Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2309: Only a Woman: Ella Black, Lost and Found (Part 1–Ella’s Legend)

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

Ella Black was the first woman to write about baseball for a national publication—if her name was Ella Black, and if she was a woman. On Ella Black: Lost and Found, a three-part scripted series from Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh explores what we know about the enigmatic trailblazer and tries to solve some of the […]

Have you heard the beginning of Take Me Out to the Ball Game? You know the chorus, which starts with the words in the title, but I'm talking about the part they don't play during the seventh inning stretch, even though there's just enough time between innings. Let's listen to the earliest recorded version of the song from the year it was written, 1908. That's a man named Edward Meeker on the mic, which was more of a horn in those days. When Meeker and the millions of others who still sing along to that song every year reach the chorus, they're not just expressing their own desire to be at the ballpark. They're also quoting a character, Katie Casey. In a 1927 rewrite, Katie Casey was rechristened Nellie Kelly.

Nellie, like Katie, loved baseball games and knew the players, knew all their names. The important part is that the protagonist of the most famous song about baseball, an anthem composed by two men who'd never been to a baseball game, was a woman. And most people don't know her name, either one of her names. They don't even know that a woman was part of the song. Decades before Katie Casey and Nellie Kelly, there was another woman, a real one, who loved baseball games. She didn't just know the players and all their names, she wrote about them, and the

baseball world watched and waited to see what she would say next. Her name was Ella Black, though she too was sometimes known as Nellie. And when these words of hers were printed on March 3rd, 1890 in a prominent Philadelphia based newspaper called Sporting Life, she became the first woman to write about baseball or any sport for that matter for a national publication. There is one thing sure,

and it is one that is recognized by both the local clubs. And that is that whichever one is a winner in the struggle so soon to commence, that one will have to thank the ladies of Pittsburgh and Allegheny for having done a great deal to land the victory on its side. There is one thing and only one thing sure about Ella too, her byline, which appeared at the end of 39 columns There is one thing, and only one thing, sure about Ella too.

Her byline, which appeared at the end of 39 columns that Sporting Life ran between March and November of 1890. Ella was a correspondent in Pittsburgh, technically Allegheny City, which was right across the Allegheny River from downtown Pittsburgh and would become part of Pittsburgh proper in 1907. Her remit was to send weekly dispatches

about the two teams in town at the time. One, which we now call the Alleghenies, was the predecessor of the modern day Pirates, a member of the same national league that the Pirates play in today. The other, which we now know as the Burgers, that's B-U-R-G-H, was the Alleghenies direct competitor, a member of the brand new Players League.

The P.L. was aorganized rival to the NL that was formed by the first athletes labor union in American pro sports, the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players. Sports writers were a brotherhood too, which explains the heading on Ella's first column, which cried out to readers like a carnival barker directing the rubes at the circus to see the bearded lady.

A woman's view, A novelty in baseball literature! The baseball situation considered and commented upon from a female standpoint. This was the 1890 equivalent of clickbait. Except that there was substance to Ella's stories. Engaging prose, keen sports insight, and real reporting. Ella introduced readers to female fandom, traded barbs with well-established baseball writers, and landed significant scoops. Granted, that sensational headline hadn't lied.

Ella was a novelty. One historian you'll hear from later, Donna Halper, has called her the earliest female sports writer we know about, a true trailblazer. Yet her name is even less well-remembered than the literally unsung Katie Casey and Nellie Kelly. And to this point, Ella Black has been almost as much of a cipher as those fictional characters. In fact, she was widely thought to be a fictional character, as University of Missouri St. Louis

Professor Scott Peterson, author of Reporting Baseball's Sensational Season of 1890 and a leading Ella expert, explains. Many readers in the sporting life assumed that she was a man writing as a woman for some reason. They never really had a good reason as to why she might do that, but they almost to a person wrote that there's no way a woman could know this much about baseball. Ella encountered some skeptics in person. In April of 1890, not long before opening day, Ella received a press pass. Many thanks for the credentials sent me this week. I shall value them all the more as you say they

are the first ever issued to a lady correspondent by The Sporting Life. In May she went to Washington Park in Brooklyn where the Alleghenies were visiting the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, the proto-dodgers. There she attempted to use her credentials for the first time. I did not have very good luck with them, as it turned out. When I reached the gate at Washington Park on Friday last, I took the card out of my pocketbook and, showing it to the gentleman who seemed to be in charge,

asked him if that would be sufficient to admit me. He examined it very closely and said, well, well, I've heard of you often, but I always thought you were a man, but you really are a woman. I assured him that such was really the case. The gatekeeper said the press pass was probably all right, but that Ella couldn't enter until she got the go ahead

from Brooklyn's owner or another team official. As it was nearly time for the game to begin, and I did not care to indulge in so much red tape, I put an end to the conference by purchasing a ticket and feeling very independent as I walked in and took my seat. The uncertainty surrounding Ella, then and now, has probably played a part in keeping her profile low. Undaunted, Brooke Kroger's comprehensive 2023 book about women in American journalism devotes a single sentence to Ella. For the 1890 baseball season, sporting life carried baseball stories under the byline Ella Black that were a subject of gender controversy never entirely resolved. The Encyclopedia of Women in Baseball gives her a whole paragraph. An Atlas Obscura piece published in 2016 says,

several historians have tried to puzzle out who she was, where she came from, and where she went next, but all have come up short. A 2024 collection of Ella's columns called Sports She Wrote notes, other than her byline, Her Life is a Mystery. And a 2009 paper by professor and sports historian Mike Sowell, who scoured several sources in search of Ella concluded,

like many of the women journalists of her generation, Ella Black appears to have been lost to history. To the West, to the West. Both during her life and long after it, Ella alluded all attempts to untangle who she was and what happened to her. Until now, 135 years after her first and last byline. I'm Ben Lindberg, a senior editor for The Ringer,

and this is a production of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast. I've written about baseball for much of my life and followed the sport for almost all of it. I'm fairly familiar with its history and its long list of luminaries, most of them men. But until a few years ago, I hadn't heard of Ella Black. I'm not sure what shocked me more when I belatedly learned about her, that she existed at all, or that so few fans of the sport are aware of her work. I wanted to get to know her better, and hopefully help others make her acquaintance too.

