Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2311: Only a Woman: Ella Black, Lost and Found (Part 3–Ella’s Legacy)

Episode Date: April 17, 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 […]

Ella Black stopped writing for Sporting Life in November 1890, but every now and then, her name reappeared in its pages. On December 3rd, 1892, the paper published an unbyelined list of baseball notes. Reds player manager and future White Sox and Black Sox owner Charles Kamisky's head, it said, was becoming liberally sprinkled with gray hairs. 40-year-old Chicago Colts first baseman, Cap Anson, reportedly had no intention of retiring, and also said he was quite ready to shoot John Montgum Reward or any other man in the baseball profession. He may have meant in billiards, or it would have been bigger news.

1890 Pittsburgh Bergers player-manager Ned Hanlon, by then in Baltimore, believed that all bunted hits that go foul should be called strikes in order to prevent intentional fouling of the ball. And Al Reach, founder and president of the Philadelphia Phillies, considered baseball far from dead and said that with a few changes in the playing rules and a little strengthening of the weaker teams, everything would be all right again. Amid all of that news, this item appeared. Ella Black and Irene Meredith, the rival feminine writers on the game, seem to have gone out on strikes together. The almost certainly pseudonymous Irene Meredith was a woman in Cincinnati who had written

about baseball for a local Pittsburgh paper, The Pittsburgh Leader. In 1890, Ella Black, the first woman to write about baseball for a national publication, had called Meredith the only other feminine baseball writer than myself. Irene's writing has been lost, but it seems to have stopped around the same time Ella's did. When that 1892 note appeared, readers hadn't heard from Ella in the two years since her last sporting life column ran, nor would they hear from her again.

The words that closed her penultimate column, which she wrote about the players league, applied almost equally well to her. What a change from the brilliant start that was made last April. Who would have thought it? 15 years after that 1892 note, in 1907, Ren Mulford, who had complimented and sometimes

sparred with Ella in 1890, wrote this in Sporting Life. Do you remember a few years ago when Irene Meredith and Ella Black were creating more or less of a furor in fandom by their stories of baseball from the standpoint of the woman enthusiast? Mulford mentioned Ella again in 1910 when he said she was numbered among the brilliance. After that, Ella was virtually forgotten until the 21st century, when a few historians and writers rediscovered her.

Some, such as Professor Scott Peterson, author of Reporting Baseball's Sensational Season of 1890, tried to follow a trail of extremely stale breadcrumbs, which went nowhere. Ella Black turns out to be kind of a common name. And at one point I got pretty excited because I thought I'd found her. I thought, oh, this could be her.

And then by the end, I decided it couldn't be her. There are things that lined up and then just stopped lining up. So I do have hope someday of finding Ella Black writing under another name. ["Lost and Found"] Welcome back to Only a Woman, Ella Black, Lost and Found. I'm Ben Lindberg, a senior editor for The Ringer, and this is a production of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast. On part one, we met Ella and learned about the conditions

that made the 1890 baseball season and Ella's role in covering it both possible and unprecedented. On part two, we went to Ella's 1890 neighborhood, recounted her coverage and its critics, and gave the short-lived Players League its laurels. This time, on part three, Ella's legacy. We'll pick up that stale trail and find that it does lead to Ella.

We'll visit two more neighborhoods Ella knew well, and we'll trace the triumphs and travails of women in baseball after Ella Black broke the seal. When I became the latest writer to be drawn to Ella, I got sucked into the search like a treasure hunter looking for lost Inca gold. I didn't really think I'd crack the case, but I couldn't stop trying to uncover new clues. It's a feeling John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball and a 19th century specialist knows well. And we became obsessed. We'd become, you go down the rabbit hole and no impediment appears and you go further and further down. There was one impediment though.

The only thing we know about her is that she was in Pittsburgh in 1890 and of course the 1890 census is the only census we don't have because it burned. As the National Archives website says, on January 10, 1921, a fire in the Commerce Department building, Washington, D.C., resulted in the destruction of most of the 1890 census to the woe of researchers ever since. I'm one of those researchers, and yes, woe was me. So at first, I followed false leads, getting attached to various Ella Black candidates and having my dreams dashed, like the hopeful hatchling in Are You My Mother? Eventually, I phoned a friend, Ben Zimmer, who quickly caught the Ella Black bug too.

I think I heard about her first from Effectively Wild, I think, when you had mentioned her. And then when you put the call out, I looked her up. That was enough to get me going. The idea that she just wrote these amazing columns in the 1890 season and then just completely disappeared. I mean, that's the type of mystery that's just too good to ignore in terms of like, what can we actually find out? And so yeah, that's catnip for me to see is there something out there that other people haven't found? Are there answers to these questions that might still be lurking in various databases if we can just sort of piece things together?

In addition to his work as a linguist, lexicographer, and writer, Ben is something of a search angel who helps people do genealogical research, a pursuit that's of a piece with his work as a word nerd. I find that doing the historical research on family histories often scratches the same itch that I have when I'm doing research on particular words and how they developed over time. It's a similar type of experience for me, trying to piece historical details together to tell a story, uncovering details that perhaps had been hiding in historical archives, waiting to be found.

I shared what I knew with Ben, from Ella's 1890 address in Allegheny to the best Ella Black candidate I'd come up with, who aside from being in the right place at the right time with the right name, didn't fit our Ella Black's bill. None of the other details really seemed to make sense for what we were looking for, and so it required kind of putting that aside and looking for other evidence, and it was really that address that you focused on originally that was the key to unlock everything, really. With the rest of Ella Black's biography unavailable to us, that street address 160

Robinson became our Rosetta Stone. If you had that address and you wanted to know who lived there in 1890, you wouldn't have the census to go by. That got me thinking about, well, what other resources could be available for figuring that out? I knew that there were city directories that were available on ancestry.com and that they had been scanned and digitized so that the text was searchable.

And you could actually do a full text search on these city directories for the city of Pittsburgh and across the river. So 160 Robinson, that address on the Alleg of Pittsburgh and across the river. So 160 Robinson, that address on the Allegheny side, was searchable. I just started putting together names that I found in those directories and fortunately those city directories also listed people's occupations. As I determined 160 Robinson was a boarding house, so the names and occupations came and went.

Traveling salesman, a milliner, an upholsterer, two kinds of clerks. But given what we were looking for, one person popped off the page. I just kept looking through the names and came across a name of a journalist, a reporter for the Pittsburgh leader. His name was William P. Pinkerton, as listed in the directory. I checked out his name by checking out the Sporting Life archive, and there was a reference to William P. Pinkerton as a baseball writer from Pittsburgh. So for just a little while, I was concerned that

Ella Black was actually William P. Pinkerton riding under a pseudonym, because there was a baseball writer at that address But it was a man not a woman Yeah, I remember you you emailed me like oh I have bad news right at first I thought oh no nobody wants to find out that Ella Black was just a pseudonym for a male writer But from that first bit of evidence that seemed like a possible explanation But then just doing a bit more research using those genealogical resources,

it became clear that that was not the explanation after all. The directory listed William, but not his wife, typical. But when Ben expanded his search to ancestry, he struck gold. William Pinkerton was married to a woman named Ellen, or Ella Black. I found a rainbow of a golden hue. It led me to a land where dreams come true.

And so that was a huge relief to find out that Ella Black was a real person. It just so happened that people weren't able to find her because at the time she would have been using the name Ellen Pinkerton. Ellen being her official first name, but she did use the nickname Ella as well as the nickname Nellie when she was younger. But yeah, she would have been known as Mrs. Pinkerton at the time. And quickly also discovered that William and Ella left the Pittsburgh area shortly thereafter.

Just a few years later, they had left for Brooklyn, which would be another reason why she was so hard to find. Because if you were just looking in the Pittsburgh area, you wouldn't have found her. And so from just that address, we were able to then piece together her story, her husband's story. We've finally been able to find out who Ella really was.

As Peterson said when I told him, Oh, that's wonderful. I got goosebumps over here, Ben. I got them too. Ellen Hodden Black, who would one day cover baseball civil war, was born in Pittsburgh to John and Fden Black, who would one day cover baseball Civil War, was born in Pittsburgh to John and Fannie Black less than two weeks after the effective end of the American Civil

War on April 20, 1865, the same day the War Department put out a poster promising a $100,000 reward for the apprehension of John Wilkes Booth and two suspected accomplices of the murderer of our late beloved president, Abraham Lincoln. Nellie Bly had been born less than a year earlier and less than 50 miles away. More than 25 years later, Ella would send her first letter to sporting life.

Opening day in 1890 was the day before her birthday, an early present for turning 26. Ellen was the fifth most popular name for American girls born in the 1860s. No wonder we've met so many Nellies. Ella's early life was tragic, which wasn't uncommon for kids at a time when the average life expectancy in the US was roughly 40. Her two younger sisters, Blanche and Alice, died less than a year apart before Ella turned seven, and when she was eight, her 35-year-old mother died of that most Victorian cause, consumption, aka tuberculosis. The 1870 census says that before Ella lost her sisters and mother, they all lived with her mother's extended family.

Ella's father, a Civil War veteran, wasn't part of the household. He would die at 39 in 1880 when Ella was 14. He's buried in the family plot at Allegheny Cemetery, eternal home of baseball great Josh Gibson and musician Stephen Foster, who wrote the song Nellie Bly. Apart from his wife and death as in life, John has no headstone.

