All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Players Association

 
 

Player Biographies

» back
EARLENE “BEANS” RISINGER
 
                                                                By Jim Sargent
 
 
At South High Field in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Wednesday, September 9, 1953, Earlene “Beans” Risinger once again showed her durability and skill as a pitcher in the All-American Girls Baseball League (known today as the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League). In the Shaughnessy Playoffs, Risinger’s Grand Rapids Chicks, an improved team that finished in second place in the six-team circuit with a 62-44 record, had opened the postseason in Illinois with a 9-2 loss to the fourth-place Rockford Peaches (51-55 record). Facing elimination in the best-of-three semifinal series, the Chicks flew back to Grand Rapids for the second game. Pitching well with the chips down, Risinger blanked the Peaches on a two-hitter to win, 2-0.
 
Risinger’s clutch performance was backed by timely hitting and good fielding. The Chicks’ big hit was a single to left field in the seventh inning by Alma “Gabby” Ziegler, a .139 hitter in 1953. Ziegler drove home Jean Smith, who had singled and stolen second base. In the eighth, Dolores Moore knocked in the game’s final run with a bases-loaded sacrifice fly. The following evening, also at South Field, the Chicks’ Dottie Mueller went the distance and helped Grand Rapids advance by outlasting Rockford, 4-3.
 
In the league’s championship playoff, the Chicks met the third-place Kalamazoo, Michigan, Lassies (56-50), surprise winners in three games over the pennant-winning Fort Wayne, Indiana, Daisies (66-39). On Friday night, September 11, at South Field, Grand Rapids defeated Kalamazoo, 5-2. Traveling to Kalamazoo for the second game on Saturday night, Risinger, the lanky 6’2” right-hander from Oklahoma, hurled a 4-3 victory. Finishing with a flourish,Beans, as she was known to teammates and opponents alike, struck out one of the league’s best hitters, Doris “Sammye” Sams, with the bases loaded and two outs in the seventh and final inning. Because that strikeout came against Sams, a five-time AAGPBL All-Star and a two-time Player of the Year, it became a highlight of Risinger’s unlikely career.
 
Earlene Risinger came from tiny Hess, Oklahoma, a village of less than two dozen people located in the southwest part of the state just above the Texas border. As a girl, she had no idea that women could play baseball professionally. Overcoming her fear of leaving home, Beans moved away to pitch in the All-American League from 1948 through the circuit’s final season, 1954. Her overall record was 73-80, but best season came in 1953, when she led the Chicks in victories with a 15-10 ledger, won twice in the playoffs, and helped her team win the AAGPBL Championship.
 
Born on March 20, 1927, the oldest child of Homer Francis “Soupy” and Lizzie Mae (Steen) Risinger, Earlene grew up in a sharecropping family surrounded by hard times. To earn money for shoes and clothes, she worked in the cotton fields. Her parents dubbed her “Beans” because she liked pork and beans for breakfast. Tall, slender, and attractive, with brown hair and hazel eyes, she loved sports. Beans especially liked watching her dad play first base on a sandlot team that played Sunday afternoons. Soupy taught his daughter to throw a baseball, and they played catch almost every day, which turned out to be the key to her future.
 
“Baseball ran in the Risinger family. That’s what I played with my cousins,” Beans recollected in a 1997 interview.
 
Although she was a good athlete, girls, as was the custom of the times, were not allowed to play baseball on the school team. Southside High did have girls’ teams in basketball and softball. But Earlene, too tall to play with most girls, liked to hang around and play baseball with the boys. Later, she was asked to coach first base and to warm up the pitchers. After graduating from Southside in 1945, three months before World War II ended, the 18-year-old had few prospects. For more than two years she worked in local cotton fields earning 50 cents an hour. Suddenly opportunity knocked.
 
Risinger recalled in 1997, “After graduation, here I was with no future. We never even thought about going to college, because there was no money for college. We were so poor that we couldn’t afford the newspaper. But one day in the spring of 1947, I was reading the day-old sports page at the country store. I always wished there would be girls’ baseball team, you know. You dream a lot when you’re a kid in a small town.
 
“That day I read about a traveling All-American Girls baseball team going to play an exhibition game in Oklahoma City on the way back north from spring training. I never dreamed such a league existed. I dropped a postcard to the sports editor, and he sent my card to the league’s headquarters in Chicago. Pretty soon I got a letter asking me to come to Oklahoma City for a try-out.
 
