Beans" Risinger: baseball player biography

At South High Field in Grand Rapids on Wednesday, September 9, 1953, Earlene "Beans" Risinger once again showed her skill as a pitcher. Her Grand Rapids Chicks had lost one game and were facing elimination in the best of three semifinal playoff series of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Taking the mound, Risinger hurled a two-hitter and shut out the tough Rockford Peaches, 2-0.
The home club's big hit was a seventh inning single to left field by shortstop 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, with the same teams playing in Grand Rapids, Dottie Mueller pitched the distance and the Chicks advanced to the championship round by stopping Rockford, 4-3.
In the final series, with the Chicks leading one game to none, Risinger, a lanky 6'1" right-hander, pitched a 4-3 victory over the Kalamazoo Lassies. Finishing with a flourish, Beans, as she was known to teammates and opponents, ended the game by striking out one of the league's great sluggers, Doris "Sammye" Sams. That strikeout would be a highlight of Risinger's unlikely career.
Earlene Risinger grew up in Hess, Oklahoma, a village of less than two dozen people located in the southwest part of the state. 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.
During those years, Risinger won 73 games and lost 80. But her best season was 1953, when she led the Chicks in wins 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 "Soupy" and Lizzie Risinger, Earlene grew up in a rural community. To earn money for shoes and clothes, she worked in the cotton fields. Tall and attractive, with brown hair and hazel eyes, she loved sports. She particularly enjoyed watching her father play first base on a sandlot team that played on Sunday afternoons. Soupy taught his daughter to throw a baseball. 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.
Although she was a good athlete, girls were not allowed to play baseball on the school team. Southside High did have girls' teams in basketball and softball, but Earlene 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, just 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.
As Risinger recalled, "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 teams, 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 from home."
"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 Meacham. But we didn't have enough good players."
Beans turned out to be a good pitcher for last-place Springfield, although her rookie record was only 3-8. During her first season as an All-American, the league converted to overhand pitching, a switch from the modified sidearm delivery of 1947 (the AAGPBL began in 1943 using underhand pitching). Also, the mound was moved from 43 to 50 feet away from home plate, and to 55 feet in 1949, moves which favored strong-armed pitchers.
"It was a blessing that I turned around and went home in 1947," Beans explained, "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.
"When the league disbanded after 1954, I had the opportunity to go to x-ray school at Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids. After the training, I began working in an orthopedic surgeon's office. I have been there ever since."
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 regular season record, the club won the playoff championship. However, Milwaukee was a minor league city and home to the triple-A Brewers, so the Chicks failed to draw good crowds. The franchise moved to Grand Rapids in 1945.
In the Furniture City, the Chicks prospered, finishing third in the AAGPBL with a 60-50 mark in 1945, second with a 71-41 record in 1946, and second with a 55-47 ledger in 1947. But in 1947 Grand Rapids won the league's Shaughnessy Series Championship (first place versus third, second place versus fourth, and winner versus winner), lost in the finals to the Rockford Peaches in 1949, and won a third title in 1953.
Risinger arrived in 1949 and became a regular pitcher. During her six full seasons with the Chicks, she compiled records of 15-12, 14-13, 9-9, 10-15, 15-10, and 7-13. Known as a tough pitcher to hit, she threw a hard fastball, a curve, and a change-up.
"Beans was fairly tall with those long arms and legs," commented Sammye Sams. "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 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 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 began to claim the attention of many fans.
Those interests 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.
In addition, after the rookie touring teams, the Sallies and the Colleens, were dropped in 1951 because of the league's lack of funds, there was no "minor league" or training teams for female baseball players.
Last but not least, the early 1950s were the years of the Korean conflict, "McCarthyism," and the growth and spread of the population into new suburbs. That meant many Americans developed new interests and spent less time going to the ballpark.
As a result, the league dropped from eight teams in 1949, 1950, and 1951 to six in 1952 and 1953. Only five clubs competed in 1954.
In 1952 and '53 the league featured Grand Rapids, Rockford, the Fort Wayne Daisies, the Kalamazoo Lassies, the South Bend Blue Sox, and the Battle Creek Belles (a franchise which played the first seven years in Racine, Wisconsin). The Battle Creek Belles relocated to Muskeegon early in the 1953 season.
The AAGPBL's financial problems were illustrated in Grand Rapids. In mid-July of 1952, a fire swept the clubhouse and grandstand at Bigelow Field, then home of the Chicks. The damage was estimated at $45,000, including $5,000 worth of baseball equipment.
Beans recollected, "We lost everything, uniforms, gloves, cleats, and all. For our home games we had to wear the old uniforms of the Peoria Redwings, a team that went under after the 1951 season. Our caps didn't even match."