Maybe Ella's dad did teach her to score baseball games a few years before he died, as she described. He lived nearby, and his obituary described him as a well-educated man of genial disposition and an expert bookkeeper. But he wasn't her primary caretaker. In 1876, a few years after Ella's mother died, her grandmother, who was also named Ellen, was granted guardianship of young Nellie Black at Orphan's Court.

In 1880, when Ella was 15, her maternal uncle became her guardian, though she was then living with a maternal aunt. After being orphaned, rendered an only child, and changing legal guardians, maybe baseball became a kind of guardian for Ella, a constant she could count on. In 1886, her guardianship was dissolved. At the Orphan's Court Division

of the Department of Court Records in Pittsburgh, Ben found three documents signed by a 21-year-old Ella in an elegant hand, with a distinctive swoop joining the halves of her middle initial. One of the signatures, in purple pen, looks like it's hardly faded. By then, Ella was signing as Ellen H. Pinkerton. She had married in 1883, the day before her 18th birthday. Mr. W. Plummer Pinkerton of the Pennsylvania Railroad Transfer and

Ms. Nellie Wack were united in marriage last evening at the residence of the bride's aunt on Townsend Street. The officiating clergyman was Reverend H.T. McClelland of the 6th Presbyterian Church. The ceremonies were witnessed by only a few relatives and friends. William S.P. Pinkerton. The S.P. probably stood for Swan Plumber. After William Swan Plumber, a prominent Presbyterian clergyman William may have been related to, was born in Allegheny City in July of 1863, a little less than two years before Ella, to two Irish immigrants, Samuel and Mary McAllister Pinkerton.

As a teenager, he worked as a clerk like his father. By 1890, William or his family had been living at 160 Robinson Street for almost a decade. Ella and William were there by 1884, when, almost exactly nine months after their wedding, their first and only child, daughter Nancy Hunter Pinkerton, known as Nane, was born. So when Ella became a baseball writer, she was a working mom. By 1888, William was a reporter at the Pittsburgh Leader. That

year, Ella was briefly mentioned in a book about the women of Pittsburgh. Mrs. W.G. Pinkerton, Nellie Black, is one of the domestic little women. She is the niece of Mrs. Jacob Reamer and of Mrs. John Haslett, wife of one of Youngstown's leading manufacturers. William, a second-generation American, and Ella, an orphan, weren't well-to-do. If they had been, they wouldn't have been living in a boarding house in a sketchy location like Little Canada. But as that domestic little women mention suggests, Ella did have ties to higher society. Her grandfather, John Black Sr., was a prominent merchant with a grocery business who once ran for mayor,

and John Black Jr.'s obit noted that the Black family are well connected, ranking among the pioneers of the city. Aside from Ella's two passing mentions of a brother, who must have been fictional or figurative, because as far as we know, Ella had neither a brother nor a brother-in-law, all of the details in her writing line up with her life. Her early baseball memories fit her 1865 birthdate. Her closest relatives, the grandmother and maternal aunt

she had lived with, had moved to Brooklyn by 1890, which explains Ella's trips to visit family there. She also took a trip to Chicago to attend a family wedding, and she did have a relative in Chicago, a second cousin she grew up next door to, who had been married and widowed by 1900. Because it's moving day, moving day. The next question, of course, is what happened to Ella and her family after 1890. In 1893, Ella, William, and Nancy moved to Brooklyn. And the 1900 census says they were living with Ella's Aunt

Blanche, the same maternal aunt who had taken her in when she was a child. In 1904, the whole clan lived on Hancock Street in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, in a brownstone that's still standing. William remained a reporter for a forgotten publication called The Bedford Record, but not for much longer. After a lingering illness, he died in 1905 at age 41 of Breit's disease, or what we would now call nephritis. He was buried in a family plot at Cypress Hills Cemetery

on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. As of that year, the widowed Ella and Nancy were living in another Bed-Stuy brownstone that's still standing on Van Buren Street. Ella, by then, was working as a nurse, as she continued to in 1910, after a couple more moves around the neighborhood. I've had Ella Black on the brain for a few years now, and I've grown quite fond of her. Maybe you've come to care about her too.

So I would love to report that she lived to a ripe old age and passed away peacefully surrounded by loved ones. But I can't, except for the peacefully part. In July of 1890, Ella had mentioned that while on one of her trips to Brooklyn, she'd reported a Saturday game for the Brooklyn Eagle, a paper that employed Henry Chadwick for almost 50 years. The Eagles account of that day's double header, a sweep of Pittsburgh's NL team by Brooklyn, was was unbylined, but it could have been Ella's work. Twenty-one years later, on October 22nd, 1911, the same paper printed an account of Ella's death the day before.

Loss of the sense of smell, a faculty which she had not known since three years before she was severely hurt in a trolley accident prevented Mrs. Ellen Pinkerton of 378 Quincy Street from detecting the odor of escaping gas in her apartments yesterday afternoon. And when her daughter got home, it was to find Mrs. Pinkerton stretched out on the floor, dead. Mrs. Pinkerton was a widow, 46 years of age. Alone in her home, on the top floor of the Quincy Street house, she went about her household

duties yesterday. She was cleaning the woodwork, and is believed to have accidentally detached the rubber tube from a gas range without noticing it. Through the wide open pipe, the stopcock remaining open, the gas escaped. Mrs. Pinkerton continued at her work, no odor conveying a warning to her. Finally overcome, she fell to the floor. The daughter returned at five o'clock and found her mother's body where she had been at work.

Dr. Ernest Brenner of 64 Van Buren Street was called in. He said that Mrs. Pinkerton had been dead about an hour. Another paper noted that the kitchen window was slightly lowered from the top, but not by enough to prevent the floor from filling with lethal fumes. Ella's death certificate lists the cause as accidental asphyxiation by illuminating gas,

a fairly common occurrence in the 1890s and 1900s before electric lighting was ubiquitous. At the time, the Brooklyn Dodgers were widely known as the trolley dodgers. After the common pedestrian practice of narrowly avoiding the hazardous electric trolleys that had replaced the borough's slower and more maneuverable horse-drawn streetcars in 1890s. Ella, evidently,

hadn't dodged well enough, and the damage left her vulnerable to a silent killer in her home. She had lived to be older than both of her parents, but sadly not by much. Funeral services were held on October 24th, and Ella was buried privately in the same Cypress Hills plot as William. Nancy, who worked at a telephone company, married late in life and had no children. So when she died at 79 in 1963, Ella's direct line passed away with her. I had fantasized about speaking to Ella's great-great-grandson one, but it wasn't to be. Ella's closest living relatives are descended through two of her first cousins, both on her father's side.

They're Ella's first cousins three times removed. One, Samantha Baker Ith, is Ella's Aunt Lydia's great-great-granddaughter. Lydia married a man named Jacob Reamer, who ran one of Pittsburgh's first confectionaries. The Reamer Brothers candy factory, built in 1906, still stands. Samantha, who's from Pittsburgh and still lives in Pennsylvania, has carried on the family tradition. She writes a blog called Samantha's Sweets and runs an Etsy store named Sam's Sweet Art.

Just as Ella had the same name as her grandmother, Samantha's grandmother Lydia had the same name as her grandmother, who was Ella's aunt. Samantha shared a family tree that her grandma Lydia left her, along with photos of Ella's grandfather, father, and daughter, tantalizingly close to Ella herself. Unless... Look, this might be wishful thinking, but one of the photos shows an unidentified, dark-haired woman standing next to Ella's Aunt Lydia and first cousin Annie. The mystery woman appears to be a few years younger than Annie, as Ella was.

To my eye, at least, she also looks a lot like Ella's daughter. Same mouth, same nose, same hair. Maybe I'm seeing what I want to see. Or maybe this woman was related to Nancy just less closely. In my headcanon, though, those are Ella's eyes I'm looking into. The other cousin, Kathy Tarkington, is the great-great-granddaughter of Ella's Aunt

Maggie. Although Kathy lives in Cincinnati, she went to high school in Pittsburgh, and she shared a little family lore about Ella's paternal aunts. I've tried to research the Blacks for years. I think my mother had told me that John Black was a grocer on the north side of Pittsburgh, and all of his daughters were very, very pretty. They would turn heads if they would ride in their carriage down the street. I keep thinking that if only I had looked into Ella earlier, I could have talked to slightly less distant descendants who might have remembered more.

Kathy knows the feeling. It's very frustrating because I am the oldest now left in the generation where anybody has any interest in this, in the family tree. I try to look at maps because I remember as a child being taken around to look at the houses and where my grandparents and where the reamers lived, But I don't have anybody to ask questions of anymore. They're all gone.

I wish I had. It's sad. Still, she was pleased to learn about Ella's hidden history. There's one well-known figure on the other side of Ella's family. The grandson of the aunt Ella lived with in Pittsburgh and Brooklyn was Arthur Whitten Brown, a World War I pilot who was later knighted for serving as navigator on the first nonstop transatlantic flight. On Kathy's side, well, I'll let her say it.

That's just really kind of neat that there's an actual person in the family that is semi-famous. It's just nobody is, nobody has any distinction in my particular branch, but you go to cousins and you go to whatever. And people did a lot of stuff, just not mine. We're very undistinguished. We just hang in there. There's something to be said for simply surviving. Plus, Kathy feels philosophical about it. At this point, when you go back that far, we're all just your relatives, you know?