In this episode and the two that follow, I'll be sharing the story of Ella Black with help from historians, researchers, and leading figures from the realms of baseball and journalism. We'll discuss why Ella's season in the sun was such a tumultuous time both in baseball and in American society. We'll connect her tale to today to assess how much has changed and how much still hasn't. And along the way, we'll solve some major parts of the puzzle of Ella's identity. I believe I have figured out who she was. Oh, that's wonderful. I got goosebumps over here, Ben.

Welcome to Only a Woman, Ella Black, Lost and found. Part One, Ella's Legend. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] In 1890, the superintendent of the US census declared that the western part of the country was so settled that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. The Wild West was winding down and the frontier was officially closed. As that physical frontier closed though, new socio-cultural frontiers were opening. The final decade of the 19th century was the last gasp of the Victorian era, but it was also the dawn of the Progressive One, the beginning of the Gay 90s and the Gilded Age, and, relatedly, a time of escalating labor wars and government reforms that pitted

increasingly resolute workers against brutal robber barons. The United Mine Workers of America formed in 1890, and the Sherman Antitrust Act became law. The demographic makeup of the country and the options available to some of its citizens were rapidly changing too. Construction of the first federal immigration station started at Ellis Island in New York Harbor in 1890 and the National American Woman Suffrage Association was founded. For both better and worse, technology leapt ahead in 1892, yielding new devices ranging from the cardboard box

and improved perforated toilet paper rolls to, more morbidly, the electric chair. And the advent of phonograph cylinders made it possible to preserve and disseminate the sound of speech and music, including this 1890 United States Marine Band recording of John Philip Sousa's 1889 Washington Post March, a message in a cylinder sent across the centuries. Our story reflects those larger developments. Well, not the part about cardboard boxes. Ella was working her way into a workforce women had historically been barred from, just as so many of her contemporaries were fighting for access to other traditionally male spheres.

Sports writing wasn't quite as crucial as voting, and guaranteeing the right to report on baseball didn't require a constitutional amendment. But in 1890, the press box was almost as impregnable as the ballot box. Here's Marie Hargan, a sports journalism professor and the dean of the College of Communications at Penn State, a couple hours east of where Ella lived.

Ella Black had to not only demonstrate her credibility as a woman who was able to go do reporting in general and write in a way that was appealing, but to move into a space that wasn't really seen as a space that women could traverse very well at all. Because part of the credibility for journalists in covering sports was just the fact that you were a man. So sports is sort of that last terrain for women in terms of reporting and

journalism. So this whole story of Ella Black has been fascinating to me. The players Ella was covering were also locked in a larger struggle that epitomized the perils and the promise of the age, says Point Park University Professor Robert Ross, author of The Great Baseball Revolt. 1890 was this big test for not just professional baseball, but really for the labor movement at large, which was exploding at this point. It was something that workers across America could sort of see as a contest between the capitalist class and the working class.

Union workers in 1890s sort of saw themselves in the players league and the players league certainly tried to sell themselves as union men, the representatives of the working class. And so it was a contest over who has the best baseball, who can make the most money, and who should enjoy that, who belongs not just in the ballpark in terms of players, but also fans, and who should be at the table in terms of shaping this sport that has really become the national pastime. Technically, every year is a pivotal one.

I'm sure you've heard about the butterfly effect. Well, there are many millions of butterfly wings in the world, and 12 months is a lot of time for flapping. So we could make almost any year seem momentous if we tried. But it's easier to argue for 1890 as an inflection point than it is for most years. In some respects, 1890 was when the country started to resemble modern America. Though in other respects, the debut of Ella Black and baseball's labor battle prime among them,

what seemed like significant steps forward were in fact false starts. For both baseball and journalism, 1890 was a preview of permanent breakthroughs that wouldn't come to fruition for another 85 years. 1890 provided a glimpse of the future, and this podcast will provide a glimpse of that past. To put Ella Black's brief but groundbreaking career in context, we need a bit of background. First, about women who worked at 19th century newspapers,

or tried to, and second, about baseball. In 1890, women made up 20% of the U.S. workforce, but only 4% of the country's almost 22,000 editors and writers. Very few of the journalism jobs that went to women were easily obtained, says NYU professor emerita Brooke Kroger, the author of Undaunted. Margaret Fuller, who really starts the ball rolling in 1840, is part of a very, very small elite group who catapult over the prejudices against women in the field and just rise because they are really, really exceptional.

And that is always true in the field, that exceptional women, at least as I've studied it, never have a problem. Where the problem comes is the mass of really bright, capable women who are as bright and capable as most of the men, if not more so. Ella was one of those women. And as she wrote early in the 1890 season, she was well aware of what she was up against and what was at stake. Everyone seems to think that all a woman knows how to do is work around her home, talk dress and fashion. I do not advocate women's rights in the same way as Dr. Mary Walker and others of her stamp, but still, I think they have just as much brain and can do most things quite as well as the men. I only hope someday,

unless the sporting life should remove me from its staff, to be able to force some of the brilliant masculine members of humanity who have seen fit to ridicule the idea of a woman riding baseball to admit that I am competent to do it. In 1890, shortly before Ella Black's first byline, yet another Nellie reached the peak of her fame. The three most accomplished female investigative journalists

of the era were Ida B. Wells, who courageously documented the lynchings of African-Americans, co-founded the NAACP, and was also active in the suffrage movement, Ida Tarbell, a muckraker and reformer, whose work helped lead to the dissolution of the monopolistic standard oil, and the one who was best known in 1890 and remains well known now.

