Doris Sams, who pitched a perfect game and set a single-season home run record in the women’s professional baseball world of the 1940s and 50s that inspired the movie “A League of Their Own,” died Thursday in Knoxville, Tenn. She was 85.
Sams was one of the leading players in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, founded in 1943 by Phil Wrigley, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, to provide evening entertainment in Midwestern towns and keep interest in baseball alive when the majors were losing most of their players to military service in World War II.
The women’s league, which survived into 1954, was largely forgotten until the 1992 Hollywood comedy with Madonna and Geena Davis on the field and Tom Hanks as the profane manager who drove one of his players to tears and then famously exclaimed in bewilderment, “There’s no crying in baseball!”
Playing for Michigan’s Muskegon Lassies and their successor franchise, the Kalamazoo Lassies, from 1946 to 1953, Sams, who was 5 feet 9 inches and wore glasses, pitched underhand, sidearm and overhand, as the rules governing deliveries evolved.
She hit a league-record 12 home runs in 1952, playing in 109 games; she hit better than .300 in each of her last four seasons; threw out many runners playing the outfield when she was not pitching; and she was the league’s player of the year in 1947 and 1949.
Sams pitched her perfect game in August 1947, retiring all 27 batters for the Fort Wayne Daisies in a 2-0 victory, then threw a no-hitter the next year against the Springfield Sallies.
Doris Jane Sams was born in Knoxville on Feb. 2, 1927. A grandfather and her father, Robert, played semipro baseball, and she joined with two older brothers in playing baseball as a youngster. By 11, she was playing fast-pitch softball on a team with much older girls. She also won a regional marbles tournament and was a Knoxville city badminton champion before turning to pro baseball after a tryout in 1946.
She was soon a star and shared the covers of Dell publishing’s 1948 major league yearbook with Ted Williams — he on the front, she on the back. She estimated that she was paid about $4,000 a season.
The Hall of Fame displayed one of Sams’s player-of-the year trophies along with her Louisville Slugger bat when it opened its permanent exhibition on women in baseball.
In her interview with The Post-Dispatch, Sams said that a mannequin of Babe Ruth was on display near the women’s exhibit.
“I look over to the right and see Babe Ruth,” she said. “I look over on the left and see Ted Williams. Then I look in the mirror and say, ‘What are you doing here?’ It’s all so unbelievable. I never ever dreamed our league would get this kind of recognition.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/sp...ies-at-85.html