Jackie Mitchell was one of the first professional female pitcher in baseball history. Her claim to fame lies in the fact that not only did she strike out Babe Ruth, but followed up that K with a three-pitch strikeout of the Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig.
During the 1931 season, the seventeen-year-old Mitchell pitched for the Chattanooga Lookouts. The Lookouts and the New York Yankees were scheduled to play an exhibition game at the Lookouts home, on April 1, 1931. Rain postponed the game until the next day, and that's when Mitchell took the mound, with the Babe up to bat. The story goes he took the first pitch for a ball. The next two were curves, which he swung and missed at, and the fourth pitch caught him looking for a called third strike. Lou Gehrig was up next, and swung through three straight pitches for the strikeout.
The greatest travesty about this was that a few days after this happened. the commissioner at the time, Kenesaw Landis, voided her contract and declared women unfit to play baseball as the game was "too strenuous." She retired in 1937 at age 23, frustrated that she never received the respect she deserved from the game.
Baseball officially banned women in 1952, a ban which lasted until the 1992 season.
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