She was born Elizabeth Cochran, but she made her name as Nellie Bly. Bly's incandescent career began because she took objection to being told what she could and couldn't do. Here's Kroger, who also wrote the definitive lie biography. — She is a girl with nothing going for her. The family's poor, she's had to leave school in ninth grade. The family's moved to Pittsburgh from the small town they come from. Her mother is running a boarding house, and she's helping with that. She's doing odd jobs. It's a mess.

An article runs in the Pittsburgh Dispatch by a columnist who was known as the Quiet Observer. And it's called What Girls Are Good For. And he basically writes a screed against women trying to worm their way into the workplace. And she responds with a letter to the editor, really annoyed that he should suggest such a thing when there are plenty of girls

who need to work. Like, what are you saying? Some of us need to. And the editor looks at it and says, oh, her grammar's terrible. She has no syntax. But I see a spirit here. I'm like, when does that happen? Never.

And he puts an ad in the dispatch asking lonely orphan girl, which is how she signed herself, to come forward. And she does. And he hires her on the spot, gives her the pen name Nellie Bly, and starts publishing her. That was excellent scouting. Bly would soon pioneer a new genre of journalism, which would see her perform feats of reporting, such as getting admitted to a mental institution as a patient to expose its deplorable conditions, or trying to travel around the world like Phineas Fogg from Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. Nellie did it eight days faster than Fogg, setting a world record. The biggest change that comes in the 1880s, around 1887,

is the stunt girl movement, led by Nellie Bly and her many, many imitators. These were women who were performing feats of pretty girl daring do, usually with a reform agenda. So there was more to them than just doing the stunt of feigning insanity and getting into an asylum. You were always looking to answer the call of the progressive era to champion reform. Of course, it meant a certain kind of woman.

She had to be young. She had to be daring. She had to be full of good ideas of things to enact. But it was something. Tarbell and Bly were both in Western Pennsylvania. For much of the 1880s, Bly lived in Allegheny City, where Ella would do her own work. That may not have been a complete coincidence.

Ella never brings up Bly in her columns. But the first mention we have of her from a sporting life item published shortly before her first missive starts with this sentence. Nellie Bly-ism seems about to invade sporting journalism. There is no woman journalist of that era who did not know about Nellie Bly-ism seems about to invade sporting journalism. There is no woman journalist of that era who did not know about Nellie Bly, who had not followed her career,

who had not seen the exceptional way the public and her newspaper responded to her between the fall of 1887 and January 1890, when she completes her trip around the world. Week after week after week during that period, she is doing expose after expose that are being republished across the country. Everyone is following Nellie Bly. And so it's impossible to imagine she wasn't an inspiration. She was the everyman girl who did things that were unimaginable, A, for Victorian women generally, and secondly, in journalism.

So she created aspirational opportunity, if not actual chances. There's the rub. A lot of women wanted to be Bly, but few found willing employers. Even Bly herself had a hard time finding work when she went to New York, frustrated by being limited to less adventurous assignments at her paper in Pittsburgh. In 1887, now in New York but still sending stories to the Pittsburgh Dispatch, Bly interviewed several editors of prominent New York papers about their policies and beliefs about women in the newspaper business.

What the editors told her sheds a lot of light on the attitudes women like Ella encountered as they tried to break into the biz. First, George Hepworth of The Herald. The very sources from which we obtain a larger portion of our news render it an impossible field for a woman. On account of the sensations and scandals which are demanded by the present popular taste, a gentleman could not, in delicacy, ask a woman to have anything to do with that class of news. That is what bars her from rapatorial success.

So women couldn't cover news because it could offend their delicate sensibilities, and for the same reason, they couldn't come to work without hampering the ability of guys-to-be-dudes and dudes-to-be-bros. They are a restraint in an office. The men do not feel at liberty to take off their coats or rest their feet upon the desks, and then they are too much of a guard morally. When they are within hearing, men cannot give vent to their feelings in the language all grades of angry men employ. John Cockrell of The World, who had once shot and killed an irate reader in a newspaper office,

boys will be boys, conceded that newspaper women weren't useless, provided they accepted their place. I think they can do things well enough. What they are fitted for, however, they don't want to do. There are society events which no man can report as well as a woman, yet they always claim to hate that style of work. Anyway, why hire a woman when the city was teeming with perfectly employable men? We do not encourage women here, because we have a deluge of good men unemployed. What they are fitted for is so limited that a man is of far greater service. We employ two women, so you see we do not object

personally." Sure, nothing personal. Three's a crowd. Charles Anderson Dana, the eminent editor of The Sun and former Assistant Secretary of War during the Civil War, made the reasonable observation that women weren't being prepared for their profession. I think if they have the ability, there is no reason why they should not do the work as well as men. But I do not think they can, as a class, do equally good work, for the very reason that women have never been educated up to it in the same manner as men." Dana had a point about the pipeline problem. The world's first school of journalism opened in 1899. The first J-school in the U.S. didn't open until 1908. In 1890, there wasn't really any way to study for the job except by being on it. Dana's point is that the system of training J-School in the U.S. didn't open until 1908. In 1890, there wasn't really any way to study

for the job except by being on it. The system of training within the journalism universe was apprenticeship, and only men had the apprenticeship. So even if a woman would lobby to get permission to cover a bigger story or do something like that, she would have this huge disadvantage of the lack of training. The only way women could train, I'm talking in newspaper newsrooms, was by osmosis. You know, they had to kind of watch things happening. Well, that's always going to be a lot more faulty than someone who's actually been through a structured training. So, you know, there were lots of built-in disadvantages.

