Humps and He-Shes

[b]Max Granillo[/b]: Judge Landis's office had to find someone who could be the "president" of the WBL, which would of course be supervised by the Commissioner's Office. The backlash from the owners was very strong, and he didn't want to put someone in who would let the league languish. Landis had no plan to support this league forever, but it needed to be propped up like a Potempkin village and he needed someone to do the job.

A friend recommended a corporate litigation lawyer named Lonnie Plotner. Plotner wasn't exactly the smartest tool in the shed - he was 57 and his legal skills were sub-par. However, he was probably the greatest schmoozer of all time. He could talk a nun out of her corset. That was how he had kept his job.

[b]Erik Knupp[/b]: Plotner would have done anything for Judge Landis. Plotner loved baseball so much he probably would have paid to be involved with it, regardless if his involvement was strictly peripheral. Plotner loved working a room.

[b]Elnora Sunderman[/b]: Plotner's hiring either sent a signal to the owners deliberately or inadvertantly - but the message was clear. Plotner had no pull, he had no baseball pedigree, he was a complete unknown. The message was that if you needed to clear some of the deadwood out of your office but for political reasons couldn't afford to directly fire someone, you assigned them to your WBL operation. The franchises would go bust and a plausible reason could be given to take someone off your staff.

"Drunkards and failures," was how Branch Rickey described it. In spite of that, there were a handful of young - and old - men with real talent that simply wouldn't be recognized in established baseball.

[b]Max Granillo[/b]: The league - as it was - really started to come together in January of 1943. Each of the sixteen franchises of major league baseball managed to secure some sort of grounds for the women to play. A rudimentary schedule was designed, budgets were allotted and the questions of day-to-day management of the league were the only ones left to be answered.

[b]Elnora Sunderman[/b]: Teams couldn't exactly afford to be picky in who they hired as coaches. A lot of the coaches were washed-up former players, some were drunks, some were incompetents. However, there was always a Class C or Class D type of organization in financial disarray somewhere in the country, and some coaches figured they could park themselves in the women's league until jobs in real baseball came up.

[b]Tameka Hadjupp[/b]: As launch day lurched closer, the wives of the owners began asking questions about this WBL. How would the players dress, and what kind of women would they be? Would they be the "right kind" of women?

[b]Max Granillo[/b]: I don't think they called them "lesbians" back then, that wasn't a term in common use. I remember reading an old letter from someone that asked, "how many 'he-shes' do we have?" You know, [b]he[/b] and [b]she[/b].

[b]Tameka Hadjupp[/b]: Many women played softball because it provided the opportunity to break gender norms. I'm not going to cast any aspersions on anyone's appearance. I'm just going to say that some of the players were not conventional-looking women and leave it at that.

[b]Elnora Sunderman[/b]: If it had been a four-team league, you might have been able to find a lot of conventionally attractive women to play baseball. However, with sixteen teams you needed anyone you could get.

[b]Max Granillo[/b]: There was a story of a guy who went scouting up in Texas. This woman comes up to him with a short haircut, says, "Hiya, Mac!" and spits a big wad of tobacco to the side. The fella says, "I looked at her and I thought she was the manager." She could hit, though.

[b]Elnora Sunderman[/b]: It wasn't an all-lesbian league, despite what you might read from period letters. Certainly, there were more lesbians in the league than would be represented in a random sample of the population, but I believe the league was majority heterosexual.

[b]Tameka Hadjupp[/b]: To the players, it was no big thing. If you were any good at softball at all - if you played for a renouned industrial-league team, you were going to meet "mannish" women. Players either got used to it, or left. And the players that got used to it figured out that these women weren't out to "convert" them. The gay players simply wanted the chance to play sports like anyone else. There probably wasn't a lot of social mixing between the two groups but they generally respected each other. They definitely respected each other's talent.

[b]Elnora Sunderman[/b]: Locker room clashes were never between heterosexual players and gay players. They were between fundamentalist players and gay players.

[b]Max Granillo[/b]: Cliques? Yeah, there were cliques, but there were no more cliques than in any other clubhouse I've been in. They were just along some different lines.