Hot Take: Interview with Dr. Kat D. Williams, author of Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez

In late July 2020, Brenda interviewed Dr. Kat D. Williams, author of the new book, "Isabel 'Lefty' Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star." Williams is a Professor of Women's Sport History at Marshall University, and the president and a founding member of the International Women's Baseball Center.

They talk about the life of Lefty Alvarez, how Alvarez, who grew up in Cuba, came to play in the The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, Alvarez's life after the AAGPBL, and the state of women's baseball in the United States today.

Order "Isabel 'Lefty' Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star": https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9781496218827/

Kat's website: www.tellagirlshecan.com, and her Twitter: twitter.com/drk1943

Find the International Women’s Baseball Center here: www.internationalwomensbaseballcenter.org

Music during the episode: "Floating Whist" by Blue Dot Sessions www.sessions.blue

Transcript

Kat: Lefty’s story really solidifies what I believe is some of the most important things that we can ever learn about sports. That is what it does for us as individuals.

Brenda: I am so excited to have with us today on Burn It All Down, Kat Williams, a professor of American history at Marshall University. She’s also board president of the International Women’s Baseball Center. She is the author of The All American Girls After the AAGPBL: How Playing Pro Ball Shaped Their Lives, and a new and exciting book that we’re gonna talk about today, Isabel 'Lefty' Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star. Welcome to Burn It All Down!

Kat: Thank you! It’s pretty exciting to be here. 

Brenda: Tell our listeners a little bit about Lefty.

Kat: Lefty, wow. Lefty is still alive and she suffers from dementia, so I sometimes refer to her in the past tense and it’s not for any reason other than I just have not really been around her or communicated with her for a while. Lefty was just an amazingly kind, volatile, exciting person, and she was also one of the most mysterious people I ever met. I tell this story about first meeting her and I think this gives a sense of who she was – I went in 2003 to the 60th anniversary of the AAGPBL; they have a players association and people can become associate members and go to these reunions, and I had not been to one before. It was as I said 2003, it was in Syracuse. I was pretty nervous about going, there were all these women who are obviously superstars, right? Like half the world I had seen A League of Their Own about 150 times, and so I was really nervous.

I was standing in the lobby looking around, there were all these grey-haired women, all standing around talking, chatting with one another, very animated. I’m just standing there thinking, what the hell am I doing here? All of a sudden this short bubbly woman comes up to me, she says, “Have you seen Jane?” I said I don’t know Jane, but before I could really get that out of my mouth she said, “Oh! Holy cow, there she is over there – here, you can carry this and follow me.” That was Lefty. She handed me her suitcase and took off across the lobby with me following her carrying her suitcase. We came up to this other woman who was far more sort of in charge – that was Jane Moffet, who was indeed in charge – she vice president of the players association. When I got there, standing there Jane didn’t even look at me. She looked at Lefty and she said, “Who’s this?” and Lefty said, “I dunno. She had a nice face and I thought she could carry my suitcase!” Jane said, “So you just give your suitcase to strangers?” and Lefty started to say something, and from behind me I heard, “I dunno Jane, she does have a nice face and she’s got a funny name, Kit Kat!” That was Beans Risinger, another former player. I remained ‘Kit Kat’ to Beans until 2008 when she died.

At that moment Beans said, “You know what, she does have a nice face, Jane. She can carry your luggage too.” They all took off across the lobby with me carrying both Jane’s and Lefty’s luggage. Now, I’m old enough to remember Candid Camera, and so I’m standing in this lobby thinking, what just happened!? I carried their luggage to their rooms. That was Lefty, that kind of openness to strangers, this “here I am!” and “of course no one is gonna do anything dishonest because everybody’s as wonderful as I am.” That was my first experience around Lefty, but over a period of time we became friends. I have always had a love for and appreciation and a curiosity for Cuba, for Cuban culture and music and the politics of it all. When I found out that she was from Cuba we just started talking and her stories from living in Cuba and her stories from that period of coming to the United States were just hair-raising, some of them. We became friends; from there I was encouraged to take some of those stories and put them in a book and tell Lefty’s story.

Brenda: She doesn’t follow a typical Cuban immigrant trajectory in terms of the years we’re talking about and the experiences. How’d she get there?

