Swinging for the fences
Author: Barbara Beal Schmid
Original Publication Date: May/June 2003
Summary: Before it was fashionable for girls to be athletes, Earlene
"Beans" Risinger was throwing fastballs in sandlot baseball games with the
neighborhood boys. Before it was in vogue for women to proclaim their
independence, Risinger was riding a train across the country by herself.
Before it was acceptable for females to want something more than a husband
and motherhood, Risinger was pursuing a career as a pitcher with the
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL).
Highlights
Earline “Beans” Risinger grew up picking cotton and playing backyard
baseball
Afraid to leave home, Beans nearly missed chance to join the league
Six years with Grand Rapids Chicks gave Beans and fans great memories
Players used earnings for college education after league folded
Earline “Beans” Risinger grew up picking cotton and playing backyard
baseball
You have to admire her chutzpah.
By bucking society's expectations of women in the 1940s, Risinger showed
women everywhere that it's OK to swing for the fences in life rather than
simply going for a bunt.
Risinger was born in Hess, Oklahoma, a town so small it was the size of
some people's families. The date was March 20, 1927, two years before the
start of the Great Depression. Life was a struggle for Risinger's parents,
Homer and Lizzy, even before her three younger brothers came along. Her
father scratched out a meager living as a ginner at a nearby cotton camp.
Her mother tended the homestead, nurturing the children and a vegetable
garden through the 110-degree summers and relentless winds that swept across
the plains.
As Risinger grew taller on the food staple that became her nickname, so
did her responsibilities. By the time she was twelve years old, she was
working in the cotton fields for fifty cents an hour to contribute to the
family dinner table.
Yet between work and school, she always had time for baseball. Every
Sunday afternoon, Risinger's father, her uncles and cousins played in a cow
pasture against the neighboring town of Altus. Risinger had been playing
catch with her father since she was six, and she soon became a valuable
member of the team.
America's favorite pastime became Risinger's. When she wasn't playing
baseball, she was coaching first base for the high school boys' team or
reading about baseball in the Daily Oklahoman at the grocery store. One
spring day, while checking the statistics of her favorite team, the New York
Yankees, she saw a story about two professional women's baseball teams
hosting tryouts. Excited about the prospect and encouraged by her family,
she sent a penny postcard to the sports editor. He forwarded her request to
the All-American Girls Baseball League Management Corporation headquarters
in Chicago. Beans was invited to the tryouts in Oklahoma City.
Afraid to leave home, Beans nearly missed chance to join the league
The scouts were dazzled by Risinger's overhand pitches and imposing
6-foot, 2-inch frame. Even though league pitchers threw underhand or
sidearm, the scouts offered Risinger a contract with the Rockford Peaches
for the summer of 1947.
"I had to go to the bank to borrow the money for the train to Rockford,
Illinois," she recalled, unconsciously touching her league ring. "I'd never
been away from home and I was scared. It took so long to get to Chicago on
that slow-pokey train that I was homesick and turned around and went back
home. Then I had to go out and work in the cotton fields to pay back the
banker."
After another year of working ten-hour, backbreaking shifts in the cotton
fields, Risinger realized she was at a dead end. When the AAGPBL scouts
returned to recruit her in 1948, the timing couldn't have been better. The
league had just adopted a completely overhand style of pitching for the new
season. It needed Risinger's arm. And Risinger needed baseball.
She signed with the Springfield (Illinois) Sallies for the 1948 season.
Although initially shy about wearing the league uniform and being in a
locker room full of women, she quickly adapted to her new life. Her pay was
seventy-five dollars per week, more than double what she had earned in the
cotton fields.
"When I had first come into the league, I was embarrassed going out on
the pitcher's mound in that short skirt," said Risinger, cupping a cup of
hot chocolate at a coffee shop near her home in Grand Rapids, her hazel eyes
sparkling with the memory. "I had never even worn shorts. In hot Oklahoma,
you covered up from the sun. You wore overalls and a hat. So wearing that
short skirt, I was embarrassed. But it really didn't take long to get over
that."
The Sallies ended up folding for lack of fan support after Risinger's
first year. But her career wasn't over. In the winter of 1949, she was
allocated to the Grand Rapids Chicks and also invited to play on a tour of
South and Central America.
"It was a wonderful experience," she said of her first overseas journey.
"We started in Panama City. We went to Venezuela, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and
Puerto Rico. A lot of Chicks players went on that tour. Johnny Rawlings was
the Chicks manager at the time, and he was our coach. He taught me a lot
about pitching down there. It was just like a spring training."
Six years with Grand Rapids Chicks gave Beans and fans great memories
The following spring, Risinger started with the Chicks in Grand Rapids,
where she played for the next six years. From May to September, she donned a
white and blue uniform for home games and a gray and blue one for away
games. She put on the league's required makeup, styled her short, dark hair
and played ball nearly every day. Weekday games were played at night and
doubleheaders were on Sunday afternoons.
"Beansie was very popular with the players and the fans," said Marilyn
Jenkins, a Chicks batgirl from 1945-51 and a catcher from 1952-54. "She had
a great personality and was outgoing. She had great knowledge of the game.
As a pitcher, she had a quiet confidence and her height was a real asset for
her. I caught her and she looked like all arms and legs coming at you. You
just didn't see girls that tall. That added uniqueness to her. She couldn't
run very well and hit very well, but that's not what pitchers did back
then."