It's not surprising that knowledge of Ella Black's journalistic career wasn't handed down through the generations. None of the announcements of Ella's death noted that she had been a baseball writer either, though the Brooklyn Daily Times mentioned that she was the widow of William, who in his time was one of the leading newspapermen of the city of Pittsburgh. William did write for the leader, but whether he was one is somewhat in doubt. John Thornton hadn't heard of him, and Pinkerton doesn't appear in an illustration John shared of almost 50 prominent baseball writers circa 1890, every one of them a white man whose heads orbit luminaries like Chadwick and Mulford. It's hard to play Pinkerton Detective with William, partly because the co-leader of the actual Pinkerton Detectives back then was a William too, which is bad for our Williams

SEO. But Ben and I tried to learn all we could about him, because we wanted answers about Ella. On the one hand, confirmation that there was an Ella Black living at 160 Robinson Street in 1890 would seem to set the matter of Ella's identity to rest. On the other hand, the fact that she was married to a baseball writer might arouse renewed suspicion.

Williams' first appearance in print came in 1879, when he was 15. The boy was smitten with Fanny Davenport, a well-known actress who just performed in a play in Pittsburgh. With Wikipedia vandalism not yet away for Williams' friends to play a prank on him, they instead started a rumor that Fanny had married one W. Plummer Pinkerton of Allegheny. Somehow their hoax made the papers, garnering enough attention that Davenport, by then in St. Louis, was asked about and denied the fake news. The last reference we found to William from prior to his death was equally colorful. It comes from

Sporting Life's Pittsburgh Correspondent Circle and was printed in January 1892. This afternoon a score or more of local newspapermen and 200 people gathered at Davies Fifth Avenue Museum to see a newspaper man enter the cage while Colonel Daniel Boone and wife were performing with their trained lions. The would-be nervy man was William P. Pinkerton, better known as Pink, whom baseball men will recall at once as Pittsburgh correspondent for the New York Sporting Times. Pink, one day last week, declared that he could tame the beasts and the enterprising museum man

promptly billed the affair. William wasn't actually thrown to the lions. Boone barred him from the cage until the act was over, at which point William was allowed to pat one of the lions while the armed lion tamer held its head. By then, William was no longer the local correspondent for the New York Sporting Times, another weekly paper that was published from 1887 to early 1892. In December 1890, one month after Ella's last column, Circle had printed this bit of media gossip in Sporting Life.

It is understood that you have quit sending screeds to a certain Eastern sporting sheet, was the remark made today to W.P. Pinkerton, long known as that paper's representative here. Oh yes, some time ago was the reply. I never work for any person who does not pay me, and they didn't pay me. Why, they owed me $115, I believe, and by hard work I managed to get about $40 out of them.

Yes, and at the time, the paper was conducted by the present management. The next week, Circle had a follow-up report. There was many a smile here over the little yarn of correspondent Pinkerton in last week's paper. One man, a friend of the sheet in question, said he understood it was a dispute. Pinkerton kept sending in matter, prolonged matter as it were, and the blue pencil got in its deadly work. In other words, Pinkerton said the Sporting Times had stiffed him, while a circle source said Pinkerton was way over his word counts.

Either way, by the end of 1890, Pinkerton and the Sporting Times were Splitsville. In a possibly related development, a new editor, O.P. Kahler, had been hired to run the paper in September of 1889. On the eve of 1890, the Sporting Times was described by another paper as the organ of the National League. It was partially bankrolled by the brother and business partner of Albert Spalding, the NL's most influential owner, and allegedly employed for propagandistic purposes. For William and Ella to have written for the pro-NL Sporting Times and the pro-Players League Sporting Life, respectively, during the same season, almost makes them the George and Kellyanne Conway of their day. One could imagine a scenario where William, with his Sporting Times job in jeopardy, hedged his

bets by playing both sides of baseball's civil war and writing under a pseudonym for Sporting Times job in jeopardy, hedged his bets by playing both sides of baseball civil war and writing under a pseudonym for Sporting Life. Alternatively, Ella may have made a go of writing because with William on the outs at the Sporting Times, money was tight. Maybe he helped her get the gig. Although Ella never invokes her husband explicitly, some of her writing reads differently with William in mind. She makes occasional cryptic references to a well-connected scribe, friend of mine or gentleman friend of mine, and informant, all of whom feed her helpful tidbits. In an April column, she criticizes the unseemly vulgarity of Kahler and the Sporting Times, and cites a source that could not be doubted in making the claim that

the paper would have gone under in 1889 had the National League not propped it up. Maybe William was that source, settling a score. It's possible that William would share tips with his wife that he couldn't print in the NL-friendly Sporting Times. Maybe some of the intel Ella said she serendipitously overheard actually came from him. Of course, it's only natural that William's work

would have deepened Ella's pre-existing interest in the sport, for all we know they may have bonded over baseball. And Ella could have helped William with his writing too. As undaunted author Brooke Kroeger says, how many women or men borrow from the expertise of their partners or their closest friends? I mean, of course you do. That's how you learn. So what's wrong with that? ... Ideally, we could compare William's writing to Ella's, much as we compared Laura's to Ella's in episode one. Believe me, I tried.

Unfortunately, the only surviving issues of the Sporting Times date from after 1890 and don't include any of Pink's prose. As for the Pittsburgh leader, where William and Irene Meredith wrote, and where Ella could well have contributed to, no trace remains from the relevant period. I followed the leader as far as I could,

but every, well, lead led to a dead end. Unless there's a secret, pristine stash preserved in someone's attic, those years of the leader have disappeared from the face of the earth. When I asked Vincent Golden, curator of the American Antiquarian Society, about papers like the leader,

he told me, back then, it was what I call low status. People just didn't save it. Even if they'd tried, it might not have survived, because it wasn't made to last. Ben Zimmer came across a scholarly paper published in 1972 about two 1890 articles from the leader. The author of the 1972 paper noted that there was only one copy of the leader issue in question remaining, and that it was not destined to have a very long life, due to the composition of the paper on which it is printed. This isn't ancient history.

As I record this, there are still some surviving super-centenarians who were born before Ella died. Yet her husband's whole oeuvre has been wiped away, as if it dated from prehistoric times. The only examples of Williams writing we have are his signatures on the documents that dissolved Ella's guardianship. Everything else has crumbled like the statue of Ozymandias.

I wonder what William would make of the fact that his wife's work outlived his life's work. We digital natives like to think that our output is more permanent, preserved for posterity in the cloud and on hard drives. But some of my work has already been lost to link rot and digital decay. How long until this podcast crumbles? John Thorne? Newsprint is fish rap. I don't know whether recording things on our blogs is digital fish

rap or whether it will be preserved or will disappear as well. Because Williams' work may as well have come with a warning that said, this message will self-destruct, we can't probe the couple's past any further. As John says, we're not going to get to the bottom of this one. It's like Abner Graves and Abner Doubleday. We're off in the land of legend. Maybe. But if William wanted to pose as a woman, why would he have used his wife's real name and address, leading any doubters straight to his own door?

How would he have known so much about the preferences and proclivities of Pittsburgh's female fans? And who was the woman who charmed Chadwick with her baseball knowledge for hours on end? If we dismiss all of the evidence that points to Ella Black being Ella Black, and assume that a man must have written her columns, we're no different from those who doubted Ella

in 1890, or for that matter, those who doubt today's women writers, such as pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. In 2015, Vanity Fair asked Ferrante about persistent rumors that she wasn't a woman. Have you heard anyone say recently about any book written by a man? It's really a woman who wrote it, or maybe a group of women? Ferrante said. Due to its exorbitant might, the male gender can mimic the female gender, incorporating it in the

process. The female gender, on the other hand, cannot mimic anything, for it is betrayed immediately by its weakness. What it produces could not possibly fake male potency, Ferrante added. Thus, when a woman's writing does not respect those areas of competence, those thematic sectors and the tones that the experts have assigned to the categories of books to which women have been confined, the commentators come up with the idea of male bloodlines. And if there's no author photo of a woman, then the game is up. It's clear in that case that we are dealing with a man

or an entire team of virile male enthusiasts of the art of writing. Unless there's a great reason to doubt them, why not take Elena and Ella at their word? I have always been taught to either speak the truth or to say nothing at all, and I cannot see how anyone can pursue any other course and still have any hopes of retaining the respect of those around them. After digging as deep as we could, Ben and I were excited to share what we'd discovered with Ella disciples such as Peterson.

Oh, you've made a lot of progress. I'm impressed with all you've uncovered. And yet as is often the way with history, each answer prompts new questions. That's what's so tantalizing is that we're able to find out so much about her and yet there are these things that always seem to be kind of just outside of arm's reach. It's like, can we just get a little bit more? That's appropriate though, I think, you know? I mean, it's like she was elusive at the time, and so we're just left to wonder what happened. I've been reading in the papers of a very funny land.

It's the land where the women wear the trousers. We'll probably never know why Ella stopped writing, but we can still speculate. Maybe William resented that her career seemed to be going better than his, as historian Donna Halper says, Ella Black may indeed have been Ella Black, but if she married and she took her husband's name, I'm not real persuaded she

would have publicized that because it would have redounded negatively not just on her, but on her husband. The belief was that somehow a woman who was successful A woman who was successful was very emasculating for her husband. Even into the 1980s, I was still being asked how my husband felt about my career. Or maybe Ella wasn't making much money and had her hands full with her six-year-old daughter. This might be unrelated, but less than a month before Ella's last byline, the Pittsburgh Dispatch printed an item from a young lady living at 160 Robinson, who said she had three years of experience as a bookkeeper and cashier at one of the largest eastern hotels and was looking for work.