Kat: Lefty grew up in a household of family members who loved baseball, she was surrounded by baseball, and Lefty was a fabulous athlete. One of the things I do in the book is I talk about all these different sports – she played volleyball, soccer, and she fenced, she did all these other sports. She was just basically a really good all-around athlete, but she loved baseball and she played baseball on the street, as did most kids at the time, even the girls. But she was really good at it. You’ve got that as the foundation, but then you back up…Lefty’s mother was very complicated, she wanted Lefty to be very solidly identified as middle class, she wanted her to have all the things that she herself didn’t have, so she tried to get her into beauty pageants. Lefty was incredibly beautiful; that was not gonna work. She tried these other sports and was Lefty’s way out of poverty, was that Lefty’s way out of Cuba? But then she got word somehow that a man named DeLeon – some people call him a “wine merchant” and I’m not sure that is exactly how you would describe him – was a businessman in Cuba. He had connections with Phillip Wrigley and Arthur Meyerhoff who were involved in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League.

Old-timey commentator: These feminine phenoms play in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, which keeps the turnstiles clicking and that loops eight midwest cities: South Bend, Fort Wayne, Peoria, Rockford, Kenosha, Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. Look close, folks – this is not softball, but real major league-type baseball.

Kat: They had started a women’s league in Cuba patterned after the All Americans; they had very similar uniforms and very similar rules and they did that in preparation for the All Americans coming to Cuba to play exhibition games and for spring training. Lefty’s mother somehow or another got word of that. She said to Lefty, “You’re gonna go, and you’re gonna try out.” And she did. 

Lefty: In 1947 there was spring training and we had exhibition games, and to let you know, I pitched in one game. I did very well, that’s what my mother told me. She was at the game. That was the first time my mother saw me play. That’s when they decided they were gonna bring four Cubans to the United States. Yeah, the manager, the Cuban manager, said, “You’re gonna be next.” 

Kat: It was DeLeon that gave Lefty her first baseball glove. He is the one who said to her, according to Lefty’s memory, “You’re a true athlete, you’re a real athlete and you’re going to do well.”

Brenda: When they were establishing the Cuban league, when were they establishing it and why did they decide to do this in Cuba?

Kat: The All American Girls Professional Baseball League started in 1943 and it was after just a couple of years that Phillip Wrigley who was one of the original founders kind of got out of it. I mean, he could kind of see that the war was coming to an end. Arthur Meyerhoff who had worked with Wrigley for many years, was an advertising executive, he took it over and because his area was PR and advertisements he understood that this league is not gonna last if we don’t recruit elsewhere, if we don’t expand the interest. They saw this as an opportunity to do both. One of the things that they did was plan spring training in ’47 to coincide with the appearance of Jackie Robinson and they were all there together, and that kind of opened up some possibilities for both the men and the women.

The idea of doing a Latin American exhibition tour, that was Meyerhoff, and going to Cuba, that was Meyerhoff. Now, I’m not saying that was him alone,  but that was under his leadership. The Cuban women in terms of their actual team, I’m not sure when they began practicing, putting together the team, but I suspect if the US team was coming in ’47 they had to know a year or more in advance and I believe that they started that process well in advance of the US players coming.

Old-timey commentator: This, friends, is Havana, Cuba. In the background yonder is famous Morro Castle; in the foreground there’s some bonitas señoritas Americanas – kids from the USA who have figuratively taken Havana over in a feminine peacetime invasion, a whole army of girls in uniform. Watch! That’s right, an army of baseball players. Not softball, hardball. Stars of the All American Girls Baseball League here for training.

Kat: I think it’s multi-faceted, I think it was a way to bring more money into the endeavor by expanding into other markets, but also to bring in more ball players. There had already been some interest. There was one Cuban woman who came before that did not stay very long. They already kind of knew there were players that they could recruit. The Latin American tours were successful on one hand but they were not ultimately successful in broadening the reach of the league, they did not ultimately establish a Latin American branch of the All Americans. 

Brenda: But they do recruit a few of them to come to the United States, which is how Lefty got there. 

Kat: That’s right, that’s right.

Brenda: How was that journey?

Kat: There were four women that came sort of at the same time. Lefty was the youngest, so she really was kind of looked after. She tells the story about getting recruited, her mother saying, “This is great, you’re gonna go to America and you’re gonna be a professional ball player.” She was very excited. Lefty tells the story about her family taking her to the airport. She said she doesn’t remember what any of them said, Lefty didn’t even look back. She got on those steps going up that airplane with a suitcase and a ball glove and didn’t look back. In some ways because her mother had that kind of confidence in her I think Lefty had confidence, but because there were three other players that traveled with her she also had some camaraderie, she had some people who did speak Spanish and could help her, but it was hard. It was a hard transition.