But Dana strayed into paternalistic territory with his next comment, which reflected the reality that newspaper women were often obliged to bring bodyguards or chaperones with them when they reported at night or in not-so-nice neighborhoods, which gave editors a pretext to assign someone else. If a woman can do the assigned work as well as a man, there is no reason why there should be discrimination to her disfavor. And yet, while a woman might be the assigned work as well as a man, there is no reason why there should be discrimination to her disfavor. And yet, while a woman might be ever so clever in obtaining news and putting into words, we would not feel at liberty to call her out at one o'clock in the morning to report at a fire or crime.

In such a case, we never hesitate with a man. That is why the latter is preferable." Dana also made a comment that called his own accuracy into question. Accuracy is the greatest gift in a journalist. Women are generally worse than men in this regard. They find it impossible not to exaggerate. The headline of the article read, Mr. Dana is devoid of prejudice, but prefers the man. I'll let you be the judge of the devoid of prejudice part.

Finally, Robert G. Morris of The Telegram. Women are more ambitious than men and have more energy, if anything. But yet, their work has its limits on the papers. Not because they are not smart enough, but because they are women. If there was an emergency just as we were ready for the last edition, I could not send a woman sliding down the banister and have her return up three flights of stairs, four steps at a time. If you're wondering why these hypothetical slow sliders

and climbers couldn't take the elevator, well, early elevators were also slow, and the first electric elevator wasn't installed in the commercial building until 1889. But that still sounds like a weak excuse. And remember, these are the things men were saying to a female reporter on the record.

One can imagine what may have been said behind closed doors. In 1887, the same year Nellie Bly was questioning New York's publishing power brokers, a veteran journalist named Jane Cunningham Crowley, better known by her pseudonym, Jenny June, was reminiscing about what she had heard from the New York editors she had tried to talk into hiring her a few decades earlier. They stared at me in blank amazement. To employ a woman on a newspaper was a thing almost

unheard of. Even when she got work, it was with a woman's column, focused on fashion, cooking, and the like. A range of topics was not permitted. Discussion of new books, it was said, would interfere with the regular book reviewer. The same in regard to pictures and the drama. And when I, for example, very naturally asked,

but Mr. H, what then can I write about? He said, oh, why there is always dress and fashion. Women in newspaper offices, as elsewhere, are drudges, obliged to do a large amount of work for small pay because their general and special culture has not fitted them for the best places. And what Hepworth said about newspaper men worrying that women would cramp their style

was true to Crowley's experience. Men are not accustomed to act with women from a business point of view and their presence oppresses them. They will stand carelessness, negligence, even drunkenness from a man because that is the regular order of things. But a woman without trial is generally understood

to be a nuisance in a newspaper office. Crowley credited her eventual husband, a fellow journalist who became an editor and hired his wife, for helping her advance. Which wasn't unusual, according to Kroger. Many women found platonic patrons, but one way or another, it's who you know has never not been true. The women who were really good at it, first of all, they had to have superb talent, but they also had the talent of networking.

They were great networkers. Well, who are you going to network with? It's the men who are in charge because men were in charge. Of course, in a world where men are in charge and where women are isolated and vulnerable, there are bound to be abuses. This was 130 years before Me Too, so documented cases of harassment, let alone consequences for the perpetrators, were scarce.

But some women still found ways to get the word out about bosses who took liberties. Where we see them is in the fiction written by women journalists, which often talks about fending off advances and those kinds of responses. Of course it happened, the world hasn't changed. There were of course supportive non-predatory employers, hashtag not all 19th century newspapermen, and open-minded male editors could and did make a

difference in aspiring female journalists careers, potentially including Ellis, as we'll learn later. Of the six editors Nellie Bly interviewed in 1887, there was, as her subhead said, one editor who favors the fair sex. Foster Coates of the Mail and Express, which the editor of the New York Times told Bly had been quicker than any other paper to give work to women, largely lived up to that billing. Now, progressive by 1890 standards sometimes sounds regressive today. Society, fashion, and general gossip are entirely suitable for women, and she for them. Their dress, constitution, and habits of life keep them from the routine of a reporter's work.

But Coates also said, Women are invaluable to a newspaper. In subsequent articles Coates wrote for Ladies Home Journal in 1890 and 1892, he burnished his bona fides as a feminist ally. In a great many newspaper offices there is a prejudice against women. Why this is so I do not know. I have employed them for a number of years and have always found them to be painstaking, accurate, and reliable. In numberless cases I have found that they could do some kinds of reporting far better than men. It is a mistake to think that women are only

fit to write fashion articles. I think the day is coming when women will do a large proportion of newspaper reporting." Coates, hopefully speaking sincerely and not just virtue signaling to the ladies' home journal audience, really laid into his more misogynistic counterparts. Why should not women succeed in newspaper work? Frankly, I cannot think of any valid reason. To be sure, various excuses are given. Vassalation of purpose, inability to concentrate effort, weak physique, lack of experience,

insufficient knowledge of the world and its affairs, and so on through a long and tiresome list of excuses, all frivolous, none of them worthy to be called an objection or even seriously considered. Such excuses are usually made by men who are judging women by a past standard, men who forget that in this golden hour of triumph for women, she has been educated to do any and all kinds of work where brains and ability are required. Most editors give women a chance by being unfair to them. Coates also made the case that a woman has charge of some special department in a paper secures permanent readers, not only among her own sex, but among men. Not that the women who were bringing in new readers would necessarily share in the spoils. It probably won't shock you to learn that while there was approximate pay parity between

male journalists and the few female journalists who entered the industry early on, that equivalence had long since ended by 1890. Even for famous writers like Nellie Bly, who temporarily left journalism after Cockrow and publisher Joseph Pulitzer declined to give her a raise or a bonus for circumnavigating the globe and boosting circulation. I think women were so desperate to do this work because their other options were so much less interesting that when it was figured out that you could pay them less and they would be happy with it, they did. And then once you created that, it was very hard to squeeze that gap.

