Let's Row Together

October 11, 1977. Forty-six years ago, Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned me from baseball clubhouses, setting up the court fight I'd win before the next World Series happened.

October 11, 1977.

Forty-six years ago, today.

I was at Yankee Stadium, assigned for the first time to report on theWorld Series. I was ebullient as the game began after the Dodgers’ player representative Tommy John told me that his teammates had okayed my access to their clubhouse after the game. I’d been working in the Yankees clubhouse at the American League Championship playoffs, so for the first time I’d be able to participate fully in reporting a World Series after this game.

I was seated in Row G, Seat 16 in the makeshift auxiliary press box, a working space created for the Series’ overflow press. Tightly packed into Section 9 grandstand seats between home plate and first base, we had good views of the game and updates that were conveyed from the main press box via a scratchy loudspeaker.

From Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, what happened next.

“Melissa Ludtke, please report to the main press box.”

             The garbled words crackled from the small loudspeaker bolted to a column in Yankee Stadium’s grandstand near to where I was sitting in the auxiliary press box. I thought I’d heard my name. It was the fifth inning of the first game of the World Series, and I was concentrating on the game. So, I turned to ask Roger Angell, The New Yorker writer seated to my right what he’d heard.

            “Sounds like you, yes” he said.

            The announcement from this disembodied voice caught me off guard. Usually, we were fed updates like pitching changes or the scorekeeper’s call of an error or fielding play. Hearing a person’s name was odd, and odder still when it was mine. The standard practice was to repeat each message, so I listened attentively for that. This time I heard my name and the request, clearly.

            I had to go, but to get out from where I was seated required me to flatten myself like a pancake and wiggle my body sideways past lots of men. We were squished into tight quarters of a makeshift press box. … Assigned to seat #9, I was in the middle of Row G. A thin plywood slab jutted out over each seat to provide a small writing surface making it tough for even the slimmest among us to squeeze through. To get out, I’d have to disrupt each man who sat between me and the aisle. As I wiggled my way down the row, I set in motion a Jack-in-the-box wave as one man rose, then sat, as the next one rose, then sat, and so it went. With my mid-inning departure, I was also violating the gentlemen’s agreement that once we were in our seats, we stayed. We were at the game to work, so mid-inning dashes for a beer or pretzels were frowned on. We made sure to visit the restroom before sitting down.

            With the score 2-1 in a pitcher’s duel, the Dodgers led, and the Yankees were at bat. I didn’t want to draw the men’s ire by walking in front of them during a key hit or play. But I had to get out and so I squeezed past as quickly as I could. I already stood out as the rare woman in a sea of men, and to accentuate this was the last thing I wanted to do. A lot of baseball writers weren’t accustomed to having a woman among them, which I found out when I went to ballparks outside of New York and realized I was the first woman who’d shown up to work at a game.  Just being there made me a disruption, as I was a stand-in for all women, and they hated the idea of more of us showing up to change this male dominated institution. I personified the fears of those who’d rather keep working and living as they did before women started to actively fight for change.

            The longtime PR director of the Red Sox, Bill Crowley, had articulated these fears to Diane K. Shah when she introduced herself in Fenway Park’s press box late in the 1972 season. A week or so earlier, Shah had telephoned Crowley to let him know she’d be at Fenway Park for a September series. She asked him to leave press credentials for her. Shah told Roger Angell for his New Yorker story that Crowley tried to discourage her from taking the assignment. He refused to give her the customary press pass granting access to the field during batting practice. Instead, he’d give her a seat in the grandstand and have ballplayers brought to her. Or she could stand at the railing near the field and players might talk with her there. Nor would she have a seat in the press box. Hearing this, Shah had her editor and the magazine’s lawyer, both men, call Crowley. Grudgingly, Crowley agreed to give Shah a pass for the field and a seat in the press box. So, it was in the press box, a few innings into the first game, that Shah approached Crowley. Until then, he’d avoided interacting with her.

            “See? Nothing terrible has happened,” she said to Crowley, reassuring him that she could do her job without incident.

            “Well, it will,” he told her, gruffly.

            Shah didn’t know what he had in mind.

            “Tomorrow, there will be 50 girls like you here,” Crowley declared.

             She reminded him that there weren’t close to 50 female sportswriters in America.

“Maybe not, but they’ll say they are, just so they can get at my players,” he shot back.

In the summer of 1977, arguably the Yankees most tumultuous season on and off the field, the team’s media relations person, Mickey Morabito, was in his rookie season.

Mickey Morabito and Billy Martin celebrating the World Series victory. Photo by David Moir.