Professor Marie Hardin, the dean of the College of Communications at Penn State, says that even today... A lot of young women go into the industry and then exit within a few years. Sometimes the theory is that women go into these careers and then, you know, they see maybe that they're in an organization where they're not going to be able to advance or they're harassed or they experience discrimination. And those are the things that sort of have them head to the door. What we found when we interviewed young women who were very early in their careers in sports

journalism is they were making a decision based on two factors. It was the combination of, hey, I don't see how this is going to work with the life I want, with the work-life balance, with the family that I anticipate having, the combination of that and the challenges that they knew they were going to face in moving up on the career ladder. So they were sort of saying, I don't think this is going to be worth it for me. And so they would choose other forms of journalism, or they would choose to just leave journalism altogether. Maybe Ella felt like she'd made her point by proving that a woman could be a capable

baseball writer, and she'd had her fill. Almost a century later, in 1988, Nancy Cooney, the assistant sports editor of the Sacramento Bee, was quoted in a New York Times story about women in sports writing saying, Men don't leave. They do it all their lives and are thrilled to do it. But women get to a certain level and say, what's next? Or perhaps Ella's departure wasn't her choice. With one team in Pittsburgh, there may have been less demand for her services at Sporting Life.

About a month before her final column, the paper trimmed its page count from 16 to 12, where it stayed for the following season. And in May of 1893, the longtime sporting editor of the Pittsburgh leader, Tom Fullwood, died after a lengthy illness. Ren Mulford made a point of saying that Irene Meredith wrote for the leader during Fullwood's day. So maybe Fullwood was Pittsburgh's answer to our old feminist friend, Foster Coates. Fullwood could have encouraged Ella to write and William to let her, and his illness and death could have precipitated the Pinkerton's departure from Pittsburgh. I'm partial to one of two other explanations, though. Maybe after being, as she said, heart and soul for the players league,

Ella felt too betrayed or saddened by its demise to carry on. She certainly sounded disillusioned in her last dispatch. I will admit, I was badly fooled. It has taught me that in the future, no dependence is to be placed on what a man or men may do, even if they have agreed to anything, and that they are just as fickle and liable to change of mind as we women are popularly supposed to be. Or maybe Ella actually foreshadowed why she would walk away, in a column from May. So long as I can write baseball and not make myself conspicuous, alright. When I cannot do so, I shall stop writing.

Ella was nothing if not conspicuous. She was too talented not to be. That line makes me wonder how Ella would feel about being credited quite conspicuously now. She did publish her real name and address, her maiden name granted, but she could have used a pseudonym if she really wanted to keep her sports writing secret, and she said that the allegations about ghost writing would be rather amusing to those who know me, which suggests that her work wasn't a taboo topic in her personal life. Plus, no one would berate her for being a baseball writer today. I asked my confidant Ben Zimmer

how he felt about exhuming the secrets that Ella had taken to her grave. Based on those columns from 1890, she has a lot of pride in her work, and I think she would be proud to be recognized for that, even if it took this long. The liveliness of her style and the way that she wasn't afraid to mix it up with other writers suggests that she would be happy for people to know about her history. know about her history. History professor Leslie Heafy, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Women in Baseball and longtime chair of the Women in Baseball Committee at the Society for American Baseball Research says, I think she'd love it. I think she'd be disappointed it didn't happen sooner or maybe not. I'm not sure but I'm sure she would love the fact that her story is finally getting a little more traction.

And I always think when we find one and we can get people intrigued, it's likely to get them intrigued enough to go look for somebody else. There are two more Ella landmarks I want to take you to. Her last temporary residence and her eternal one. We'll come back to both. But first, let's recap what transpired after Ella and the Players League left the scene. Late in 1890, as the Players League collapsed, Ella foresaw the future of baseball.

Ella Judging from what has happened in the past, it would be by no means surprising if the National League would someday be again the great favorite in the eyes of the fickle public that it once was. Such changes have happened before and I would not be surprised to see them come again. 1891 would be the last gasp of the American Association. After that the NL reigned as the lone major league for the next ten seasons until the American League claimed that status too. In the interim, player pays suffered from the senior circuit's stranglehold. In 1890,

with three rival leagues competing for players services, the average big league salary had been $3,000. That dropped to $2,400 in 1892 and $1,700 in 1893. The Players League's principals would one day find purchase in the Players Association led by Marvin Miller. But even Robert Ross, professor at Pittsburgh's Point Park University and author of The Great Baseball Revolt, concedes, I'd like to think that it changed baseball forever, but I think it was rather ahead of its time.

No one tried this again for so many years. And as for Ella, John Thorne says, She was a pioneer without followers. She is an oddity. She is not Jackie Robinson for women. Women just did not have much of a role in baseball, except as spectators with the intention of softening the behavior of men. John's not wrong, but as Heafy says,

I think that's one of the fascinating things about women's participation in baseball. It's always been there and the opportunities may not have been large, but women have always been involved in everything from being players to writers to owners, even umpires, though it's obviously been a little bit of up and down. Nor, Heafy adds, does the paucity of successors in the years after Ella diminish what she accomplished? Somebody like Ella is incredibly important because I think we tend to focus solely on when a door opens completely and numbers follow. But that takes time in most cases and there have to be people that got it started and attempted and I think Ella fits in that category.

But I also think it's always important for people down the road historically to be able to look back and realize the trajectory, the path, the triumphs and the struggles. And we often tend to focus when it takes a long time solely on the struggles and not the triumphs. And I would argue that as limited as it was, her being able to participate as she did is more on the triumph side of things. There were many more struggles to come. For at least half a century, dating back to Maria Midy Morgan, who had occasionally covered horse racing for the New York Times as early as the 1870s, women who wrote about sports were so scarce that, like each new generation of female baseball players, they were often erroneously described as the first of their kind, as was, perhaps, the first female entrant to the baseball

writing ranks after Ella in this Washington Post passage from 1895. She is Mrs. Sadie Neller Miller, a bright, pretty, and accomplished little lady who has somewhat trained herself into saying a whole lot of clever, readable things in a column or two weekly for the Baltimore Telegram, she's probably the first lady to take hold of this line of newspaper work. This opens another field for the lady journalist, and it may be expected that others will soon follow her example. Miller wrote under her initials, SKM, to hide her gender, another of the era's sports pioneers

employed the same approach. Ella Black was preceded as a female on the job in baseball by Eliza Green, who had been the scorer for the Chicago White Stockings, who are in fact today's Cubs. She had been the scorer virtually in secret, signing her sheets EE Green so that her gender would be invisible. And she was the scorer from 1882 into 1891 or perhaps to its conclusion. Halper has written extensively about Ina Eloise Young, who became the first American female sports editor in 1906. As Halper says, though, we're lucky to have heard of her, considering how easy it was for women in the field to fade into obscurity.

Unless they never married and they continued to use their quote, maiden name, we don't know who they were. Because in many cases they were referred to only by their husband's name, you know, Mrs. John Jones. And their identity was completely erased. Just as Ella's almost was. That applied to female players too, according to Barbara Gregorich. I discovered that the most important person in the first 50 years of women in baseball was a woman who played under the name Maud Nelson. But it took me four, almost four years to discover that her name was not Maud and her name was not Nelson. I don't think there were historians around interested in the subject.

And I'm not sure the women themselves who played baseball at that time had the thought that they have to preserve their history. And so it just sort of evaporated in a way. So did women's participation in baseball, eventually, but not right away. ["Pomp and Circumstance"] From the mid 1890s up to World War I, a new new woman archetype emerged,

the Gibson Girl, as described by Debbie Shattuck Burton. We see journalists begin to promote this idea of healthy, vigorous womanhood instead of women wearing corsets and staying home and not exerting themselves. So this is what leads to the rise of Charles Dana Gibson's Gibson Girl image of the very robust, athletic, outdoorsy sporting woman. She becomes the new icon for women to emulate. And so we do see women by the millions playing basketball and tennis and golf and riding bicycles and playing baseball.

The arc of women players, it would appear that it's on an upward trajectory. And so you would think that that trend would have continued and baseball might have lost its gendered identity in the same way that basketball did, for example, which was being played by both men and women, although by different rules, it never really became gendered as a man's game, but baseball did. And decades later, Leslie Heafy says that gender divide became codified. Women's participation in baseball is pretty strong all the way up to the 1930s. And then of course softball does come along and Little League makes its pronouncements.

And I think that had a profound effect on the ability for women to find opportunities to play. Opportunities to write, however, were about to ramp all the way up to a trickle. For female sports writers, 1944 was a watershed year. That's when Mary Garber began her career as the replacement for a sports editor who joined the Navy. Garber got her first job, she later said, because it was the war, and every man was in the armed forces. Shortly after she retired, more than 60 years later, the basketball writer became the first woman to win the Associated Press Sports Editor's prestigious Red Smith Award for contributions to sports journalism.

The same year Garber was hired, a Pittsburgh native and aspiring journalist named Elaine Kahn graduated from college. Her daughter shared recordings with me that her mother, then known as Elaine Khan Light, made at age 95, a few years before her death at 99 in 2021, in which she reminisces about her sports writing career. I made the rounds of all the papers and nobody hired me. And I didn't hear anything. And an aunt that I never forgave her for said to me, you ought to get a job as the secretary

and support your parents. And I took umbrage at that, that she did not believe in me. The other thing, there was a woman who was in charge of the publications at university at that time. And she was always telling me how wonderful I was and how great my jobs would be. And, you know, she wrote me letters to all these people and one thing another.