Coates, ever the optimist, figured the problem would work itself out. There is no reason in the world why a distinction should be drawn in the matter of pay between men and women. There is, I know, such a distinction. But the future may be dependent on to wipe that out. The very distant future. Maybe. I've been giving the men of the late 19th century a tough time, and deservedly so. But just as men didn't necessarily see the success of a superstar like Bly as a sign that they should hire more women, the women who made it into journalism weren't always eager to welcome other women into that world.

Competition encouraged infighting more so than solidarity. I don't see a lot of door opening because I think being able to achieve like that was so rare that you held on to that for dear life. Ellen McKay Hutchinson, who went by Nellie naturally, covered the women's movement with some distinction starting in the 1870s. And she had harsh words for any women who wanted to be leader writers or senior editorial authors.

Putting aside the physical part of the equation altogether, both the nature and social position of woman must be transformed before she be competent to act as the responsible salaried leader-writer. She must have constant, practical political experience, and she must never let her sympathies, prejudices, and antipathies run too violently away with her. While woman is woman, I'm afraid that this latter requirement will not be met."

Newspaper Correspondence, which Ella Black would become, came in for criticism too. Newspaper Correspondence makes a kind of literary seventh heaven for a clever and large-minded woman to find free space and appreciation for her written talk or inspirations in themselves. Her worst faults are haste and carelessness in transcribing her impressions, thus allowing sudden prejudices and preferences to stand above her name as well-considered judgments. Hutchinson had takes on women who wrote book reviews too. They seldom find the masculine level

of judgment and expression, but right today, a brilliant critique, tomorrow, a very insipid one. Wider and more thorough culture, a less impulsive habit of thought, and a more genial temper must medicine these ills." She did at least concede that the supposed failings of her fellow female journalists

were not entirely their fault. "...the most unlovely and unmanageable qualities hitherto shown by our women journalists are slovenliness and spitefulness. They are the result of that almost universal want of American women. The want of a keen exact habit of reasoning. This jelly-like inaccuracy of thought and expression is not so much a fault of Constitution as of training. It has not until lately been the fashion in our schools to teach girls to think, only to remember. No wonder a reporter named Elizabeth G. Nelson, writing in 1893, saw relatively little progress

for her newspaper peers compared to their predecessors. They stood at the door of the sanctums, so to speak, but their invitations to enter were not urgent. Notwithstanding many claims to the contrary, they occupy practically the same position today. They are more numerous and they are further in, but their tenure of office is distinctly open to discussion. If every woman were taken out of the field, the newspapers would go to press at the usual hour.

And yet, McKay Hutchinson also expressed this more affirming message, using a term from the time that referred to intellectual literary women. …human nature and journalistic genius are the same, whether clad in coat or petticoat, and the refinement, depth, and cleanliness of thought which earnest, sincere, and scholarly men are bringing to the profession will be found in no greater and no less degree in the wise and saintly blue stockings of the future. Crowley, a feminist, also sent mixed messages about what women in journalism should aspire to. Taking all things into account, they have done well and will do better yet in future.

The one thing to hope for now is that with the new education, the new ambitions and the new work, the new woman will cling fast to the best part of the old, the tender womanhood, wifehood and motherhood that the world cannot do without." That last sentiment speaks to the way in which the role of women in society was shifting, and not just in journalism. Those three words Crowley used, the new woman, were about to become synonymous with a wider movement, which McKendree University Professor Martha Patterson has written multiple books about.

I started all my research with tracing the conception of the American new woman throughout the country. The phrase was coined in 1894 in a debate between two British intellectuals. And then it was quickly picked up in the American press. In the popular press, the New Woman was associated with the suffrage movement primarily, but also any host of women's movements. So the movement for temperance, those women

were considered new women. For dress reform, women who were advocating greater access to higher education and entrance into male-dominated professions. Those were all considered new women and they were reviled in the dominant press. They were often caricatured as masculine or as neglecting their family in some way. There was a tremendous amount of backlash. Being a new woman was a threat, a threat to the nation. By 1895, a wave of new woman music crested. The sheet music for this one, A New Woman March by Edward Holst, shows a lady leaving her crying kids and telling her harried husband to have his chores done

by the time his new woman wife gets back from the game. In 1890, a few years before that term caught on, Ella Black wouldn't have thought of herself as a new woman, but she basically embodied one. What's interesting to me about Ella Black is that she's entering these male domains and reporting. Readers, well, some would have been scandalized, but many were kind of eating it up just for its novelty.

This is all part of this larger movement of women leaving the home and claiming the public sphere in ways that would have been uncomfortable for many, and even at the same time, it was kind of exciting and sometimes sexualized as dangerous. Whether the attention was positive or negative, it could be exhausting. Male journalists just had to do their jobs. Female journalists had to represent all women, which took its toll, as Elizabeth G.

