"Girls & Gloves"
Early on the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese fighter planes launched a devastating attack against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor. The next day, Congress approved President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war against the Empire of Japan. The United States had at last entered the Second World War, and virtually overnight American life underwent a complete transformation. Hundreds of thousands of men left their civilian occupations and volunteered for military service, among them many professional baseball players.
The commissioner of Major League Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, assumed that baseball ought to be suspended until the war was over. Before making a decision, however, Landis wrote to President Roosevelt for advice. In his reply, dated January 16, 1942, Roosevelt told Landis that he thought baseball should continue to be played despite the war. "I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going," Roosevelt declared.
Philip K. Wrigley, the chewing gum magnate and owner of the Chicago Cubs, took Roosevelt's words to heart. He realized, though, that with so many star players enlisting in the military the caliber of Big League baseball was sure to decline. Wrigley decided, therefore, to establish a new league that initially at least would attract fans to the ballpark by its sheer novelty. Thus was born the idea of women's professional baseball.
With the help of lawyer Paul Harper, advertizing executive Arthur Meyerhoff, and Ann Harnett, who had organized women's softball teams on the playgrounds of Chicago, Wrigley set to work creating a women's professional baseball league during the winter of 1942. His original intention was to professionalize women's softball, but Meyerhoff pointed out that if Wrigley wanted to sustain an interest in baseball during the war then the women ought to play hardball. Wrigley agreed, but worried that there were too few women with the skills to compete.
In the end, he and his committee compromised, inventing a hybrid of softball and baseball. The league would use a twelve-inch ball and play on fields with sixty-five-foot base paths. (The ball used in the Major Leagues has a circumference of nine-and-one-half inches and the base paths measure ninety feet). The size of the ball used in women's professional baseball was reduced to eleven inches in 1946 and to ten inches in 1949. In 1954, the base paths were lengthened to sixty-five feet. Pitchers threw underhand until 1946 when they were permitted to throw sidearm; in 1947, pitchers were required to throw sidearm and in 1948 they began to use the overhand motion.
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