So at the end of a month, when I didn't get a job, I went in to see her. And that was the strangest thing because what she said to me was, why don't you get married? Which was what a woman was supposed to do in those days. Elaine didn't do what she was supposed to. Instead, she got a job with the AP.

So in 1946, she was reporting on baseball when the pirates took a vote on whether to authorize a strike. A lone female baseball reporter in Pittsburgh, whose name starts with E.L. at a time of labor upheaval in baseball and beyond? Sounds familiar, right? Even 50 plus years after Ella, Elaine wasn't welcomed by the sports writing establishment, which also sounds familiar. They tolerated me, although I didn't sit in the press box. I could be all around the press box where you could talk to people. I don't know, maybe I even could get a free sandwich or something. I don't remember

that. Though she couldn't enter the clubhouse, she could at least go down to the field. And she did, on June 7th, 1946, while the mail writers were enjoying their press box privileges. Years before big leaguers unionized for the first time since the Brotherhood, the Pirates were considering joining an independent labor union that called itself the American Baseball Guild, which was advocating for higher minimum salaries, a salary arbitration process,

and no trade clauses, among other worthy goals. The players threatened to strike unless the team recognized the Guild as its bargaining agent, and the possibility that the Pirates might not play was national news. I went down on the field to see whether the team was going to come out or play or not. And the minute Al Lopez came out, he shook my hand. You know, this is great, we were friends. And then I knew that they were going to play.

There was no strike. So I ran up and got hold of the telephone. And that was another thing they never forgave me for because I had the phone and I had the story. And that was it. And you know, they didn't want me up there after that. And I felt I had beaten them at their own game and I wasn't interested in it anymore.

["Piano Sonata in C Major, Op. 16, No. 2"] their own game, and I wasn't interested in it anymore. Daris O'Donnell also began her reporting career in 1944. O'Donnell, an investigative reporter based in Cleveland, would sometimes pursue Nellie Bly-like stunts. In 1957, she tried to gain access to big league press boxes. She was admitted to the one in Washington, DC, but barred by the Yankees and Red Sox. Around 1950, another woman who had gone into journalism at the tail end of World War II, Gloria Swegman,

had surveyed several New York sportscasters about the potential for women to work in broadcast booths. Almost to a man, they downplayed or dismissed the idea, much as New York editors had poo-pooed the prospects for women at newspapers to Nellie Bly more than 60 years earlier. I see no reason why a girl couldn't come in for an inning or so if they know baseball well, the Dodgers' Connie Desmond said. If pretty enough, she could sit next to me. Part of the rationale for the sportscaster's pessimism was women's lack of access to clubhouses

and locker rooms. And that status quo would stick for another quarter century. The Elaine Kahn of the mid-1970s was Pittsburgh reporter Pola Smith, who worked for wire service United Press International. Smith, who covered the Pirates and Steelers, recalled in 2011, I was not universally welcomed with open arms. One player, she said, tried to grab my hand and put it on his genitals. Another time she approached Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw for an interview outside the locker room and Bradshaw reflexively

signed an autograph for her, assuming she was a fan. She had to beseech Bradshaw for his time outside the athletes' inner sanctum because locker rooms and clubhouses were still closed to women. But by 1975, when Smith started covering sports, the barriers were weakening. Here's Marie Hardin. Their success and their visibility and doors being open for women in sports journalism really is tied to access for women to sports in general.

So I would tell you, if we look at the history of women in sports journalism, you really can tie it in many ways to Title IX. In other words, when Title IX happened, the door started opening for women. Title IX went into effect in 1972, but the dam began to break before that, says Brooke Kroeger, author of Undaunted.

We get a big change after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the changes in mentality. We also get the feminine mystique. We get women starting to see themselves in a whole new way. It took about six years till 1970 for at least the women of journalism to realize that the civil rights legislation Also applied to them that they could use it as a workplace cudgel, which they didn't even grasp I mean, that's how Embedded this feeling was of your place in the world So once that happens and you know, there's a confluence of historical factors coming together to make this happen

there's a confluence of historical factors coming together to make this happen. Change begins. So there are lawsuits or civil actions against owners, publishers, editors, etc. And at numerous papers and magazines across the country, those take about 10 years to resolve. A lot more attention goes into creating more equity. Is it ever equal? Does it ever get quite righted? Not for a really long time. The first wave of the women's movement had crested in Ella's era.

Now the second wave was here. Melissa Letke, a writer and researcher for Sports Illustrated, saw herself as surfing it. This was a time when clearly there was a sense that those of us who were extremely well educated as I was, sort of had an obligation to go out there and try to achieve and do what we could do and show that women belonged in places that they hadn't been belonging before. So once I got the baseball beat, I ended up getting passes to all the

American League and all the National League stadiums. I was a reporter researcher and sent out to different stadiums around the country. So essentially I was the only woman covering nationwide full-time baseball. At the 1977 World Series, Lutke was denied access to the Yankees clubhouse, not by the Yankees, who had already let her in, but by baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Lutke sued Kuhn on the grounds that her 14th Amendment equal protection rights had been violated. I knew enough to know that I wasn't welcomed there, that I was considered to be an invader,

that this was really the bulwark, This was the last place that baseball had where it could keep women out. It tried to keep them off of batting practice. It tried to keep them out of the press box, tried to separate them at dinnertime, tried to keep them out of their baseball gala. All of those things had fallen gradually through the 70s. So this was it. And so there was really a strong sense that if I manage to get into the clubhouse and do my reporting,

that this would fundamentally change baseball, that I would disrupt the privacy of the players and that there would suddenly be a lot of other women invaders. Lutke was reviled in the press. Every accusation hurled at new women in the 1890s and worse was hurled at her. But in her Lutke versus Kuhn court case, she prevailed. But you know, at the heart of that, and I hope that, you know, for Ella it might have been too at the heart of it, really was their desire just not to have us there.

So it was about exclusion, it was never about nudity, and eventually the judge also said that. Even after Lutke's 1978 victory, which arrived less than three years after the site's decision finally killed the reserve clause, women on the beat continued to encounter resistance. Claire Smith was one of them. Smith, another Red Smith award winner, no relation, holds a number of distinctions. The first full-time female member of a baseball beat, the first female recipient of the Baseball Writers

Association of America's Career Excellence Award. As a girl in, yes you guessed it, Pennsylvania, she was inspired by Jackie Robinson, and she pursued a sports writing career, starting at her local paper in Bucks County. Being someone who knew where, finally, where she wanted to go and just had to plot a course there, I would not be given an opportunity to be in the sports department at the Courier Times because the sports editor there, I had never had a woman on staff, it seems apparently on purpose. And I didn't think that being African American was going to get me there either. Like Ella, her break came at a Philadelphia

paper, the Bulletin. And also like Ella, she eventually moved to New York, where she joined the Yankees beat full-time in 1983. Thanks in part to Melissa Letke, every American League team's clubhouse was open to women. But the National League left that policy up to the teams, and the Padres' doors were closed to women. Smith was assured she'd be allowed in during the 1984 National League Championship Series. But when she went to get quotes after the Padres game one loss. I went into the Padres clubhouse and all heck broke loose. Players yelling basically for me to get out of the clubhouse, clubhouse personnel yelling, the general manager not really getting involved.

But the clubhouse personnel started to push me towards the door, literally hand on back pushing me towards the door, and the door closed, and I'm standing in the bowels of a wiggly field in the claustrophobic, ugly tunnel and wondering how am I going to do the job I'm being paid to do if I don't have any, both sides of the story, if I don't have Padres in this story. As I'm standing there panicking, I was the only woman in the clubhouse, though therefore the only woman thrown out of the clubhouse. I was the only woman in the clubhouse, though therefore the only woman thrown out of the clubhouse. I was very emotional.

I was at literally at a crossroads wondering if I can't do this, if I don't want to do this, if this is what it's going to be, maybe I don't want to do this. That's the literal figurative crossroads point I reached. The league had reached a crossroads too. When the new commissioner of baseball, Peter Euberoth, heard what happened, he made an almost immediate proclamation.

One of the first things Peter ever did was basically tell the media the day after what happened in Chicago that that would never happen again with any reporter wearing credentials issued by Major League Baseball, that every clubhouse was open at any point in time to properly credentialed reporters. And that was it. He basically universally opened the clubhouses to women reporters at that point. It still didn't remove the trauma and that still kind of exists to this day. Then I think if you talk to Ella, she would tell you, you can legislate out things like

closed doors and the inability to get credentials, you cannot legislate away hate and ignorance. So I wish I could say it all ended that day, but if you talk to women who cover to this day, they are still subject to some ugly, hideous stuff, especially thanks to the internet. Susan Fornoff, a contemporary of Smith's, could testify to the fact that official proclamations couldn't curb hateful behavior. My first job, they interviewed three women for the job, because they wanted to have one. When you say they wanted one, do you mean one and only one? Yes, yes, they wanted their token representative. So that was as far as the door was open at that time. She got that gig

for a Baltimore paper straight out of school in the early 80s and covered the Orioles who were managed by Earl Weaver. He had said any woman that wants to go in our clubhouse, she needs to bring a note from her father. And so when I went, I asked my dad to write me a note. And so he wrote this note to Earl. And he looked at it and he folded it back up and he said, this is the best one I've gotten. And my dad said, with quivering pen, I hereby give my daughter Susan permission to enter the Oreo locker room, mainly because I know that even if I don't She'll find a way to get it in there anyway After her stint in Baltimore for enough was hired by the Sacramento B to cover the A's

Where she unwillingly found herself at the center of a scandal during the 1986 season they had a player Dave Kingman he was known for hitting a lot of home runs and striking out a lot and He was also known as being not a nice guy. He had some problem about women. A woman should be a woman. A woman should be a lady actually. And she shouldn't go in the locker room, clubhouse. And you know, she really shouldn't even cover baseball. It's a man's world. We were in Kansas City and the game was about to start and we're sitting in the press box and the security guard brought me a little like a corsage box. And so I look at all the other writers that are there and you know we're friends I said are you guys up to something? They were like no they wanted me to open the box.

