Towards the end of March in 1931, a new baseball season was approaching for the Chattanooga Lookouts. The owner and manager of the minor league team was Joe Engel. Scouting a baseball training camp in nearby Atlanta, Georgia, Engel had noticed a young 17 year old pitcher (and Chattanooga native) named Jack Mitchell, who had mastered a wicked curve-ball. To cut costs in the Depression, Engel was ready to offer Mitchell a contract to replace a more expensive player. In just a few days, in an exhibition game originally scheduled for Wednesday April 1, 1931, the Lookouts would face the visiting New York Yankees at the new Engel Stadium as they journeyed home following their pre-season training in Florida. These 1931 Yankees would produce a couple of batting performances that year that remain in the top 25 all-time single-season offensive records to this day. In my cricket-playing home of Great Britain, we can be quite ignorant about baseball, but we've all heard of #3 and #4 in that 1931 batting order:
Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

 

The owner Joe Engel thought Mitchell had something new to offer that might just catch them off guard. It was a “drop-pitch”, a breaking ball that Mitchell had been taught every day as a very young child by the kind man who lived next-door when the family lived for a while in Memphis. That kind man was Dazzy Vance. He was starting out back then as a pitcher for the Memphis Chicaksaws. He later played for the [Brooklyn] Dodgers and by 1931, he was already a three-time National League MVP. He took a liking to his tiny neighbor and enjoyed his role as the professor in "how to pitch like a professional" class of one. So it was that on March 28, 1931, Jackie Mitchell officially turned professional at the tender age of 17, signing a formal contract with Joe Engel's Chattanooga Lookouts Class AA minor league baseball team. The big game against the New York Yankees was scheduled to be played just four days later. There was heavy Chattabnooga rain storm on that Wednesday, and the game had to be postponed, finally getting underway at 2:30 in the afternoon of the next day Thursday April 2, 1931. Along with big city newspaper reporters, a paid crowd of 4,000 were there (not too bad for a rescheduled weekday afternoon game in the fimamcial circumstance of the Depression). I was surprised to learn that Chattanooga was one of the first cities outside of New York, Bronx, Brooklyn and the Philadelphia and Boston areas with a baseball team, starting shortly after the Civil War. Though not the first local team, this Chattanooga Lookouts team was founded in 1885. They are nearly 30 years older than the New York Yankees (1913), and even 20 years older than the Yankees' predecessor, the long-defunct New York Highlanders of 1903. But I imagine that the appearanceof Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig was still a Very Big Day for this southeastern corner of Tennessee. The starting pitcher for Chattanooga was their returning long-time regular Clyde Barfoot (then already in his 40's). But he didn't last very long on the mound. Barfoot's first two pitches resulted in a double off the center field wall for Ernie Combs and a single for Lyn Lary, with Ernie Combs scoring a run from second base. The manager/owner saw that his starting pitcher's nerve had gone. Furthermore, he realized that the next batter had also noticed the pitcher's condition, just by the way Babe Ruth strutted up to the plate. Engel decided to take a gamble, ensuring either way that Mitchell's professional career debut would have a remarkable start by pitching to Babe Ruth. I don't want my personal [British caused] baseball ignorance to detract from this next bit, so the next paragraph is in the words of journalist Adam Dosier, which he based in part on contemporary 1931 newspaper reports:

 

Jackie Mitchell took a few warm-up tosses, "wound up as if turning a coffee grinder" and then let loose with that curve-ball. Ruth swung through it. He took another big hack at a second breaking ball and missed again. Ruth then paused and demanded that the home plate umpire inspect the ball. Two pitches later, and ahead in the count Jackie Mitchell "sailed one down the middle". Ruth just stood there frozen as it sailed over the plate for a perfect third strike. The New York Post called it "the deadliest insult of all". "Ruth flung his bat away in high disdain as he trudged to the bench", said the New York Times. Mitchell made easy work of the next-up batter Lou Gehrig too, sitting the first baseman down in just three pitches.

There apparently isn't much recorded by the press about Gehrig's first at-bat: just the last sentence of the quoted paragraph above. Perhaps those New York reporters were too stunned by what had just happened. Jackie Mitchell had disposed of both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in just seven pitches, and it wasn't just because Jackie was only 17 years old. Jackie Mitchell was a girl - just the second woman to join a male minor league baseball team. She had been preceded only by Alta Weiss, also a pitcher, who had played for the semi-professional Vermillion Independents (Ohio) a quarter of a century earlier. Generously, even the New York newspapers had plenty to say about what happened next. It was the crowd’s reaction, still described as the longest standing ovation in Chattanooga’s history.

 

Several photographs survive from that day, and a growing gallery of them can be seen by clicking here. Adam Dosier's article reports on research and interviews with the Director of Research at the Baseball Hall of Fame on the possibility that it was staged and just “a show”. They concluded that, as sworn by several members of the Yankees team, the pitching feat was real. Even cynics agree that Lou Gehrig would never have been involved in anything so sacrilegious to his name or that of the Yankees, and more importantly to the game of baseball itself. Jackie Mitchell herself stated it was legitimate to her dying day in January 1987. Jackie Mitchell continued to play for the Chattanooga Lookouts as the regular season, as documented by an in-depth mid-season interview with her and ger father that was featured in the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. She left Engels and moved around a few small clubs in the 1932 season. In 1933, she signed for the House of David barnstorming show team – a sort of Harlem Globetrotters for baseball. She retired in 1937, picking up that baseball just one more time after that. She threw the ceremonial first pitch for the Chattanooga Lookouts on opening day of the 1982 season, at the tender age of 69.

 

This presentation of the story represents the work of several people, most notably Adam Dosier in this article.
(c) Copyright 2013, Christopher Benson. Version control: 1.3.13100401