Saving the Best for Last

In 2009 I became interested in self-publishing, and after exploring the options, I reprinted She’s on First as a self-published book in February 2010.

I was so pleased with the results (a new cover design [by Robin Koontz, who also designed the cover above] plus I restored a small scene that my editor had cut back in 1987) that I realized I would self-publish more books. My best-known book, Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball (Harcourt, 1993) proved undoable because in order to reprint the 100 photos in the book I would have had to pay thousands of dollars in permissions. (And I feared that if I published the text only, without photos, both readers and libraries would be very, very upset.)

Maud Nelson, 1890s

But while I couldn’t afford to reprint Women at Play, I could afford to put together and publish a new book, one that consisted of my research notes — the raw materials from which I sculpted Women at Play. Such a collection of newspaper articles, posters, diaries, and letters would, I felt, interest baseball researchers. Also, I thought such a book would interest English teachers at the junior high, senior high, or college level. A collection of original sources, all on the same topic, could prove valuable to those who teach the research paper.

Excited about this, I started to put together my concept of the book. Almost immediately I realized that this was not a one-volume project. Rather, it would take three volumes — because I wanted to keep each book at about 150 pages rather than publish a large-format, 450-page book. From the get-go I decided what each volume would logically contain, starting with women ballplayers of the 19th century and moving forward to the early 1930s.

Research Notes for Women at Play, Volume 1, contains articles on Maud Nelson, the most important person in the early history of women in baseball; on Margaret Nabel, founder of the New York Bloomer Girls; and on the African-American players of the Baltimore Black Sox. It also contains articles on John Olson, Maud’s husband, founder of the Cherokee Indian Baseball Team (though they were really Seneca Indians).

Leona Kearns

I published Volume 1 in November of 2010, and I thought I could publish Volume 2 by 2012. As it turned out, Research Notes for Women at Play, Volume 2 took me longer to put together: it was published in July 2013.

Finally, in October of 2015, five years after I published Volume 1, I’m publishing the third (and last) volume of Research Notes for Women at Play. Because all of the information in Volume 3 comes from the years 1925-1935, none of it is public domain. This means that I could quote only modest amounts of most articles: it means that I spent a lot of time writing accurate summaries of article contents.

But Volume 3 is different from the two previous volumes in another way, too. A reader going through it from beginning to end may feel she or he is reading a novel. Or deciding a court case. Or perhaps reconstructing a “what really happened” crime scene.

That’s because Volume 3 contains the story of the Philadelphia Bobbies, Eddie Ainsmith, and Leona Kearns, their disastrous trip to Japan to play against men’s teams in 1925, the abandonment of three players, and the death at sea of one of them.

Margaret Gisolo of the Blanford Cubs

Contrasted to the tragedy of that story, Research Notes, Volume 3 also contains the exciting story of Margaret Gisolo, who helped lead her 1928 American Legion Junior Baseball team to the state championship. Margaret later played for Maud Nelson’s All-Star Ranger Girls, and later still founded the Department of Dance at Arizona State University, where she was a much loved and highly respected professor. The book also tells the story of Leona Kearns’ younger sister, Nellie, who, along with Margaret, played with the All-Star Ranger Girls.

Volumes 1 and 2 have worked in the way I wanted them to. They are used by baseball researchers looking for information that might help them learn more about a team . . . an individual . . . a rare photograph. They are also used by teachers, and in more imaginative ways than I would have considered. Some teachers, for example, use the books to teach about sports journalism in the past . . . about the manner in which women athletes were written about  . . . even about clothing styles.

If one must spend five years sifting through thousands of pages of accumulated articles and arranging them in a useful order, then it’s a reward in itself, to the writer, that the final volume is the most exciting.

And a reward to the reader, too, I hope.

Baseball signed by the 1934 All-Star Rangers players.