And so I opened the box and there was tissue paper in there and it moved and I closed the box right away. You know I said oh my gosh it moved it's alive it moved something like closed the box right away. I said, oh my gosh, it moved, it's alive, it moved, something like that. And the security guard came over, he felt terrible, but he looked and he said, it's a rat. I said, well, you can have that. And he said, well, I know a little boy who'd love to have this rat. I said, well, tell him to name it Kong,

which was the nickname of Dave Kingman, because we all knew who sent it immediately. Somebody with the club confirmed that it was his handwriting on the tag, and the tag on the leg said, my name is Sue. Kingman's problem with Fornoff wasn't that she'd written something he didn't like. It was that she'd written anything at all. Yet the unrepentant player got off with a fine and a warning.

The following year, Fornoff co-founded the Association for Women in Sports Media, AKA Awesome. following year, Fornoff co-founded the Association for Women in Sports Media, aka AWESOME. There had been a lot of women talking for a while about we should have some kind of group. But one of the things that meant so much to me was the support I got from other women journalists. And, you know, we realized we were all spread out and not everybody had that kind of support anywhere nearby. Really, we wanted to have a voice when things like this happen. Two of the speakers at the group's first convention

in 1988 were athletes Don Baylor and Ronnie Lott, who were advocates for women in sports media. We had a question and answer with them. Really, I think it gave all of us a big boost for them to just basically give us pep talk and say we did have a place there and we did belong there. We should stand up when people do things like send us a rat. We shouldn't be quiet and say,

this happened because for a lot of women, they didn't want to draw attention to the fact that they were women. They just wanted to be sports writers or baseball writers. Your story about Ella Black kind of brought that up a little bit. You know, people didn't know. She probably didn't want them to know. I think we all still felt that way a hundred years later. In 1990, Fornoff became the first female official scorer since Eliza Green a century earlier

and the first ever who was publicly known to be a woman while she held the job. She's long since left baseball. Although Awesome now boasts more than a thousand members, Fornoff surprised me when I asked if she was proud of how the group has grown. Is it heartening to see how it's grown and is still doing good work almost 40 years later. No, no, no. I want it to not be necessary. I would hope that when we get to our 50th anniversary, we could just disband.

That would make me really happy to not need that anymore. Right around the time Fornoff started working as a scorer in the Bay Area, a woman named Sherry Nichols was attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which Ben Zimmer's son attends today. I was in the graduate program in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. It was about maybe a quarter women, maybe. There were two female professors and that was it.

So, you know, not like I had a lot of role models. I was an undergraduate physics major and I would routinely run into people in physics and engineering who just didn't think women should be there. And I didn't run into that in graduate school. It was just more subtle. It was just like an assumption that I couldn't keep up more than that I didn't belong. Last time I talked about Ella Black's credentials as a quasi-sabermetric thinker. Sherry Nichols is the most influential female sabermetrician, an early internet analyst who pioneered zone-based defensive stats, inspired the founders of baseball prospectus, and ensured that historical baseball data from Retrosheet would be free for all before,

like Ella, leaving baseball behind to do other work and raise a daughter. But before that, her pursuit of a graduate degree gave her a gateway to the primordial soup of sabermetrics. We had access to the internet and there were Usenet groups that are sort of like Reddit today, and one of them was RecSport Baseball. I started reading that and posting on that and found a community there. I never hid the fact that I was a woman. I never posted under an alias or anything. So I would get some blowback because, you know, how could I know anything?

Nichols' analyses made impressions on people who went on to work for MLB teams, but she never came close to working for one herself. Unless you count this close encounter with the Pirates. Somebody knew somebody and who knew somebody else and said, oh, the GM wants some computer people to do something for him. So my husband and I and another friend went and met with them. The GM just wanted unpaid validation for his idea, which wasn't a good one. The meeting didn't go anywhere. But as a result of that, I got to go underneath the back behind home plate and watch the game from behind home plate underneath and everything. And that's where all

of the people who take care of the field hang out during the games and my presence there made them very uncomfortable. They're like, no, no, you can't curse, no swearing, there's a woman here, there's a lady here. And Jim Gott came bouncing in, he was a pitcher, he came bouncing in swearing up a storm and they're like, no, no, no, no, there's a lady here. The presence of a woman wouldn't provoke that reaction from the Pirates today. Pirates senior vice president and assistant general manager Sarah Gellis is one of the team's highest ranking baseball operations executives. I'm overseeing the R&D department here and there's a group we're building out called

player analysis that falls into that group but is focused on sort of applied analysis in addition to the more traditional data science and engineering verticals within R&D. Ella Black did plenty of player analysis of the precursors to the Pirates in 1890, but she probably never imagined that the team would take her advice. The homegrown Pennsylvanian Gellis, who previously worked for the Orioles and Astros,

has envisioned that future for herself ever since a certain baseball bestseller was published. Sort of a cliche story probably, but the Michael Lewis book Moneyball was released when I was in high school and I read that and I think that's what first sort of opened my eyes to this career even existing generally, but also you know the fact that someone without a playing background in baseball could make an impact, I think was clear from that book, and it wasn't specifically gender-based or anything,

but I think that was one way I read it. Gullis is one of the highest-ranking female executives in a sport that still had just one woman leader of baseball operations, former Marlins GM Kim Eng. I think all we can do is hope that the process to get you know the qualified names to the owners making the decisions is is like as sort of merit-based as possible that the talented women as they move up are at

least like in consideration. And that there are enough talented women to move up which as Gala says depends in part on fostering inclusiveness at lower levels. Just because women have equal access to existing baseball facilities doesn't mean that the facilities themselves are equitable. There's been progress. I think the closer you get to the field, probably the less progress there's been. I think that's just now improving, right? Major League Baseball has put requirements in place around having a women's locker room on road trips, right?

But there are still instances where female staff are walking halfway around the stadium to change or run to the bathroom or whatever. And I think I do find on road trips that some locker rooms are more conducive than others to being a woman in the locker room. You know, obviously our intention is not to make anyone uncomfortable. And if you have to walk through the locker room to get to the kitchen or whatever, it's

certainly suboptimal. So I do think it's nothing like what Ella experienced, but those challenges exist. The most recent MLB racial and gender report card released by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport gave the league a C for gender. I think beyond that, I hope that I can also just change the industry from within by helping us get comfortable with leaders looking different ways and having different strengths and working different schedules and whatever it might be. And that takes time.

And like I said, one person can't do that. But even if it's just like helping clubs realize that maternity leave policies are required in baseball operations, because, you know, I think most clubs haven't had someone, you know, have a baby from baseball ops before. One of the reporters who covers the club Gellis helps assemble is Hannah Mears,

Pirates sideline reporter for SportsNet Pittsburgh. Mears, who grew up in Pennsylvania, has done broadcast work for almost all of Pittsburgh's pro teams. Here's how she describes her game day routine with the Pirates. Go to clubhouse time, talk to some players if I need to that morning, get any updates

from the PR team, and then sort of finalize all my scripts and everything that I need for the game that day. And then I do my pregame hits and then the game happens and I do in game reporting stuff. I try to contribute any type of color I can on the sidelines. And then in the case of a win, we do on field interview and then go into the clubhouse and interview manager Derek Shelton first, then head to interview the players that we need to talk to. Obviously, access is essential. Pittsburgh still has some street cars as it did during Ella's day,

but Mears can't do her job by riding one and hoping that the hero of the game gets on. I think Ella would be very excited to see today that I have just as much access as anyone in the clubhouse outside of the clubhouse when we're going out to dinner after with my co-workers, going to a cigar lounge or going to a bar or anywhere. So I have complete full access and I think she would be very excited and happy to see that and hear that it's not only do I get the access but it's a positive experience. Positive but imperfect. Mears wanted to be a sideline reporter, but women who aim for the broadcast booth still find themselves vastly outnumbered by men. I don't know if it's necessarily a barrier, but I think there's some parts that are still slow to change, and the play-by-play and color space is one of those.

Another negative is the assumptions people make about Mears's qualifications, if they consider her qualifications at all. Women definitely face a lot more of the sexism comments than anyone, mostly because as soon as you get your job, it's obviously, of course, they're putting a woman here. And my biggest example, I would say, of this, something that really used to bother me is when people would ask me, what are you majoring in? And I'd say broadcast journalism. They'd say, well, what do you want to do with that?

I said, I want to be a sideline reporter. And they would say, well, you have the looks for it. They wouldn't even ask, like, what do you want to do? What's your background? What is your credentials for this? What sports are you interested to? It was automatically you had to look for it. And that was really disheartening. It was a lot of males that would say that.