“It was a miracle I even heard about the league, not getting the newspaper or anything. But I was always interested in ballplayers like Allie Reynolds and, later, Mickey Mantle, because they were from Oklahoma.
 
“I went to Oklahoma City and tried out, and they decided to send me to Rockford, Illinois, to play for Bill Allington and the Peaches. I borrowed the money from a bank and started for Rockford on a train. By the time I got to Chicago and had to change trains, I was so homesick that I took the next train back to Hess. Luckily, I had enough money to get back home. Then I went back to the cotton fields to repay the bank loan.
 
“So I got this chance and muffed it, but in 1948 a second chance came. That year the league started a team in Springfield, Illinois, which was just a one-day bus ride. The manager of the team, Carson Bigbee, and the chaperone, Mary Rudis, took me under their wings, and I made it as a pitcher. Mary looked at me and said, ‘You’re too white!’ So she took me home, we went out in her back yard, and I got all sun-tanned!
 
“In 1948 the Chicago Colleens and the Springfield Sallies didn’t make it. We didn’t get enough attendance, so we played on the road for the second half of the season. My teammates with Springfield included ‘Jeep’ Stoll, Evelyn Wawryshyn, Erma Bergman, and Mildred Meachan. But we didn’t have enough good players.”
 
A hard-throwing pitcher for last-place Springfield, Risinger turned in a rookie record of 3-8 with a 3.35 ERA. During her first season as an All-American, the league converted to overhand pitching, a change from the sidearm delivery of 1947. However, the AAGPBL began in 1943 requiring underhand pitching, as used in softball, but switched to a modified sidearm delivery in 1946. Also, the pitching mound back was moved from 43 to 50 feet from home plate in 1948, a change that favored baseball-style pitchers. Further, the league used a “deadball” which steadily dropped from 12 inches in circumference in 1943 to 9.25 inches in 1954. Beginning around July 20, 1949, the All-American issued new 10-inch balls with red laces to accompany the increase in pitching distance from 50 to 55 feet. In addition to giving players a ball that waseasier to see and livelier to hit, the game more nearly approximated baseball distances. Partly as a result, batting averages rose around the circuit. Further, the red laces contributed to convincing fans that the All-Americans were playing “real” baseball. In short, the AAGPBL played a hybrid form of softball and baseball that never really became baseball until (1) overhand pitching began in 1948, and (2) the ball changed to the red-seamed 10” size in 1949.
 
“It was a blessing that I turned around and went home in 1947,” Beans explained in 1997, “because in 1948 they went to overhand pitching. I never pitched softball, so I couldn’t have pitched sidearm or underhand.
 
“In January of 1949 I was asked to go on the South American tour, and I jumped at the chance. During this tour they had two teams, the ‘Americanas’ and the ‘Cubanas.’ I was on the Americanas with Johnny Rawlings, and he taught me the finer points of pitching. All I knew before then was how to throw the ball. He was manager of the Chicks and he got me allocated to Grand Rapids. I played with them for the rest of my career.”
 
Asked what kind of pitches she threw most of the time, Beans replied, “High and tight!” Laughing, she said, “I had a good fastball and a ‘nickel’ curve. I could throw the ball past most of them, but I got accused of pitching ‘high and tight.’ When my fastball went in really good, it tailed in toward the right-handed batters.”
 
The city of Grand Rapids was proud to host one of the most successful franchises in the All-American League. The Chicks began in 1944 in Milwaukee. After finishing with a 40-19 record in the second half of the season (the league divided the 1943 and 1944 seasons into first and second halves to boost spectator interest), the team won the playoff championship. However, Milwaukee was a minor league city and home to the Triple-A Brewers, and the Chicks failed to draw good crowds. As a result, the franchise moved to Grand Rapids in 1945.
 
In the Furniture City, the Chicks prospered, finishing third in the All-American League with a 60-50 mark in 1945, second with a 71-41 record in 1946, and second with a 65-47 ledger in 1947. Further, Grand Rapids won the league’s championship in the 1947 Shaughnessy Series (first place versus third, second place versus fourth, and winner versus winner), lost in the final round of playoffs to the Rockford Peaches in 1949, and won a third playoff title in 1953.
 
