Play ball! When Long Island women played pro baseball

This summer four women's baseball teams, including one from New York, began play in the fledgling Women's Pro Baseball League.

Affiliated with Major League Baseball, the league garnered comparisons to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the World War II and Korean War-era Midwest-based women’s league that inspired the 1992 blockbuster "A League of Their Own."

But few realize women have played baseball, or some variation of it, since the mid-1800s — one mid-20th century metropolitan-area women’s league had three teams from Long Island.

Founded in the 1940s as the American Girls Softball Conference, from 1949-52 teams from Freeport, Cedarhurst and Huntington were part of the professional American Girls Baseball League.

In an era when segregation and racism cast ugly shadows across America, the league had minority stars: Marie Roach, who played for Cedarhurst before being sidelined by illness, and Freeport’s Yvonne Coker, dubbed "the female Jackie Robinson," were its African American stars. Sue May Lee, a second baseman for Huntington, was an Asian American star — her father, Lok Lee, was an immigrant from what was then Canton, China.

Unlike the All-American Girls league, games featuring those Long Island teams were broadcast on TV.

A doubleheader between the Washington, D.C.-based Tacoma Decorators and the Cedarhurst-based dance school-sponsored Arthur Murray Girls was televised by WPIX/11  from Cedarhurst Stadium on July 10, 1948 — the first women's softball game aired in the United States.

In 1952, ABC began airing metro-area games featuring teams from the AGBL, the first of those a game between the Arthur Murray Girls and the Freeport Forest Jewels from Dexter Park in Woodhaven, Queens.

"I think too many of us believe the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was the one moment in time when women played baseball — and that's it," Fabio Montella, associate professor of library services and history at Suffolk County Community College-Eastern Campus in Riverhead, said recently. He added, "Which couldn't be further from the truth. We as Long Islanders, we as Americans, need to know it wasn't just that one particular moment. ...  There were other women's professional baseball leagues, including one right here with teams featuring women from Long Island."

1900s teams

Even before the founding of Major League Baseball’s National League in 1876, four women’s colleges — Smith, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke and Vassar — fielded baseball teams.

In the 1931, 17-year-old Jackie Mitchell, pitching for the minor league Chattanooga Lookouts, struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in a 1931 exhibition in Tennessee — causing baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to ban her from the game.

African American Effa Manley co-owned the Negro League Newark Eagles from 1935-48.

In 1950, 12-year-old Kathryn Johnston of upstate Corning became the first girl in Little League Baseball, leading to a ban that lasted until 1974, when President Gerald Ford signed a bill allowing girls to play.

It was Aug. 9, 2025, when former Hofstra University catcher Jen Pawol became the first woman to umpire a game in Major League Baseball.

"Women have always been part of the game of baseball," Leslie Heaphy, an associate professor of history at Kent State University who, since 1995, has served as chair of the Women in Baseball Committee for the Society for American Baseball Research, told Newsday. "They've played, been umpires, have owned teams — all, going back to the 19th century.

"Just because you don't know it, just because you’ve never heard about it, doesn't mean that isn't the case."

Women’s pro baseball on Long Island began in 1949, emerging from longstanding local softball leagues — leagues that flourished as women became factory workers during World War II. In Huntington Manor, the baseball-playing Manorettes began as a softball team featuring women employed by wartime aircraft manufacturers Grumman and Republic.

While newspapers of the day, including Newsday and The New York Times, covered the AGSC — and, later, the AGBL — much of that history was forgotten before being recently unearthed by Montella. He found it while researching amateur baseball on Long Island, including Satchel Paige and fellow Negro League stars playing a team fielding future Boston Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski in the 1950s.

Montella is writing a book about women’s baseball on Long Island.

"Many of these women played baseball on the sandlots growing up," Montella said. "They were playing because they had brothers, because they followed professional baseball, and first played softball because there really was no other alternative. ... They had the acumen, the ability, but not the opportunity. Then, for a brief time at least, that all changed."

Leagues' history

In addition to the Huntington Manorettes, as well as the Arthur Murray Girls and the Freeport Forest Jewels, who’d previously been the Freeport Hostess Girls, other league teams included: the Stamford Nutmegs; the Garfield (New Jersey) Flashettes; the Washington, D.C., Tacoma Decorators; the Bronx Alpines; the Colleens of Queens; and, the Queens-based Idlewild Flyers.

A 1949 article in Newsday provided a curtain-raiser, reporter Bob Zellner noting: "The ball used in the new game is smaller than the 12-inch softball, bigger than the nine-inch baseball, with a 10-inch circumference, and proportionate difference in weight."