And I know that people will say, well, there's some truth to that. But you can't just look a certain way if you don't have the work ethic behind it, the experience, the credentials and the talent to do your job, period. Like Henry Chadwick's first words to Ella about having almost thought she was a man, those thoughtless slights are at least intended to be compliments. The same can't be said for much that Mir sees on social media. The comments online are harsh, you just have to ignore them. People are always going to say rude, disturbing, disgusting things toward females no matter what. I remember putting glasses on this year and getting so

many comments about like, you should never wear glasses again. I'm like, I don't have contacts and I'm on the road for two weeks. I can't get home to have an eye appointment. I have to wear these glasses so I can see. But people will just always highlight how women look. Maybe Ella was smart not to send Sporting Life a photograph. Even if proof she was a woman would have silenced some critiques, it might have left her vulnerable to a new type of attack. Mears, who's about as old as Ella was in 1890, is grateful to the woman who was the first into the breach.

I was so thankful that you reached out and shared this story, because I have not heard it before. And as someone who grew up in Pittsburgh and loved Pittsburgh sports, I feel like this should be something that's highlighted all of the time. And the fact that I'm in the role I am now, I wouldn't even have the chance to be here without her. I'm so thankful for the women like her who were bold enough to walk toward a clubhouse,

who were bold enough to write about sports and share their opinion, and who were bold enough to say, sports and share their opinion and who were bold enough to say, I don't care that I'm a woman, I'm just as qualified to be here because I would not be here without women like that. And I would not have the credibility that I have without women like that. And I wouldn't have the confidence to share my knowledge without women like Ella. So I'm so thankful for her and to her for everything she did. And if she was here right now, I'd want to give her the biggest hug because I get to live my dream because of women who have paved the way like she has.

So I hope more people get to hear her story and I wish I could tell her thank you for everything that she's done to make a dream of mine possible and to even make a thought about having a job like this possible. It's too late to hug her, but it's not too late to pay her a visit. I'm coming home to die. Not long ago, my wife, Jessie, and I took the train to Northern Brooklyn to see the house on Quincy Street where Ella lived and died. Bedford Stuyvesant is what I wanted Ella's old neighborhood in Pittsburgh to be, a place

preserved in amber. In 2014, the New York Times said Bed-Stuy boasted, perhaps the largest collection of intact and largely untouched Victorian architecture in the country, with roughly 8,800 buildings built before 1900. Those row houses, brownstones, and bigger buildings with weathered but ornate facades have stood on quiet tree-lined streets since they sprang up to house a growing middle class from the 1890s to the 1910s, when Ella lived there. Even now, few buildings in Bed-Stuy are more than a few stories high. So as we walked toward Quincy, the expanse of exposed sky was almost disconcerting to a Manhattanite like me.

The real estate listing for Ella's former home calls it the ultimate four-story brick townhouse you have been dying for, which reads a little differently to me knowing what I know than it probably did to the people who purchased it a few years ago. It was built in 1910, which means it must have been brand new when Ella moved in. It's undergone a gut renovation, but the listing brags about the original brick and masonry. So the exterior still looks more or less like it did in Ella's day. Smart red brick with black banding and a flat roof.

Except for the parked cars, I could have convinced myself it was 1910. Jesse and I stood outside summoning the nerve to knock. A sign said, no soliciting, but after some debate we decided we weren't solicitors. Still, how do you tell a total stranger that more than a century ago, a long lost writer suffocated on the third floor of their house? Pretty reluctantly, in my case, but the power of podcasting compelled me. The townhouses subdivided into a few different residences, and but the power of podcasting compelled me. The townhouse is subdivided into a

few different residences and through the door of one we could see a shirtless kid watching something on a screen. Someone was home. We unlatched the short fence and climbed the stairs and I tapped on the glass as unthreateningly and apologetically as possible. I didn't bring my good mic because the only thing worse than seeing a random man at your door is seeing a random man at your door who's holding an oversized recording device. The shirtless kid's mother who opened the door took our spiel in stride. Considering the circumstances, she was quite accommodating, but as I suspected, she didn't know much about the townhouse's history. Have you only worked here for years? Yeah, three years. Okay. Not since 1910. For years, probably. Yeah, for years.

Okay. Not since 1910. No, I think it's been... We chatted a bit about the renovations, about her kids and our daughter, and about her father, who's buried not far from Ella. I gave her handouts about her house's former residence, one of which laid out the details of Ella's death.

That's what it says. Yeah. We're going to bed. Careful when you clean your glasses. Yes. Don't bump them. They're just gonna fit you going to go? Yes. Don't bump the... Yeah, I'm gonna go. I assume you haven't been haunted by any 100 year old baseball later ghosts. No, not as funny ghosts. I'm not doing it by kids.

I'm not doing it by kids. Yeah. I'm not doing it by kids. The Quincy Street address was Ella's old haunt, but no, not literally. We weren't invited in, understandably, so it was time to go. You know, RIP. Yeah? You wanna say a few words for Ella? I'm saying a lot of words.

That's true. Ella's mortal remains, of course, aren't on Quincy Street. They're at Cypress Hills, where Ben Zimmer and I went in hopes of paying our respects. I don't normally remember my dreams, but on the morning of the day we were due to visit the cemetery, I dreamed that I was watching TV. On the screen was a video of an actor playing Ella,

but somehow I was with a man who had known the real Ella, and when I asked him if the actor looked like her, he said no. I was going to commission a composite sketch of her based on his description, and that's when I woke up. Well, that's a very nice day to be wandering around the cemetery trying to find a grave that probably no one has visited in several decades. Well, that's the thing. I was thinking that too. There'd be with like no direct descendants,

these would be completely forgotten. There'd be no reason to go. You'd think. Until maybe we can put her on the map. Maybe Ella can be on the brochures, the pamphlets that they hand out here. They should be. Trailblazing baseball writer. They've got people who've done various firsts and... Cypress Hills, whose 225-acre grounds were dedicated in 1848, is also home to the grave of a baseball pioneer who has many visitors, and deservedly so.

Jackie Robinson. We stopped at Jackie's grave en route to Ella's. Though the trouble we had locating the cemetery's most famous resident didn't bode well for our odds of finding Ella. Excuse me, do you know which way to the Jackie Robinson, to Jackie Robinson, his grave? Jackie Robinson? Yeah. The baseboard? Yeah.

This way? Oh well it says Jackie Robinson way over there, I don't mean to miss that. Well, we were coming from the other direction I guess. Oh that's true. Well, we were coming from the other direction, I guess. In our defense, Jackie's grave isn't among the more ostentatious in the cemetery, which probably says something about how heroes are remembered. Actually, Jackie said something about that himself. A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

That impact can't be measured by the size of one's tombstone, but the number of people who leave little gifts at your grave decades after your death might be a good guide. By that metric, Jackie's doing quite well. I was expecting something even grander. Yeah. Well, it is interesting. I was just sort of like tucked under a tree there. Yeah, I guess you're allowed to walk in here through this path. They have benches and stuff. I wonder how old the bats and balls are though. Yeah, some of them look old. That's a catcher's mitt isn't it? It looks like a catcher's mitt. Not to be pedantic, but wrong position. We could have lingered longer, but we had work to do. Okay, on to our trailblazer. We went on a weekday, when the place was almost empty, except for us, the staff, and the long-term

occupants. Months after finding that reference to 160 Robinson Street, I had called ahead and gotten Ella and William's current address. Section 15, Locust Grove, Division 2, Block 23, Grave 11227. That litany of increasingly specific locations makes it sound as if signs or maps would point us straight to our destination. But we were warned at the entrance that the plot might be tough to find. Not that we'd expected any aspect of the search for Ella to be easy. And as we feared, this one wasn't. Though the weather was nice. Birds are chirping, the breeze is blowing. It was a beautiful sunny day.

The kind that makes me pity the dead. That they're not out here to enjoy it. Though I guess they don't know what they're missing. We knew we were missing Ella. But this is, wait, so then wouldn't 53 be like over here or something? Unless this is turned the other way. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. So then it should be like this way?

It would be this way and this way. Right? If we're here. If we're here. It would be this way and this way, right? If we're here... If we're here... Or wait, is this where we want to go? There's much more riveting tape where that came from, but eventually we latched onto a landmark. Alright, so...

Oh, section 15. Focus group. That's where we want to be, right? That's where we want to be. Okay. We were getting warmer, both figuratively and as the sun beat down on our pale complexions, literally. I had pitied the dead, but a cool subterranean resting place was starting to sound appealing, and even though we knew we were roughly

in the right area, we were walking in circles. Vast field of cravestones stretching out in all directions and Ella is one of them. We're narrowing it down. Eventually we switched up our tactics and I started talking to myself. Other Ben and I have spread out. I'm just stalking along the paths between gravestones. Only got five hours left on my recorder. The cemetery is going to close for then. my recorder. The cemetery is going to close for then. Edronbacher. Bowman. Wright. Detlefson.

Zimmer. Oh dear. I'm gonna tell Ben about that. He can whistle past those gravestones. Here's one that just says, Mother, Father. Could be them for all we know. Hope not. Cypress Hills does not surrender its secrets easily.

Neither had Ella. But then, just when we'd covered the same territory enough times that the names had begun to blur together, I looked down and saw something that stopped me in my tracks. The first Ella relic we'd encountered that wasn't in pixels or on paper. I was almost too surprised to sound excited. Uh, I found it. Yeah. No raised marker, so easy to miss. Hey!

