Happy Mother’s Day!
First Pitch: 1:10 PM CT
TV: Twins.TV
Radio: TIBN
Know Thine Enemy: McCovey Chronicles
Let’s not bury the lede this afternoon: Happy Mother’s Day! I hope you all have a chance to, at very least, have a conversation with the beloved mothers or women in your life! They always appreciate the call.
If you are looking for a really good “podcast listen”, I’d like to direct you to a recent Effectively Wild series on the enigmatic Ella Black. It can of course also be found on any podcast aggregator service.
I’ll let host Ben Lindbergh spin the whole tale if you are so inclined to give it an ear, but the basics are:
Photo by Sebastian Kahnert/picture alliance via Getty Images
Ella Black was the first woman to ever cover baseball for a national publication (The Sporting Life)—writing about the 1890 Pittsburgh Burghers & Alleghenys of the short-lived Players League.
Ella’s publications only appear in that single calendar year and baseball/newspaper scholars have often theorized that Ella Black was perhaps a pseudonym for a male writer.
But even amidst the vagaries of trying to truly verify anything from 1890, Lindbergh makes a compelling case that Ella was, in fact, a woman and an obvious pioneer in sports coverage from females.
Today, the Twins look to make all their mommas proud as try to sweep the weekend series with the San Francisco Giants behind this compilation of competitors…