Nelson noted in her description of a newspaper woman, Sisyphean Labor. She will be tired and disappointed and heart sick much oftener than even her intimate friends imagine. The good work of one day will be overshadowed by failure on the next, for her record begins anew each morning that she reports for duty. And on that day's work, she must stand or fall back. Her sex will hinder her one hundred times to once that it helps her. The air castles she has spent months in erecting may be demolished

by a word. Her best work will be taken as a matter of course, and anything less than her best as a deliberately planned and personal injury. The notion that newspaper work was hazardous to women's health was widespread. In 1894, a New York Times columnist named Margaret T. Welch enthused, Except in cases where a genius for art or music exists, there is to my mind no career opening more of an honor and of promise for a woman than in the field of newspaper work.'" Yet Welch also warned, "'I can recall with two minutes thinking a dozen newspaper women of my acquaintance who are struggling with some form of nervous exhaustion, directly consequent upon their

newspaper duties. The regular work done at a desk with the rest of the staff and subject to the conditions of pressure and excitement, never absent from a daily newspaper office, is often, I may almost say usually, done at serious cost to her health. Her advance is paid for out of her vitality. Even the irrepressible Nellie Bly suffered from headaches,

burnout, and depression. One might wonder why Ella Black would want to subject herself to that kind of grind. Of course, Ella was a correspondent, not an office worker. Plus, sporting life wasn't a daily paper. And as McKay Hutchinson condescendingly said, Weekly newspapers furnish more space and freer opportunities to the feminine pen. A weekly publication gives so much time for thoughtful labor that women can very well do it.

But beyond that, Ella Black loved baseball. And she also loved the idea of dispelling doubts about whether women belonged in baseball. As the 1927 lyrics of Take Me Out to the Ball Game said, Nellie Kelly was sure some fan. She would root just like any man. I have always argued a woman could do everything about baseball, except play it, as well as a man could. So let's set the scene for the season by briefly describing baseball as Ella knew it in 1890. On the field, baseball back then was, well, baseball.

Historian Richard Hirschberger, author of Strike 4, The Evolution of Baseball, says, 1890 was at the tail end of the great period of baseball rule changes. After the rapid revisions of the 1870s and 1880s, the game had started to settle into something resembling its modern form. All restrictions on overhand pitching were removed in 1884. The strike zone was formally demarcated in 1887. As of 1889, there were four balls to a walk. Pitchers were still closer to the plate than their current 60 feet 6 inches.

Mitts were still small, foul balls were handled differently, and so on. But a more mature game had begun to crystallize. Here's John Thorne, the official historian of Major League Baseball and the author of Baseball in the Garden of Eden. Bruce Catten once wrote that if a fan of McKinley's era, i.e. the 1890s, were to find himself transported by time machine to baseball in the 1950s, he would recognize

that game as being one and the same. I believe that is true even today, though of course we have more strikeouts and more home runs and some rule variations. There are changes in the way the game is played, but it is recognizably the same. As a business though, baseball was still a long way away from its current structure. But the events of 1890 went a long way toward determining how the sports economy would function for decades to come. 1890 was important because baseball had been so successful on the field in the 1880s. So there were several major leagues, the National League which had been so successful on the field in the 1880s. There were several major leagues, the National League, which had been founded in 1876, the American Association in 1882,

Union Association, 84, Players League, 1890. The Union Association had folded in a single season, a cautionary tale. Yet six years later, history was repeating itself. There were once again three major leagues as we currently classify them, the National League, Players League, and American Association. Counting one mid-season replacement for a club that went under, 25 major league teams took the field in 1890, more than would again until 1923 or 1977 in white or integrated leagues.

That total reflected the sport's burgeoning popularity, but the increased competition also threatened it, or at least threatened the National League's supremacy. We all know that it is to be a war to the death between the Brotherhood and the National League, and that both sides will resort to any means to gain their ends. Here's Robert Ross describing the dynamics

that led to this struggle. The industrialization of America is picking up steam, increasing amounts of wealth, increasing amounts of leader time. And so this meant that spectator sports are starting to become popular in the United States. As baseball becomes more popular, it becomes more profitable.

By the mid 1880s, teams in the National League were making considerable profits. And part of the strategy that enabled the National League owners to make so much money is they kept players' salaries down relatively low. They did that through a salary cap and through the reserve clause, which bound players to the first team they signed with indefinitely. For free agency. Teams could keep players for as long as they liked, or sell them whenever they wanted.

On top of that, players were managed by their owners in an increasingly draconian fashion. You had literally teams hiring Pinkerton spies to monitor players off the field behavior. Players actually, at one point in the mid-1880s, were put to this so-called brush classification scheme, where they were given a grade based on the combination of their on-field and off-the-field behavior, and that grade determined their salary. In 1885, the Fed Up players formed the Brotherhood, behavior, and that grade determined their salary.

In 1885, the Fed Up players formed the Brotherhood, which was organized by John Montgomery Ward, a native Pennsylvanian, and a Hall of Fame pitcher and infielder who had just graduated from Columbia Law School. And after the NL refused to recognize the union or make any concessions, the players announced in 1889 that they were starting their own league, which would challenge the NL. And it wasn't just a challenge of, oh, we're a different and better

league, but it was a different and better league on a new basis. One that would respect the value of the players, one that saw the players as the main attraction, but also therefore people who at least should have some power and control over the money that the league earns and the way that it was governed. The players league would have terminal contracts, no reserve rule, no buying or selling of players, no breaking contracts, and the players would partially own and operate the teams themselves. Greater prosperity leading to greater demands is precisely the set of conditions

that gave rise to the new woman. Those trends dovetailed to bring the Brotherhood and Ella Black together. Martha Patterson explains. The movement coincides with the rise of consumer culture, I mean, in consumer capitalism. There's a lot more goods being produced that need to be sold, and women increasingly become positioned in advertising and in popular representations

as consumers. So you've got that movement. At the same time, you've got the long-standing movements for greater rights, so greater literacy, greater wealth and time. Women are forming coalitions and demanding greater rights. When I said baseball was becoming more mature, I didn't mean in terms of ballpark profanity. But that was true too. NL owners employed Pinkerton detectives, just like the industrial magnates who hired the Pinkertons to break strikes, because they worried that the uncouth athletes would drive away respectable customers.