I can't even see it. Now no wonder we missed it. it's just totally invisible from more than a few feet away elusive to the last just as previous researchers had looked for Ella Black and missed Ellen Pinkerton we had looked for a raised marker and almost missed one that was flat like that hidden home plate marker in the Pittsburgh parking lot maybe because it's shielded from the wind, it's well preserved. A marble rectangle with gold-embossed lettering that looks as new as Ella's purple signature. At the top, it says Pinkerton. And below are the birth years, death years, and names. Nancy, whose grave we found later, is buried elsewhere at Cypress Hills with her husband's death date left blank. He outlived her and after a mugging moved to Massachusetts. So the Pinkerton

headstone contains two names William SP and Ellen B. Note the middle initial. Not H for Hodden but B for Black. Yeah, no, when I started looking into this, I did not expect to be able to pinpoint who she was, let alone where she is buried. And here we are standing a few feet above her. I'll have to come back to see, come back and see you, Ellen, now that we know where you are. Some time after Ben and I made our trip to Cypress Hills, I emailed Anthony Desmond, Vice President of the Cemetery, to tell him about Ella.

My timing was fortuitous. Soon, he said, a Cypress Hills committee would meet to review new candidates for inclusion in the cemetery's register of significant figures. I sent Anthony all the info we'd gathered, and months later, he gave me good news. The committee met yesterday to discuss our potential new notables, and I am happy to say that we will be including Ella Black in our notable program. The Cypress Hills Hall of Fame Class of 2025 includes Ella, 19th century journalist and minister Rufus L. Perry, who escaped enslavement, 19th century architect Menard Lefevre, 19th century criminal George Leonidas Leslie, aka the King of Bank Robbers, and 19th century major leaguer, John Candy Nelson, who appropriately

played his last season in 1890. Later this year, Ella will be added to the Cypress Hills website and to a new Notables map. And days after this podcast is published, a plaque will be placed at her grave site. It will read, Ellen H. Pinkerton, aka Ella Black. If you'll permit me one pun, that's how Ella got her grave plaque. When I return to her headstone, I'll leave a floral arrangement, like the one Spalding facetiously suggested should be left on the Player's League's grave, with a waterproof case containing a collection of Ella's writing,

the possible picture of her, a pack of modern 1890 Pittsburgh Berger's baseball cards, and our research about Ella's life, along with a link to this podcast. Maybe you're listening because you saw my mini-memorial, or maybe after listening, you'll go see it, assuming no grave robbers beat you there. If you use the new map and look for the plaque, you'll find her much more quickly than Ben and I, and all the Ella hunters who preceded us did. I hope she has enough new visitors to make up for all the years when no one knew she was there.

If you see her, say hello. Scott Peterson plans to. I'll be making that pilgrimage maybe as soon as this summer. And I've still got goosebumps over here. I mean, this is just amazing. So was Ella Black. Less than a year before Ella surfaced at Sporting Life, Walt Whitman said this about baseball, It's our game.

That's the chief fact in connection with it. America's game has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere, belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our constitutions, laws, is just as important in the sum total of our historic life. When Whitman made that remark in 1889, women weren't allowed to belong or fit into many American institutions. Baseball and baseball writing among them. When Whitman called baseball our game, he was speaking mostly for men.

I am only a woman and I'm not supposed to have a great deal of wisdom in matters pertaining to baseball. But in 1890 Ella Black showed that those institutions were better with women and that women would be, to borrow a phrase from Whitman, just as important to our history, whether they were wanted and welcomed or not, or even actively excluded as Sherry Nichols' generation was. Well, I was a baseball fan going back to when I was a kid. I remember in elementary school at recess, I was always playing baseball with the boys instead of playing with the girls.

And I remember one of the boys, when we were about eight, telling me that he was going to sign up for Little League Baseball and that I should too. And so I went home and told my parents that, and they told me that I couldn't. And I was like, why not? And they said, because girls can't play Little League Baseball. And I was like, why not? And they said, because girls can't play little league baseball. And I was heartbroken because, you know, I played with the boys all the time. I didn't see why I couldn't then. I learned pretty early on that I wasn't really welcome

in baseball. I never had to learn that lesson. So I felt pretty awful later in our chat when this happened. Could I stop you for a sec? Sure. There's like a bumping that I assured her it wasn't symbolic. Little League hasn't been boys only for half a century, but the effects of past exclusion

linger. Major League Baseball says the best predictor of whether someone will be a baseball fan for life is whether they played when they were young. There's no quick fix for depriving people of that chance for generations. When Leslie Heafy joined Sabre in 1989, the organization was almost 20 years old and had five female members. joined Sabre in 1989, the organization was almost 20 years old and had five female members. Even now, despite attempts to promote diversity, the percentage of female members sits in the single digits.

It's a baseball organization and so to some people that right there immediately says well that means it's a male organization. Of course gender diversity is only one kind. Heafy, who's working on a book about black women in baseball, notes that if Ella Black had been black, she wouldn't have had the chance to make the contribution this series is celebrating. Because a black woman writing is only gonna get to write for a black newspaper.

And those opportunities were slim to begin with. With a new women's pro baseball league launching in 2026, more women will be welcomed back to the diamond. Debbie Shattuck-Burton believes the sports pendulum could be poised for a swing. Debbie Shattuck-Burton I am cautiously optimistic. It's always struck me as ironic that we can have women running Fortune 500 companies leading military units and doing all sorts of things in sports and yet this very persistent idea that baseball is for boys and softball is for girls has continued. I am pleased to see that maybe we're finally getting beyond that and baseball can just

be a game again, a sport that anybody can play that wants to play it. And in theory a sport that anybody can cover which Marie Harden students will want to do. As a journalism Dean I've seen a dampening of enthusiasm over time for journalism jobs in general except sports journalism. Harden has seen women go from being barely represented in her classes to making up a majority of enrollment. She's seen women's sports proliferate along with women's sports media. And yet, she says, that interest hasn't translated to a much higher proportion of sports journalism

jobs. I heard a female journalist tell me she'd been a war correspondent, she'd been a sports journalist. And she said that being a sports journalist was more challenging in terms of being in this male dominated space than being a war correspondent. Sometimes two steps forward are followed by two steps back. Just ask Ella Black and the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players. I would say that I've come to understand that what we see is progress.

We shouldn't assume it's always linear. So I used to assume things will always get better and it's just a matter of measuring that. And what I've realized over time is that's not, you can't take that for granted. Donna Halper hasn't. I believe that history is about telling the truth. History is about including people who were there. When we erase people who were there because maybe some of the interactions back then were

uncomfortable, or maybe it makes us nervous or worried, or maybe it doesn't fit in with our political talking points, we do a great disservice. I fear the fact that there are people in our culture right now who have this belief in a mythical good old days that was good for some people, but not so good for others. And in a world where you were gonna be really stigmatized just from following your dream, I think the stories of women like Ella Black and some of the other early women who played baseball,

they were standing up and following their dream no matter what the culture said. And somehow the republic didn't fall. Let's end with an excerpt from a poem, though not one by Whitman. This one, which is florid but fitting, is called The Journalist. Newspaper woman Mary Clemmer Ames wrote it for and read it at the 25th annual meeting of the New York Press Association in June of 1881. And newspaper woman Claire Smith, a longtime member of the New York Press herself, read it to me and now to you 144 years later. Only a newspaper, quick read, quick lost. Who sums the treasure that it carries hence? Torn, trampled under feet, who counts thy cost? Star-eyed intelligence, and ye the nameless,

best beloved host, my heart recalls more than one vanished face, struck from the ranks of toilers, early lost and leaving not a trace. Martyrs of news, young martyrs of the press, princes of giving from largesse of brains, one leaf of laurel steeped in tenderness, take ye, oh early slain. Though in the author's pantheon, no niche obscure.

Your waning names can hold forever fast. The seeds of truth ye blow afar are sure to spring and live at last. O lonely waste within the swarming marts, in silent dream, in speaking deeds of men, quick with momentum from your deathless heart, your thoughts will live again. ["Fantastic Beats"] 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 vangraphs.com and you can check the show page and episode description for links to a lot of our research.

And if you thought this series was the greatest trilogy since the three exposition parks, please spread the word or leave a review. Thanks to Richard Hershberger for introducing me to Ella, and to Jean Hastings Ardell, Mike Sowell, Scott Peterson, Kara Giaimo, Greg Gubie, and others for helping keep her memory alive. Thanks to Ben Zimmer for invaluable research assistance,

as well as Ryan Delano, David Grinnell, and Ryan Woodward for valuable research assistance. And thanks to Jacob Reed for sight reading baseball inspired piano pieces that probably hadn't been played since the 19th century. Thanks to leading lady Ellen Adair, who was born to play Ella. She shares Ella's name, her home state, and her love of baseball, as you can hear on her podcast, Take Me Into the Ball Game.

Since Nellie went away by the Edison quartet... Thanks also to this episode's other podcast players. Roger Coleman, Rosie and Alec Barber, Michael Mountain, Ian Conwell, Jeff Hack, and Jimmy Wilkinson. Thanks to Meg Rowley for being a superlative podcast co-host, to David Appelman for giving Effectively Wild a wonderful home, to the woman and good girls in my household, Jesse Sloan and Grumpkin for bearing with me while I was mentally living in 1890,

to you for listening all the way to the end, and lastly, thanks to Ella Black for being the first. Finally went away, away.