The distance from the pitcher’s mound to home plate was 50 feet instead of 60 feet, 6 inches, while the distance between the bases was 72 feet — instead of the men’s baseball standard of 90 feet.

Pitchers were encouraged to throw overhand, as in baseball, but were allowed to throw both underhand and sidearm.

Long before federal Title IX legislation brought equality to women’s sports by prohibiting gender-based discrimination in 1972, the AGBL gave women a chance to play a game dominated by men — though Montella said, not without bouts of overt sexism.

An August 1949 multipage Look magazine feature on Valley Stream native Audrey Erickson, the Arthur Murray star and future Adelphi University Hall of Fame inductee, was titled "All-American Girl" and noted, in addition to her stardom in baseball, basketball, field hockey, track and field and tennis, she also was "a handy young lady around the kitchen."

A photo of Erickson dancing came with the caption: "When she’s not wearing baseball spikes or gym shoes, Audrey jitterbugs."

Erickson appeared on the TV show "To Tell the Truth" in the 1950s.

Montella said it featured a male panelist, upon learning Erickson punted for a Long Island semipro men’s football team, commenting: "I’ve always wanted to tackle a blonde."

"Stories talked about their form, if you will," Montella said, noting the women’s baseball uniforms included skirts — instead of pants worn by men.

"You look at it today, what these women had to go through, and it’s unfortunate. ... But they weren’t saying, ‘Hey, I’m breaking new ground here, I’m doing this for all the women out there.’ They were just doing it to play baseball."

'Part of a team'.

Queens native Gloria del Percio, dubbed the "Dancer Darlin’" when she played outfield for the Arthur Murray Girls, said  recently that she wished she could still play the game.

A longtime Kings Park resident, del Percio has spent the past four decades in New Port Richie, Florida.  Now recovering from a broken hip, she turns 100 in October.

One of 12 children — five boys, seven girls — del Percio played softball as a girl, joining the Arthur Murray Girls after graduation from Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens.

"We played games in the Catskill Mountains," del Percio told Newsday. "We traveled to different states. ... I played for seven years, but the thing I enjoyed most was that I was part of a team — and the fact we could do this. Those were wonderful days, I’ll tell you that."

Growing up in Pequannock, New Jersey, Alita Neal Nunn said her mother, Sue May Lee, rarely talked about her days as a star for the Manorettes.

A 1951 Newsday photo featured Lee, a Huntington High School graduate, at bat for the Manorettes, and Nunn shared a picture of her mother, baseball bat  on her shoulder, looking imposing in uniform.

After baseball, Lee, now 93 and suffering from a cognitive disorder, married Madison Avenue adman Herbert Neal, a 1940s African American sports star at Harvard University. Both were ultracompetitive, Nunn said.

"When I watched her play softball, and then when she coached me, you could tell just how competitive she was," Nunn said. "But I think she did it [played baseball] for the love of the sport. Even in later years, we had a large field near our house, and when family came over, we’d have games. ... You could tell that even in the family fun stuff she wanted to win."

Legendary Hauppauge High School coach Chris Messina, the winningest wrestling coach in Long Island history and member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, is the son of late Manorettes star Rose Anzillatto — later Rose Anzillatto Messina.

Though just 4-foot-6, Anzillatto was a tough-as-nails catcher for the Manorettes, having starred in soccer, field hockey, basketball and softball at Huntington High School. Her twin sisters, Mary and Nellie, also starred for the Manorettes — Mary later marrying Bill Smitt, Nellie marrying Mario "No Hair" Menza, the two men who ran the team.

"They called my mom Peanut," Messina said. "When she worked at Grumman, she’d be the one who’d go inside the plane, hold the rivets — and so they called her ‘Rosie the Riveter,’ after the war ads. ... Her parents were from Calabria, Italy, and so her father didn’t want her to play sports. But my mother was fierce. She wanted to play — and it turned out my grandfather didn’t have much to say about that "

Messina recalled being undefeated one season in wrestling, only to make a mistake and get pinned — losing a match he should have won.

"She looked at me, arms crossed, and said, ‘You blew it,’ " Messina said of his mother’s reaction, adding: "That’s how much she wanted to win."

As Heaphy said: "I present on women’s baseball all the time, and I always start by asking how many in attendance have seen 'A League of Their Own' — and I get a lot of hands. Then I ask, ‘How many of you know about women in baseball beyond that movie?’ I get almost none.

"But women have always been interested in baseball. ... That just needs to be brought out of the shadows."