The Girl Who Struck Out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig

On April 2, 1931, a 17-year-old left-handed pitcher named Jackie Mitchell walked to the mound at Engel Stadium in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She was there to pitch for the Chattanooga Lookouts, a Double-A minor league team, in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees. The first batter she faced was Babe Ruth. The second was Lou Gehrig.

She struck them both out.

The box score is real. The newspaper headlines are real. The debate over whether Ruth and Gehrig swung honestly has never been settled, and it has been going on for nearly a hundred years.

The Showman

To understand how Jackie Mitchell ended up on that mound, you have to understand Joe Engel. Engel owned the Chattanooga Lookouts, and he was one of baseball's great promoters, a man who would do almost anything to sell tickets. He once traded a player for a turkey, then had the bird cooked and served to sportswriters. He staged elephant rides and put singing canaries in the grandstands. When the Yankees scheduled a pair of exhibition games in Chattanooga on their train ride north from spring training in Florida, Engel saw an opportunity nobody else would have considered.

He signed Jackie Mitchell to a contract.

Mitchell was not some random stunt casting. She had grown up as a neighbor of Dazzy Vance, a Hall of Fame pitcher who taught her his signature pitch, a sinking drop ball. She had been playing organized baseball since childhood, competed on both men's and women's teams in the Chattanooga area, and had once struck out nine men in a game at age 16. She was left-handed, which made her sinker break in a direction that right-handed batters found especially difficult to track. She was a real pitcher. She was also a teenage girl, and Engel knew exactly what that meant for ticket sales.

The At-Bats

The game was originally scheduled for April 1 and rained out, which only added to the conspiracy theories that would follow. On April 2, before a packed house, Lookouts starting pitcher Clyde Barfoot gave up a double and a single to start the first inning. Manager Bert Niehoff pulled him and waved Mitchell in from the bullpen.

Ruth stepped to the plate. He tipped his cap to the teenager on the mound. Mitchell wound up and threw. Ruth swung hard and missed. She threw again. He swung again and missed. On the third pitch, Ruth watched it cross the plate without swinging. The umpire called strike three. Ruth flung his bat toward the dugout and argued the call before walking back to the bench.

Gehrig was next. He swung at three consecutive pitches, missing all of them, and returned quietly to the dugout.

Mitchell then walked the next batter, Tony Lazzeri, on five pitches. She had reportedly overworked her arm in preparation for the game and was pulled at that point. The Yankees went on to win 14-4. None of that mattered. The story was already written.

The New York Times ran the headline the next day. The editorial page added that "the prospect grows gloomier for misogynists."

Were They Faking?

This is the question that has followed the story ever since. The Lookouts' owner was a showman. The game was an exhibition. The original date was April Fools' Day. All of these facts point toward a setup.

But the evidence on the other side is harder to dismiss than most people think. Ruth was not known for his generosity toward women. He was quoted before the game saying women "will never make good" in baseball because "they are too delicate." Gehrig, by every account of his character, was too earnest and competitive to fake a strikeout. Tony Lazzeri, who followed Mitchell, later said the only instruction he received was "don't hit one up the middle and kill her." Several of Mitchell's contemporaries pointed out that she was a left-handed pitcher with an unusual sidearm delivery throwing to two left-handed hitters who had never seen her before. Unfamiliarity with a pitcher's motion and speed can neutralize even the best hitters, at least for one at-bat.

Mitchell herself never wavered. She maintained until her death in 1987 that the strikeouts were legitimate.

Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis was widely reported to have voided her contract shortly after the game, declaring the sport "too strenuous for women," though no documentation of this ruling has ever been found. Mitchell went on to play for various exhibition and barnstorming teams, including the House of David, but she never pitched in organized professional baseball again.

Whether the strikeouts were real or staged, nobody involved ever publicly admitted to faking them. Ruth and Gehrig took the answer with them.