entering the United States, Alvarez was connected with a host family who took her in, as was the case for many of the young women who joined the league. But Lefty’s inability to communicate her feelings, emotions and thoughts, except through baseball, led to some of her teammates playing pranks, hazing, and taking advantage of the fifteen-year-old, good-natured Cuban girl. She later told of these incidents, distinguishing between good fun and bad fun, “distinguishing between those who were intentionally trying to hurt her and those who liked her and wanted only to be playful” (53). While Lefty seemed to always try to find the good in people, the teasing clearly took its toll.

Lefty first played for the Chicago Colleens, a minor league rookie/travel team where she played well enough to be promoted to Grand Rapids and later to Fort Wayne. She proved herself to be a...