Even as he dealt daily with explosive stories in the New York press about eruptions among team members, the owner and manager, Mickey patiently heard me out. As the Red Sox’s much older Crowley upheld baseball’s tradition of doing all he could to put barriers in the way of women like Shah writing the game’s stories, Mickey, who was my age, listened when I came to him to share my frustrations at not being allowed in the clubhouse while my male peers talked with ballplayers. And then, he acted.

Under baseball’s media rules, I could not go into the clubhouse before games when NO player changed out of his uniform between batting practice and the game.

Clearly, player nudity wasn’t the reason; exclusion of women like me was.

In restricting my access, baseball’s men hoped I’d go away. That strategy had worked when the men banned women writers from the press boxes, kept them off the field at batting practice, when the male writers talked with the players, and told them they couldn’t eat their pre-game with the male sportswriters.

Clearly, these men’s nakedness was not the issue; exclusion of women like me was.

Five years after Shah’s encounter with Crowley at Fenway Park, Mickey did all he could to gradually expand my access – first to the manager, then, at the last two games of the season, to the Yankees’ ballplayers.

After the All-Star Game break in the 1977 season, Mickey came to me with a plan. He would go in the main door to the clubhouse — leading directly into the locker room – and then he’d meet me at a side door leading to the “passage” to Billy Martin’s office. This meant I sat in Martin’s office after every game I worked for the rest of that season.

For the last two games of the 1977 season, Mickey left me Daily Clubhouse Passes and told guards at the door that I could work in the locker room with the male writers. Before both games, I reported before the game, then during the American League Championship Series, I reported there both before and after the games.

No male writer deemed my presence among them as a story worth writing.

They changed their mind after Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned me from entering either team’s clubhouse during the 1977 World Series.

When I reached the Yankee Stadium’s main press box that evening, Mickey – the only person in baseball who had extended a helping hand to me – was waiting for me at its entrance. The commissioner’s office had sent him to deliver its message, which was the antithesis of what we had worked hard to accomplish that season.

From Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, what happened next.

Morabito motioned for me to follow him, so I did. When we stopped, we were as far back in the press box as it seemed possible to be. …

          After his tepid hello, Morabito remained standoffish, intensifying my unease. His usual affability was replaced by his unrecognizable sternness and a dour expression. His disposition told me that I wasn’t going to like what he’d brought me here to say. He stared the floor, avoiding eye contact. When a clump of his long, wavy black hair fell over his eyes, he did nothing to sweep it back. It was like he was trying to hide from me. In better times, his hands would dance as if he was conducting his words, but tonight his arms didn’t leave his body. Even in the team’s tumultuous times that summer, the sparkle in Morabito’s eyes was still there. Yet, in my fleeting glimpses tonight, I saw no twinkle. How could I feel so distant from a person I knew so well? We were here together, but I felt utterly alone.

            “You can’t go into either locker room tonight,” he told me. His voice was so muffled that I strained to hear him. Those words stung, but I stayed silent. He shuffled his feet, and I sensed this was his way of letting me know he had more to tell me.

            “The two managers’ offices are off limits to you, too.”

            I heard what he’d said, but his words made no sense coming from him. He was the only person in baseball who’d lent me a hand in expanding this access. If he’d not met me at the side door of the Yankees’ clubhouse, I would not have been in Martin’s office in the last half of this season. Then, he’d left me press passes so I could work in the locker room at the Yankees’ last two games. That day at batting practice, he’d told me that he had given the clubhouse guards instructions to let me in with the other writers. About a half hour later, I had walked off the field and through the tunnel and directly into the locker room. I’d pulled out my clubhouse press pass to show the guards, but they’d just waved me through.

            Now, the man who’d made this happen was telling me this.

            It didn’t make sense.

                                                        ************

            Baseball writers griped loudly to PR directors when little things about their daily routine aren’t working as they think they should. I didn’t have this leeway. First of all, when a woman gripes or gets angry and raises her voice to a man, she sets herself up for all kinds of unflattering things to be thought and said about her. So, I’d looked for moments to speak privately with Morabito, then quietly worked with him when he came back with a suggestion. I didn’t air grievances when the male writers were around. I knew many of them watched and judged me as though I were a stand-in for how all women would act. This was an unfair burden to carry, but it’s familiar to those who work as a tiny minority. If I created a ruckus, there’d be a price to pay, and since I wanted to stick around baseball for a while, I wasn’t going to burn bridges but try to build them. Morabito knew this about me. Had somebody asked him that October night to bet on whether my anger at Kuhn’s ban would lead me to try to bully my way into a locker room that night, he’d have bet against that happening. And he’d have been right. In fact, when he found out about my attempt at diplomacy with the Dodgers, I’m certain he thought back to how he and I that summer had gradually expanded my access while avoiding chaos.