During those years Risinger, a regular on the mound, fashioned three winning seasons. She produced her best season in 1953, compiling a 15-10 record, reversing her 1952 mark of 10-15, and enjoying career bests in ERA with 1.75 and strikeouts with 121. Overall, she posted an All-American lifetime record of 73-80, for a winning percentage of .477. Known as a tough pitcher to hit, she threw a good fastball, a curve, and a changeup, but she oftenwalked more batters than she fanned. Her pitching statistics can be seen in the chart below:
 
Year
Team
G
IP
H
R
ER
ERA
BB
SO
W-L
Pct
1948
Spr
22
129
91
68
38
3.35
62
69
3-8
.273
1949
GR
30
234
146
90
61
2.35
143
116
15-12
.556
1950
GR
31
231
201
76
61
2.38
87
90
14-13
.519
1951
GR
24
177
116
66
42
2.14
77
65
9-9
.500
1952
GR
27
192
150
72
50
2.34
97
82
10-15
.400
1953
GR
30
231
151
66
45
1.75
95
121
15-10
.600
1954
GR
23
153
170
87
69
4.06
58
38
7-13
.350
Total
 
187
1347
1025
525
376
2.51
619
581
73-80
.477
 
Sammy Sams commented in 1998: “Beans was fairly tall with those long arms and legs. So when she started to pitch and uncoiled and hit her stride, the batter was darn near shaking hands with her. You might say, in your face. She had a good fastball. I remember it well!”
 
Risinger, who batted .171 lifetime, connected for four doubles and a triple, but no home runs, in her seven seasons. On August 10, 1952, in a Monday night marathon against Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, with Risinger hurling, prevailed in 13 innings, 3-2. The homestanding Chicks won in the bottom of the thirteenth when Jean Geissinger singled, moved to second on a sacrifice, advanced to third on a groundout, and scored the game-winning marker when Risinger singled to short right field, her second hit in six trips. Earlier, Risinger belted her only career triple, but the Lassies’ Jean Marlowe retired the side, leaving the lanky right-hander stranded on third.
 
Beans remembered, “I couldn’t hit all that well, and I was a slow runner, so all I did was pitch. One time I really connected and hit the ball all the way to the stands. Anyone else would have had a home run, but I just barely made it to third base.
 
“Our bookkeeper was in the stands with his son. Afterward, the father told me that his boy looked up and said, ‘Daddy, why don’t she run?’”
 
Beans, who batted .203 in 30 games in 1953, laughed at the memory.
 
The quality of play in the All-American League remained first-rate as the years passed, but the number of teams declined. After 1948, when the AAGPBL reached a peak of ten teams and generated a record league attendance of 910,000, other interests and forms of recreation began to claim the attention of many fans. Those attractions included more popular programs on television; more major league baseball games on TV; and more participation by people in golf, tennis, badminton, and other individual games.
 
On the negative side, while the Springfield Sallies and the Chicago Colleens functioned as rookie touring teams and played an extensive exhibition schedule against each other in 1949 and 1950, the two clubs were dropped in 1951 because of the league’s lack of funds. Thereafter, the AAGPBL had no “minor league” or training teams as a means of recruiting new female baseball players, and good pitchers were particularly hard to find. Further, Americans in the early 1950s witnessed the stalemate in the Korean War, the increase of anti-Communist fears known as “McCarthyism,” the boom in production and sales of automobiles, and the growth of the population into new suburbs.
 
At the same time, women increasingly faced social pressures to conform to traditional gender roles. In other words, the American woman’s “place” was in the home with her family. As actress Debbie Reynolds observed in the 1955 movie The Tender Trap, “A woman isn’t really a woman until she’s been married and had children.” These trends also meant that many Americans developed new recreational interests, enjoyed access to a variety of far-flung activities, and spent less time going to local ballparks, although major league baseball remained popular.
 
The All-American League, continuing to change and evolve within the nation’s increasingly conservative culture, dropped from eight teams in 1949, 1950, and 1951 to six in 1952 and 1953. Only five clubs competed in 1954. In 1952 and 1953, the league featured teams from Grand Rapids, Rockford, Fort Wayne, Kalamazoo, along with the South Bend Blue Sox and the Muskegon Belles, a franchise that played from 1943 through 1950 in Racine, Wisconsin.
 
In 1952 the league’s financial problems were illustrated by an incident in Grand Rapids. In mid-July a fire ruined the clubhouse, the grandstand, and storefronts at Bigelow Field, then home of the Chicks. The damage was estimated as h