A league of their own

By CASEY OLSON

The Mirror

They now have a league of their own, which is something Jeneane Lesko has been waiting over a half a century for.

The 70-year-old played a key role in organizing the first-year Washington Women’s Baseball Association (WWBA), a competitive hardball league for women around the Puget Sound area.

“It’s real baseball,” said Lesko, who played in the short-lived All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) for two seasons in the early 1950s. “It’s really fun and I’ve really been pleased.”

The WWBA is currently in its inaugural season and includes three teams — Westside Falcons, Eastside Ravens and South End Raptors. Each team has a 16-woman roster and league games are played on weekends at several fields around Western Washington. Sunday marked the third week of the WWBA’s season.

“We have had some good games,” Lesko said. “Most of the players are coming from softball or they played baseball when they were younger. It’s been tough to get the word out. But we actually have three good teams.”

The idea of organizing an all-women baseball league in Western Washington started two years ago when current league president and player Steph Derouin and others, including Lesko, got a team together to play in a 24-hour game in Arizona benefiting AIDS relief in Africa.

“It was fun and we wanted to keep this thing going,” Lesko said.

So last summer the Washington Stars were created and played in an 18-and-over men’s Pierce County baseball league. But the dream of a league of their own was still the goal. Other women’s baseball leagues exist in several states, including Colorado, California, New York and Florida. The first Women’s Baseball World Series was held in Canada in 2001.

“They were hitting our pitchers pretty hard,” Lesko said about playing in the men’s league. “About halfway through the season we exchanged batteries (pitcher and catcher) and that made an even game. Their pitcher would throw to them and we would throw to our team.”

The Bellevue resident knows baseball and played two seasons in the AAGPBL, which was the subject of the 1992 movie “A League of Their Own.” The women’s professional baseball league formed when male players were drafted during World War II. Lesko’s career in the AAGPBL included seasons with the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Chicks. The left-handed pitcher had a record of 10-9 with the Chicks.

“I was raised in a little town and there wasn’t a whole lot to do there,” Lesko said. “So I got into sports and played a lot of baseball with the boys.”

In those days, girls weren’t allowed to play Little League baseball and Lesko’s physical education teacher “didn’t pay any attention to the girls. He would just give us a ball and send us to the pasture.”

Lesko admits she was the town tom boy and would tag-along with the baseball players at practices and games. She even acted as the bat girl for the town’s semi-pro baseball team through high school.

“I was well-respected because I could play,” Lesko said. “One of the old-timers in town saw an ad in the local newspaper about tryouts (for the AAGPBL) in Battle Creek (Mich.) He worked with me for a while and I went up and tried out right after graduation. That was the first time I had been out of state.”

Lesko’s two seasons in professional baseball (1953-54) were the last two in the 12-year history of the AAGPBL.

The teams played in small venues and drew 5,000-6,000 fans a game and were top stories in local newspapers. Lesko and the rest of the girls in the AAGPBL played 112 games during a season and made $100 a month, which was pretty good money back then, she said.

After the league folded, Lesko continued playing two more summers with a traveling all-star team, which combined the best players from around the league and played exhibition games against men. During a bulk of the games, Lesko’s all-star team would also switch batteries (pitcher and catcher) with their male counterparts — making for “great competition.”

Following her last season with the traveling all-star team, baseball really took a back burner in Lesko’s life before the release of “A League of Their Own” in 1992.

Until the producers of the Hollywood movie called to invite Lesko and other former AAGPBL players to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. for the filming of the final scenes of the movie, not a whole lot of people even knew she was a professional baseball player.

But that has changed since the release of the movie. Fans track down the surviving players and ask for autographs. Others attend the annual reunions of surviving AAGPBL .

“The movie was very accurate,” she said.

The characters in “A League of Their Own” were mostly a combination of several players and personnel, she said. Some things were also dramatized, like the relationship between Tom Hanks’ character, Jimmy Dugan, and his team, and how the players treated their female chaperones.

“(The coaches) didn’t act that way,” Lesko said. “They never drank on the field and there was no animosity. They would teach what they knew from their experiences and our chaperone was just like a mom to me.”

They also taught Lesko a love of baseball that is still going strong after more than a half century.

Sports editor Casey Olson: 925-5565, sports@fedwaymirror.com

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