Abbey Mastracco
New York Daily News
Maybelle Blair recently found herself nostalgic for baseball. At 96 years old, she had spent a lifetime in baseball, watching, playing and serving as an ambassador for the sport. The former All-American Girls Professional Baseball League pitcher found herself missing a certain sound that always brings her back to her younger days in the game: Spikes on concrete.
“There’s no sweeter music than by ear is to hear spikes against cement or hardwood,” Blair said Thursday at Citi Field. “You can hear that music. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. I loved it.”
Blair was so nostalgic for that sound that she went down to a Dick’s Sporting Goods near her home in Orange County, California and purchased a pair.
The indefatigable Blair was named the first-ever recipient of the Amazin’ Mets Foundation Legacy Award this week. The foundation, which is chaired by Mets owner Alex Cohen, created the award to recognize people and organizations driving progress and making impactful change in the sport and in the community.
Blair has been doing that since the 1940s. After playing in the league that inspired the movie “A League of Their Own” and a few professional softball leagues as well, the former Peoria Redwings pitcher dedicated herself to advancing opportunities for girls and women a game that hasn’t always been inclusive toward them. Blair has been traveling the country since the 1980s to talk about women in baseball and doesn’t plan to stop anytime soon.
She helped get a permanent exhibit established at the Baseball Hall of Fame and is a founding member of Director Emeritus of the International Women’s Baseball Center, a project dedicated to preserving the history of girls and women in baseball and softball. The goal is to build a museum in Rockford, Illinois, the former home of the Rockford Peaches of the AAGPBL.
Currently, the center consists of a stand and a field where they hope to host large-scale youth tournaments in much the same way the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown does. Blair said they need about $1 million more to get the museum operating, but she’s confident that it will happen.
“Then we can start putting the shovels in the ground and get the center itself started,” Blair said. “The field is just beautiful, just lovely. You just want to step into it.”
Blair grew up in Southern California and Texas, first finding baseball through her brother. She would park herself in front of the radio at the family’s home. This was before the Dodgers made their way out west, but they could get Chicago Cubs games even in Southern California. The team adopted the Cubs as their own. She would report back to the boys who were practicing about what was going on at Wrigley Field.
She learned to keep score and she was proud to do so.
“By the time I was about six or seven, I could keep a baseball score as good as any man living,” she said.
Blair was scouted by someone not unlike Ernie Capadino, the character played by Jon Lovitz in the movie. She still remembers what it felt like to put the uniform on the first time. The dress made her feel like “Miss America.”
She was a pitcher, but she hit and played defense too.
“I had a great arm, but my glove — I had a very good glove,” she said. “I had to learn to catch or my mother and father would have thrown me in the Pacific Ocean.”
Blair wasn’t like other women in the league. She didn’t have a husband away at war like the other women. Her sexuality was something she hid for years, but finally, at 95 years old, she decided she was done hiding. Last year at the Tribeca Film Festival, she came out publicly.
It isn’t just young girls and women she advocates for, it’s LGBTQ+ youth as well.
This is part of what led Cohen and the Amazin’ Mets Foundation to choose Blair for the Legacy Award. The foundation gave a grant to Athlete Ally, a nonprofit that educates communities on how to understand obstacles for the LGBTQ+ people who play them.
The only female athletes she remembered looking up to were tennis players. It didn’t occur to her that a baseball player could be a female role model, but now it’s a role that she relishes. In a room full of people passionate about baseball, hers still stands out.
“This award means something that you’ll never realize to me,” Blair said. “Women in my day had no opportunity, whatsoever, to be around baseball, a game that I love so much. They have opened the door up to us women, we are now executives, we are now owners, we are a little bit of everything in baseball.”
Blair still clickety-clacking her way around the country, opening doors that were never open for her. Her biggest hope is that those doors stay open for generations to come.
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