Women at Play: A Square Book

My first novel, She’s on First, was a baseball novel, published in 1987. After I spent 1987 promoting She’s on First, I decided I would write a true account of women in baseball. I started researching this subject in January of 1988 and figured I would finish by December.

Wrong! It took me four years, from 1988-1992, to uncover the story of women playing hardball. I frequented libraries, asking for local history files. I visited the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library. And I scrolled through the microfilm of more newspapers than I care to remember.

Part of the reason it took me four years to complete the research on women in baseball was that I was searching for Maud Nelson, whom I first heard mentioned in Debra Shattuck’s Master’s Thesis. (I read every master’s thesis that I could find if it contained a mention of women baseball players.) After maybe two years I discovered that Maud Nelson was also Maud Olson. And after that I discovered that she had two brothers whose last name was Brida . . . so her name must have been Brida. And then I discovered she married a man named Costante Dellacqua. And then I discovered that Maud Brida Nelson Olson Dellacqua wasn’t really Maud: her name was Clementina Brida.

I’ve never been particularly fond of long telephone calls. I’d much rather meet somebody in person, or exchange letters. That was back in the 1980s. Today I prefer email or text. But neither email nor text existed when I was researching Women at Play, so I ended up making  many phone calls many times. Whenever I found a lead on somebody who might have played baseball in, say, 1912, I would track her down — or who I supposed she might be — and then I would make a phone call. 

My spiel went something like this: “Hello, I’m Barbara Gregorich, calling from Chicago. I’m writing a book on the history of women who played hardball, and I wonder if  you’re the [NAME] who played baseball in [YEAR] for [TEAM NAME].” Amazingly — they almost always were the person I was looking for. And they were very willing to talk to me, and very generous with their time and information.

After the publishing contract was signed, my editor at Harcourt suggested that the approach I take should not be scholarly, but “popular” — a book that the average person would want to read, written in a non-scholarly style. In fact, he said something that I’ll always remember: “Think proper nouns. Make the title and focus of each chapter a proper noun.” So that’s what I did, and I’m very happy he suggested that approach, and happy that I was able to think, organize, and write with that approach.

Besides the proper-noun chapters and focus, photos and sidebars also contributed to the popularity and success of Women at Play. Each chapter contains at least one sidebar, and most contain three. These extra snippets of information, printed in bold, attract the reader’s attention and win the reader’s interest. 

As for the photos, I think that of the 150 or so I collected 99 went into the book. Unfortunately, the photo permissions cost close to $6,000 back in 1992, and they would cost even more today, which is why I’m not able to include them in the text-only digital version of Women at Play.

 I signed the publishing contract for Women at Play in July, 1992. The manuscript was due 92 days later. This was an incredibly tight deadline for a book covering 100 years of history, containing 80 or so sidebars, plus 99 photos and captions. To say nothing of the Introduction, Acknowledgements, Credits, and so forth. The reason the deadline was so tight was that the movie A League of Their Own was due to be released on video in March, 1993 — and my publisher wanted to take advantage of that by having my book released at the same time. This was a wise marketing decision, and even though it made my life very difficult for 92 days, I’m happy that Women at Play and A League of Their Own came out in popular format at the same time.

The year it was published, Women at Play won the Benjamin Franklin Award (given for best design) in the Sports category. I think it’s a beautiful looking, inviting book. Everything about its design seems to promise that the contents will be lively and interesting. However, I was both amused and astonished when several people told me they couldn’t get themselves to buy the book because it was . . . square. In shape. 8”x8”.  Up until that time, I had no idea that some people disliked square-shaped things. As a result of what I call the “square reaction,” I had nightmares that square-hating customers would walk into bookstores and start bending back the corners of Women at Play . . . so that it would no longer be square.

I thoroughly enjoyed the years spent researching the story of women in baseball, and I equally enjoyed meeting and/or talking to many of the baseball players in the book — Mary Gilroy Hockenbury, Margaret Gisolo, Edith Houghton, Jo Winter, Sophie Kurys, Dottie Collins, Rose Gacioch, Jean Faut, Isabel Alvarez, Lois Youngen, Toni Stone, Julie Croteau, and others. They will always be a part of who I am and what I’ve done.

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The 25th Anniversary edition of Women at Play was published as an ebook. It is not square.