"Attendance was down and the club didn't have the money to buy new uniforms or caps. But we kept doing the best that we could."
With the decline in attendance and the resulting fall in revenues. The All-American League was changing from the peak years of the late 1940s. Regardless, Beans fondly recalls that her career highlight occurred in the playoffs of 1953.
In early September, Grand Rapids wrapped up second place and faced fourth-place Rockford in one semifinal series. The slugging Daisies, after maintaining the top spot against a late-season surge by the Chicks--who won nine straight games before losing their finale--faced third-place Kalamazoo in the other semifinal.
On Tuesday, September 8, 1953, the Chicks boarded two planes and flew to Rockford for the opener in a best-of-three playoff. Manager "Woody" English announced that his lineup would feature Eleanor Moore on the mound, Marilyn Jenkins, the former bat girl, behind home plate, Inez "Lefty" Voyce at first base, Dolores Moore at second, Gabby Ziegler at short, Renae Youngberg at third, Doris "Sadie" Satterfield in left field, Jean Smith in center, and Joyce Ricketts--the only player who appeared in all 110 of the Chicks' games that year--in right. Pitchers for the second game and, if necessary, the third contest would be Mary Lou Studnicka and Risinger.
Rockford won the first tilt, 9-2, banging out 13 hits off Moore and Studnicka. Flying home on Wednesday, Grand Rapids faced elimination. Instead, Risinger rose to the challenge and blanked Rockford, 2-0, as indicated above.
When Dot Mueller pitched her club to another victory on Thursday, the Chicks advanced to the best-of-three championship round against Kalamazoo, which had eliminated Fort Wayne.
In game one at South Field, Grand Rapids emerged a 5-2 winner, thanks to the hurling of Mary Lou Studnicka--who received relief help from Eleanor Moore in the ninth. The Chicks scored solo runs in the first and the third innings, and Kazoo scored twice in the third to tie the game, 2-2.
The home team rallied for three in the fourth, loading the bases via an infield single by Moore, Studnicka's bunt-which was thrown away for an error, and a walk to Jean Smith. Ziegler knocked home one run with a sacrifice fly to left. Satterfield bounced to pitcher Gloria Cordes, who fumbled it, loading the bases. Voyce then lofted a long sacrifice fly to foul territory in right. Joyce Ricketts singled to score the third run.
With two Lassie runners on board in the top of the ninth, Eleanor Moore was summoned to the mound. She promptly retired the side, striking out Isabel Alvarez, inducing Dottie Schroeder to pop to the shortstop, and getting June Peppas on a grounder to second base.
On Saturday in Kalamazoo, Risinger pitched the biggest game of her career. As luck would have it, the game was limited to seven innings by mutual consent--due to cold, misty weather (less than 40 degrees at game time). Undaunted, Beans hurled a steady game. The Chicks gave her a one-run lead in the second inning. Grand Rapids wrapped up the scoring by producing three runs in the sixth, keyed by a two-run double off the bat of Joyce Ricketts.
Risinger yielded only one extra-base hit, a solo home run by Doris Sams in the fourth inning. But in the seventh, with the bases full of Lassies, Sams--who hit 12 homers in 1952--again came to the plate. This time Beans fanned the "Kalamazoo Clouter" on three straight pitches, giving the Chicks the victory and the league title.
"People remember that I struck out in my last at-bat in the All-American League," Sammye told me recently. "But nobody says anything about me helping my team by hitting a home run in the previous at-bat!"
"In that game," Risinger recalled, "the temperature was not much above freezing, the manager had gotten kicked out of the game, and Gabby Ziegler, the captain, was acting as manager. The bases were loaded in the seventh and I was getting wild. Up came Sammye to bat, and here comes Gabby, who was about five-foot tall."
"She looked up at me and said, 'Well, Beansie, can you get her out?' "
"I said, 'I guess so,' and I struck Sammye out with a fastball!"
Risinger and the Chicks returned in 1954 for what turned out to be the league's swan song. After the season, Beans became an x-ray technician, and she's happy about her two careers. In the mid-1960s she was inducted into the Jackson County, Oklahoma, Sports Hall of Fame.
"A lot of people say the league really made their lives. Well, it did for me. It got me out of the poverty in Oklahoma all the way to Grand Rapids. I live there to this day. That's where all my friends are. I wouldn't trade my experiences for anything in the world. I retired in 1991, and I love going to the All-American Reunions."
A very good pitcher during the league's last seven years, Beans Risinger's career illustrates the kind of first-class women whose diamond skills made a winner out of the historic All-American League.
Acknowledgment: A different version of this article was published in the 1999 issue of the Grand River Valley History.