What Risinger did well was pitch. Her favorite was a hard fastball, "high
and tight," although she also owned a curve and a change-up that often
fooled the opposition. During her career with the Chicks, she compiled a
2.51 ERA. Her best season was 1953 when she led the Chicks to a 15-10 record
and helped capture the AAGPBL championship against the Kalamazoo Lassies.
The final game of the championship was the highlight of her career.
The Chicks had won the first game of the best-of-three series and were
ahead one run in the second game. Risinger was on the mound with the bases
loaded when Doris "Sammye" Sams, an all-star slugger, stepped up to the
plate. Sams had already hit one home run off Risinger, so the pressure was
on.
"I can still visualize when we won the championship trophy," Risinger
said. "It was about thirty-five degrees in September and here we were in
those short skirts, freezing to death. I was the pitcher for that last game.
Woody English was our manager, but he had been thrown out of the game. So
Ziggy [Alma Ziegler], our captain, was the manager then.
"I started getting a little wild, I guess, and Ziggy comes out to the
mound. They had a high mound in Kalamazoo, and here I am, standing there
with a beet-red face in that thirty-five-degree weather. Ziggy's a little
thing and she looked up at me and she said 'Well, Beans, can you get her
out?' ! just shrugged my shoulders and she said 'Well, do it.' She left me
in, and I struck her out. So that was the greatest thrill right there."
Memorabilia from that game, along with photographs and history of the
AAGPBL, are on currently on display at the Public Museum of Grand Rapids. In
the Leagues of Their Own exhibit, Risinger's easy to find. She's the tallest
player in team photographs, most often standing in the back row. She's also
attractive, slim and seemingly relaxed and confident in her own skin. Her
image on her baseball card reveals more. It shows an athlete coiled for the
pitch, focused, intent, with a competitive fire in her eyes.
"Beansie had a lot of ability as a pitcher," said Alma "Ziggy" Ziegler of
Los Osos, California, Risinger's friend and mentor. "She had a really good
fastball and mediocre curve ball. She was a great team player, which was
important. And she had a lot of competitive spirit. She didn't show it, but
I knew she had it."
It was that competitive spirit among league players like Risinger that
kept fans coming back year after year. During the AAGPBL's peak in 1948,
teams often drew ten thousand spectators to a game. The Chicks had one of
the most successful franchises in the league. A museum photograph of a
Chicks game shows the grandstands packed with spectators sitting
elbow-to-elbow.
Dick Buth, who grew up in Grand Rapids, remembers attending a Chicks game
at South High Field at the corner of Madison SE and Cottage Grove. "I would
have been in my twenties," said Buth, who joined the U.S. Navy in the spring
of 1944. "It was a novelty and I recall the attendance was remarkably good.
People really caught onto it. They enjoyed it."
Although the AAGPBL had ten teams in its heyday in 1948, four years later
there were only six. By 1954, the postwar resurrection of men's leagues, the
advent of television and a lack of fan support were too much to overcome.
The AAGPBL, which had begun in 1943, disbanded at the end of the season.
Although Risinger returned to Oklahoma during her first two off-seasons
with the league, in subsequent years she chose to live in Grand Rapids. She
worked at Jordan Buick in the winter months as a maid and a file clerk. But
when the league folded, she decided to start a new career.
Players used earnings for college education after league folded
Using some of the money she had saved over the years, she attended X-ray
technician school and took a job at an orthopedic surgeon's office in Grand
Rapids. She enjoyed her work so much that she encouraged four other
ballplayers to follow suit. Risinger retired in 1991 as an orthopedic
assistant.
"The league helped a lot of women," Risinger said. "They got the money
playing ball to go to school. A lot of the girls went to college to become
teachers. One's a surgeon. I don't know what I ever would have been or done
if I didn't play ball."
Once the AAGPBL disbanded, it was all but forgotten for the next three
decades. Then, on November 5, 1988, a permanent exhibit about the league
opened at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New
York. Four years later, film director Penny Marshall immortalized the AAGPBL
with her hit movie, A League of Their Own, starring Geena Davis, Madonna and
Rosie O'Donnell.
"After the movie came out, interest in the women's league really
heightened," said Ted Spencer, Baseball Hall of Fame chief curator. "It's by
far the most popular exhibit we've ever had. It gave women a piece of the
ownership of the game. Women were finally able to link to the game, and not
just as fans."
In September 2003, the surviving players from the AAGPBL will hold their
sixtieth reunion, in New York. Many continue to stay in contact with one
another on a regular basis, providing a support system in retirement that
began in the league. Risinger has a reputation for going out of her way to
keep in touch.
"I find Beans a very loving, compassionate individual," said Rosemary
Stevenson of Nunica, who joined the Chicks in their final year. "She never
has anything bad to say about anybody. She's a special lady. She's in a
league of her own."
The tall "Okie" has been an unheralded pioneer for women in sports. By
bucking society's ideas about women to chase her own dream, she helped to
open doors for women everywhere.
"Our legacy, I hope, is that we helped other women go forward, to be more
independent and get to play sports," Risinger said. "I was so happy when
Title IX came along, but there's still a long way to go. I tell girls
interested in sports to just go for it. I don't have too much sympathy for
people who say they grew up in a poor area. I'm proud of what I've come
from. You've just got to want to do it."
BARBARA BEAL SCHMID is a freelance writer in Grand Rapids.
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