The climate at the ballpark had changed so much from the 80s to the 90s that the future of baseball was in peril as college football and even swimming and horse racing had overtaken the game in popularity. The fistfights at the ballpark were occasional, though regular, and the language used by the players was not meant for delicate ears. So the Ladies Day institution, which had been so popular in the 1880s, waned through the 90s. Women were not welcome at the ballpark. And by 1898, the league offered instructions to the players

about the kind of foul language that would no longer be permitted. So women weren't welcome in the workplace because men wanted to swear freely. So women weren't welcome in the workplace because men wanted to swear freely. And they weren't welcome at the ballpark because men wanted to swear there too and possibly punch people. Enter Ella, who wanted the ballpark to be her workplace.

From the male perspective, perhaps the worst case scenario. On occasion, being excluded or ignored would work to Ella's benefit. In her third column for sportinging Life in March of 1890, Ella described something she'd overheard while eavesdropping on two executives from Pittsburgh's National League team who were discussing the league's schedule while riding the same streetcar Ella was on. At that point the NL was slated to field 10 teams, but this unnamed official, unconcerned by Ella's presence, let slip that he expected the Indianapolis

team to fold, and the team tally to fall to eight, which would come to pass. Ella gloated. If the official who talked so freely sees this, it will cause him to wish he had accepted his friend's caution not to talk so loud, instead of saying, it makes no difference. She's only a woman and won't understand. Allow me to say, my friend, women are not usually dull of comprehension and only a woman may have interest in baseball matters. Even before the season started, Ella had begun to break news. But before there was Ella, there was Laura.

Let me explain. When I started searching newspaper archives for any info on Ella, I came across an item, unmentioned in the existing Ella literature, that would lead indirectly to a break in the case. It ran in Sporting Life in February 1890, two weeks before Ella's first column, and also appeared in newspapers from Newark to St. Louis right around the same time. Miss Ella Black of 160 Robinson Street Allegheny, PA, is the first lady to enlist in the Army of Baseball Writers. Miss Black's contributions have appeared in several Pittsburgh papers, and that she has a thorough knowledge of the national game, there can be no doubt. That brief notice contains two tantalizing breadcrumbs. The first is Ella's mailing address.

1890 newspapers didn't think much of what today would be considered doxing. More on that location to come. The second is the reference to previous writing published by several Pittsburgh papers. Unfortunately, neither I nor any previous researcher has found any surviving non-sporting life writing published under Ella Black's byline.

But I did discover a possible, I would even say probable, example of Ella's earlier writing, which hasn't been flagged before. For five weeks in February and March of 1890, slightly predating and then overlapping with Ella's column in sporting life, letters by a Laura, the first of which was signed in quotation marks

to make clear that this was a pseudonym, appeared in a local paper called the Pittsburgh Post. Like Ella's columns, Laura's letters were about baseball, female fans, and Pittsburgh's local players and teams, with an emphasis on the New Brotherhood Club. Both writers sound lively and well-informed, though Laura seems a little less serious, and her jokes are more punny than funny. Laura

also mentions keeping players' pictures in her boudoir, whereas Ella downplays the appeal of mooning over athletes. We've already heard the first couple sentences of Ella's first sporting life column, but maybe this lead from Laura's first letter is the actual earliest record we have of Ella's words in print. My dear Mr. Sporting Editor, I have often read the letters written for the papers by young ladies and have decided that I, too, would like to be an editress. As my forte is baseball, I have taken the liberty to write to you, asking if my opinions on the game would not be valuable.

I attended nearly all the games at Recreation Park and some the season before. In that time, I think I have had some valuable experience which would fit me for a capital baseball writer." Laura closed by saying that she hoped her efforts would be appreciated, and that if the Pittsburgh Post's editor thought she could become as brilliant as the sporting writers in some of the Pittsburgh morning papers, she would keep contributing. The editor agreed, appending this note to the piece. "'Dear Laura, you will certainly gain great notoriety if you continue to write such baseball stories as this one.'" Of course, Laura may have chosen her pen name

to avoid notoriety, even though our feminist friend Foster Coates would have advised her not to hide behind an alias. "'Do not use a nom to plume. Sign your own name to such matter as can be signed. It will be your capital later on. Easy for Foster to say. Women wrote Under the Rose for various reasons.

Because their editors prefer to snappier sounding pseudonym, whether in a literative label like Jane Crowley's Jenny June, or in Nellie Bly, the name of a Stephen Foster song, or to stay incognito when they were on undercover assignments, or simply to preserve their privacy, which was especially important in a profession that many viewed as unsuitable for women. There was an understanding that, you know,

persisted for a long time that ladies should only have their names in the paper at birth, marriage, and death, and no other time was that seemly. Sometimes women were published without any byline. As McKay Hutchinson noted was common practice in New York editorials, which often obscured female authorship altogether so as not to risk undercutting the writer's perceived authority. Of course, all traces of the woman's hand are eliminated as far as possible, generally

so effectively that even experienced journalists find it hard to determine the sex of the authors. I can't conclusively prove that Laura was Ella before she took her training wheels off, but I enlisted a couple of experts to take a look at Ella and Laura's writing through the lens of forensic linguistics, a field that analyzes language to investigate authorship or identify deception. Not that this is easy. It's really rare that there really would just be some super amazing tell, aha, this absolutely has to be the same person. It does happen, but not very often. So it would have to be just very idiosyncratic usage. That's Natalie Schilling, a linguistics professor emerita at Georgetown

university, who sometimes offers expert testimony in court cases pertaining to authorship. Schilling read the collected works of Ella and Laura, as well as selected columns from two prominent baseball writers we'll meet next time, Tim Murnane and Henry Chadwick, and a Pittsburgh Post fashion writer, Ellen Osborne. No word on whether she was nicknamed Nellie. And although podcasts aren't bound by beyond all reasonable doubt, the jury remains out. There's no linguistic smoking gun. There's not

like a certain vocabulary word or lexical item that only they use and nobody else uses. There's some tendencies that might suggest Laura and Ella are different, but nothing definitively to separate the two. Mindful of the suspicions about a man masquerading as Ella, I also asked whether Laura or Ella sounded inauthentically female in any obvious way. If I had to say, is there some kind of evidence of disguise in these? There's nothing that would really stick out. One thing from this Laura line sticks out somewhat to me. While I am not a prophetess, there are a few things I know.

