Couldn’t happen, you say? Well, it did. Here’s the story.
Jackie Mitchell meets the Babe and Lou Gehrig (photo courtesy National Baseball Hall of Fame)
Jackie Mitchell did it on April 2, 1931. Mitchell was playing for the Chattanooga Lookouts, and the team was playing an exhibition game against the New York Yankees. It meant Mitchell would face Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
The game was possible because the Yanks had just finished Spring Training in Florida, and the team was winding its way up North to begin the 1931 season.
Mitchell, only 17 years old at the time, was nervous but ready to pitch. She didn’t start the game (the Lookout’s ace pitcher did, but flamed out in the first inning), and that’s when Mitchell was called into the game.
Nobody expected how things would turn out. Indeed, observers were stunned.
Mitchell not only struck out the Babe, but Gehrig went down swinging, too. There was some debate back then (never proven) that Ruth and Gehrig let her whiff them on purpose. For her part, Mitchell maintained they were legitimate at-bats.
What’s even more amazing is that both batters went down after Mitchell hurled seven–that’s right–seven pitches! She then walked Tony Lazzeri, the next batter in the Yankees’ lineup, and that was the end of her day on the mound.
MLB Commissioner Landis then voided her contract, claiming baseball was “too strenuous” for a woman.
(Date in the first video is in error; it was 1931, not ’32.)
