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. Credit: Copy by Michael A.
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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.