            Why, then, was he closing the doors we’d opened?

            I was angry, so at that moment I had nothing to say that wasn’t spiteful. I thought it was best to stay quiet. But with Morabito blocking my exit simply by where he stood, I felt trapped, but not in a threatening way. When neither of us spoke or moved, I’d had time to think, and then I realized why he was treating me coldly. He was ashamed to say to me what he’d just said. He didn’t want this to occur any more than I did, yet he’d been told he had to deliver this upsetting news. Somebody had forced him to tell me this. If the Dodgers had changed their minds [on their vote to okay my access to their clubhouse], then Brenner [the LA Dodgers PR person] would be the one telling me, but he wasn’t. Whoever had ordered Morabito to do this was someone to whom he could not say “no.” In the hierarchy of baseball that person was the Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who was also the only person with authority to nullify a team’s vote, as he’d done with the Yankees in the 1976 season. Morabito remembered that vote.

            Now I knew he wouldn’t forget this one.

---

Notes from The Road as I continue my book tour

Last evening’s book event, moderated by author Maddy Blais, felt like a homecoming at Odyssey Books in South Hadley, MA, as I was joined by several of my Amherst High School classmates, a Western MA climate activist friend I had met only via our Zoom meetings until we hugged there, and a dear friend/college classmate who lives in Amherst.

I also made a new friend with Maddy’s friend Marsha Ackman, whose book, Curveball, I know well. In our photo, below, I see Hillary over my left shoulder, Katanji Brown Jackson at my elbow, and Kamala Harris at my hip. No better company!

Martha Ackman, the author of Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League. Playwright Lydia R. Diamond optioned her book on which she based her play “Toni Stone” I saw it performed at the Huntington Theater in Boston. Superb! See this play, if comes to a theater near you.

With Hurricane Helene devastating Asheville, North Carolina, I missed my book event there, while I followed closely my friends’ immense challenges due to the storm. I went ahead with my other book events in Charlotte, Chapel Hill and Greensboro, as my friend, Seth Effron, graciously accompanied me – yes, this means he drove – to my three other stops in his state.

My friends’ tour in North Carolina Starting top left corner and moving clockwise: me with Lindsay Gibbs, writer of Power Plays, who moderated my book talk in Greensboro. [Subscribe to her Substack, Power Plays.] William A.“Sandy” Darity, my high school friend who is the co-author of “From Here to Eternity: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” with his wife, A. Kirsten Mullen (in photo). Center photo: Larry Keith, former baseball writer and editor with Sports Illustrated, who along with his wife, Carolyn, also a colleague of mine at S.I. as a photo editor, hosted me in their Charlotte home during much of my stay in North Carolina. My Nieman friends Tommy Tomlinson, author of Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show, and Alix Felsing, executive coach and consultant. Lindsay Gibbs and her relatives, Chip and Nancy Prairie, and my dear friend and fellow Nieman Seth Effron, holding my book, who is the opinion editor at Capitol Broadcasting Company in North Carolina. And in Charlotte, Mary C. Curtis, CQ Roll Call columnist and host of the 'Equal Time' podcast, moderated my book talk at Park Road Books.

The week ahead

New York City: Tuesday, October 15th, with Lynn Povich, author of The Good Girls Revolt, at the New York Historical Society. Attend in-person or livestream, here.

Montclair, New Jersey: Wednesday, October 16th, with Kelly Whiteside, former Sports Illustrated writer moderating book talk at the Montclair, NJ library.

Philadelphia, Thursday, October 17th, moderated by Claire Smith, the only woman writer in the Baseball Hall of Fame, at the Philadelphia Free Library.

Temple University, Friday, October 18th, panel speaker and all-day participant at the Inaugural Women in Sports Media Symposium convened by the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media.

Saturday, October 19th: I fly to Los Angeles for two book events there before I head to the Bay Area of San Francisco, for three book events, then up to Portland, Oregon for a Powell’s book talk before gathering at the Sports Bra, and then on to Seattle and Bainbridge Island before I return home.

Check out my book tour schedule to find out locations and times of these book events. Hoping to see you along the way.

How to Buy Locker Room Talk

Show up at a book talk – my book tour is here. You buy it, I’ll sign it!!!

Go to your local independent bookstore and ask for Locker Room Talk. If they don’t have my book on their shelves, please ask the store manager to order a copy for you – and more copies for other readers.

Go online and buy it as a hardback book, an ebook (Kindle) or the audio book.

Finally, if you’ve read it, please offer a review on Amazon. It matters!