Women in Baseball Cards

I can't remember when I began collecting baseball cards with women and girls on them. It certainly grew out of my love for baseball cards in general and my long-time interest in the AAGPBL and women in baseball generally. I remember being interested in the legal fight for girls to integrate Little League in the early '70s, when I was the same age as the plaintiffs, and seeing that reflected in the movies a couple of years later when Tatum O'Neal played the star pitcher in The Bad News Bears. But at some point, I declared women on baseball cards a niche within my card collection. Other niches include cards of players that I've met, cards depicting baseball cards—similar to the stamps on stamps subgenre of stamp collecting—cards with mascots, dogs, or other animals on them, and so on. Professionally speaking, I became a librarian because of my love for baseball. The day after I graduated from college, I saw that week's issue of Sports Illustrated and read with fascination an article about the Baseball Hall of Fame's librarian and their library with three million baseball items. It changed my life. As an Illinois native and Cubs fan, another current in my life had been Harry Caray singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" with the White Sox and then with the Cubs. Later, I would be invited to coauthor a book on the song in time for its centennial. So, I was a librarian who collected baseball cards depicting women and who had just written a book about baseball's most famous song.

Mary marshall

In 2009, I got very excited when I learned that eight librarians, six of whom were women, from the public library in Missoula, Montana, had created a set of baseball cards of themselves reading baseball books, a combination of business cards, calling cards, and a fun, quirky public relations tool to get kids interested in the library. I called out to Missoula from Cooperstown and found a librarian to talk to, convincing her to send me a set of these cards for my collection. When it arrived, I was delighted to learn that technical services librarian Mary Marshall had posed holding a copy of my book! It's still the only baseball card depicting a woman on which I make an appearance, though you would need a magnifying glass to find my name on the book's cover. That's okay, my childhood dream was fulfilled. I had my own baseball card. Kinda.

Fig. 1.

Mary Marshall

Gabrielle augustine

Gabrielle has played baseball for as long as she can remember, usually as the only female member of her team. A right-handed pitcher who occasionally drops down sidearm, she's reached several pinnacles of the game for American women, including playing in Korea for the LG Cup as a member of Baseball For All, and being one of thirty-six women invited to the 2015 United States Women's National Team Trials. Didn't know we had a women's national team? We do, though not because we are such a cool, egalitarian country. Rather, it was forced on us by a world athletic community more interested in gender equity than we are. The team's roots have to do with international competitions demanding that sports allow equal opportunity for women. This card was produced in 2016 as a part of a fundraising set for the Minnesota Girls Baseball Association, the same year that Augustine joined the staff of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown as a curator.

Fig. 2.

Gabrielle Augustine

The back of many a baseball card says that the man on the front enjoys hunting and fishing. Gabrielle's card says that she enjoys knitting. Her favorite artifact at the Hall is the sweater Christy Mathewson wore on the 1913–14 World Tour. "As a knitter," she says, "I love and appreciate the details, such as the finer yarn used to create the...