And being a woman, of course, I like to tell them. That phrase, while I am not a prophetess, which leads off Laura's last letter, is echoed in a phrase in Ella's last column, I am no prophetess. If you're going to make a column evidence for and against this being the same person, that would certainly go in the for column. Another thing for the for column is the seemingly self-deprecating but also sort of sarcastic tone both Ella and Laura use to refer to their gender. Something like, you know, I'm a woman, so this, and while I'm just a woman, that kind of thing,

which I think that's a similarity across the two. As Natalie told me, there are all kinds of confounding factors in this case that make definitive answers impossible, even beyond the slightly archaic language and esoteric subject matter. The fact that this work appeared in two different papers, each with its own audience and editing practices. The fact that only Laura's

writing was certainly not written under the author's real name. The fact that it's harder to distinguish personal quirks and hallmarks in printed and published writing than in, for example, handwritten private correspondence. So for another angle on the Ella Laura question, I asked Rob Arthur, a journalist and data scientist, to take a more algorithmic look. Rob built a model that converted the same sources Schilling reviewed into numerical representations called text embeddings. That set of numbers corresponds to the meaning and also to certain extent the style of this sentence. We can use that set of numbers to then be able to assign

an author to text that we don't know who the author is. With those text embeddings, I looked at Ella Black as well as a few of her contemporaries. And I built this classifier and it was able to predict on any given sentence with 90% accuracy, whether it was Ella Black or Henry Chadwick or another couple of authors. So it was quite accurate on the known text. So far, so good. And I took it to the pseudonym articles where we don't know who the author is. And when I ran it on those articles, what I found is that about 60 to 70% of the time, it was classifying

sentences from the pseudonym articles as being written by Ella Black. This is not perfect confirmation. It wasn't certain that Ella Black was the author. But I think that's consistent with the idea that these pseudonym articles were from a different paper, maybe had a different editor, and so the tone or style of them could be different. So that might be why it's not classifying them with perfect certainty as Ella Black articles.

However, of the authors that we train this model on, the most likely author was certainly L. Black and I think there was too much similarity between them for that to be purely chance. As Schilling says, though, this is more art than science and it's probably best to be Bayesian about it. That is, to take the complete picture into account rather than relying on the language alone. You can't just look at people in a vacuum.

You have to consider where are they writing, what's their genre, what's the time period. There's a lot of complications in this authorship analysis that you wouldn't necessarily have if you're doing say a modern-day criminal case. You have to consider various historical and contextual elements. Yes, elements. Probably no pun intended. Considering the scarcity of female sports writers in 1890, let alone women who were writing about baseball in Pittsburgh specifically, I think the preponderance of the evidence

points to Ella and Laura being one in the same. Maybe having honed her chops under another name or names on a local level, the woman known as Laura was ready to go national and embrace her real identity. If so, Foster Coates would have approved. Woman can no longer be considered weak of physique, shy and retiring, anxious to hide herself from the gaze of the world.

Women of brains and ability, who have something to say and know how to say it, have no reason to fear. Woman has only to step boldly over the threshold and begin her career. There is fame and fortune for her there." If my own journalistic experience is any guide, fortune seems like a stretch. Even Nellie Bly didn't find fortune until she ditched journalism for novel writing and then married a millionaire manufacturer and took over his business. But Ella was about to find fame, the kind that would span three centuries, so far.

Next time on Part 2 of 3 of Only a Woman Ella Black Lost and Found, the National League and Players League play ball and do battle off the field with catastrophic results. Ella Black causes quite a stir in the sporting press, and I take a trip to Ella's old neighborhood as I look for clues in a very cold case. Yeah, so, I mean, I think her house where she was probably living is right in through here.

Probably in this block. I mean, it seemed like it was from the map. At first, I thought, oh, no, nobody wants to find out that Ella Black was just a pseudonym for a male writer. But then just doing a bit more research using those genealogical resources, it became clear that that was not the explanation after all. And I've still got goosebumps over here. I mean, this is just amazing. This is just amazing.

Only a Woman, Ella Black, Lost and Found is a production of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast. The series was written and narrated by me, Ben Lindberg, edited and produced by Shane McKeon and funded by Effectively Wild listeners on Patreon at patreon.com slash effectively wild, where we invite you to subscribe to support our work. You can contact us at podcast at fangraphs.com.

Thanks to Ben Zimmer, David Grinnell, and Ryan Delano for research assistance, to our music maestro Jacob Reed, and to our vocal cast for their fine performances. Ellen, Ella, Adair, who has not gone by Nelly but says it's okay if I call her that, and Eric Gildy of the Take Me Into the Ballgame podcast, Danny Fiona and Susan Barber, Peter Day, Lizzie Russell, Joe Drew, Dylan Higgins, Jesse Thorne, Julie Treba, PJ Wessels, and Shane McKeon. When the clouds go drifting by, We will be happy in Nellie, Don't you sigh. Down Lava's Lane we'll wander,

Sweetheart, you and I. Wait till the sun shines in Nellie, Bye and bye.