Some of the stories she tells about…She said, “I got off the train in Chicago and there were these people who met me there with a coat. I never had a coat!” You know? This is springtime in Chicago, and so that kind of thing…Plus she did not speak English. It was extremely difficult, but yet most of the time Lefty talks about those experiences in a way that would make you think, ehh, it’s no big deal. But it had to be a big deal. If you can get her to talk about some of the downsides of that transition to living in the US it’s loneliness and it’s uncertainty, but most of what comes out of it is, “I came to the US to play baseball, I have a baseball family now, and I’m an American citizen.”

Brenda: So how’s her pro career?

Kat: Lefty was a good ball player. Lefty was not a fantastic ball player. She was a pitcher for the most part and she was indeed pretty good.

Brenda: She plays how many seasons?

Kat: She played from ’47 and she got injured at the beginning of ’54 – she missed one year and got injured in that last season.

Brenda: That’s a decent chunk of time.

Kat: I include her stats in the back of the book, at my insistence they’re in there. Lefty was not insistent! In fact, it took me several years to get Lefty to agree to let me write this book. She said no, because “I’m nobody, I’ve got a sixth grade education, I came to the United States, I wasn’t even the best ball player – you need to write a book about Dottie Kamenshek, or you need to write a book about Sophie Kurys.” There are twelve of those! We don’t need another one. What Lefty represented is what I think some of the most important things about sports, women and gender and sports, and specifically baseball, and that is that connection to community, it is the use of that sport, the use of baseball as a way to get through difficult times. That was certainly true for my own life, and so when I recognized that in Lefty I realized that that’s the story. It’s not what a great ball player she was, it has so little to do with her stats. But it has a lot to do with what baseball did for her. That is my concept of sport identity, using intersectionality as a way forward. So I took that idea, that concept of intersectionality, a step further, because I’m convinced that someone can know me, they can know my life story, my race, my gender, my ethnicity, my sexuality, all of those things, but if you eliminate the element of sport from that mix then you really don’t know who I am, and the same is true of Lefty and that’s what sport identity is about.

Brenda: What happens to her after?

Kat: Lefty herself talks about how lost she was after the league ended. The league ended in 1954. As I said, she had a sixth grade education; by that time she spoke English, but it was not good. So finding a job, being able to take care of herself, was very difficult. One of the families had been her sponsor, the Blee family. They helped her get a green card and then ultimately helped her get citizenship in the US. They were also helping her trying to find employment. Mr. Blee was…I don’t remember exactly what his job was at General Electric, but he was a manager or something, and he helped to get Lefty a job at a General Electric plant in Fort Wayne. That became sort of a foundation for her, but she was still pretty lost. Lefty unfortunately developed a drinking habit. She talks about a number of times wrecking various cars and not remembering how she got home. There was no sport. She played some softball, she played softball at American Turners and even that was fraught because she had some friends who took advantage of her. She didn’t have that connection to her, what she called, her sporting self.

She worked at GE until she retired. In the early to mid 80s the All Americans, the former players, started to work toward reconnecting with one another. They in the early 80s had their first reunion and Lefty went to that reunion and when she did she tells the story of knowing about it and realizing that she needed to get in shape – and by that I mean stop drinking and be the person that those women knew her to be. She was able to do that, and she talks about walking into the hotel lobby at that first reunion and she walked in and people didn’t really recognize everyone, but when Lefty opened her mouth, because of her accent, people went, “Oh, Lefty! Lefty!” She became Lefty, not Isabel, because when she wasn’t playing she was Isabel.

That is why she wanted me to call her Lefty throughout this book, because she felt like she had lost herself and then she found herself again when she found those women again. She identifies with them and believes that because they know her as Lefty, that's her true self. Lefty had a difficult time in those years after the league ended. She only went back to Cuba a couple of times, and that was also fraught. But once she re-discovered those women, once she reconnected with the All American Girls Professional Baseball League players association she felt like she was really herself. She says she “found her sports self” again.

Brenda: It’s amazing what other people’s believing in you can provoke, when they’re the right people.

Kat: That’s right.

Brenda: You have written extensively about women’s pro baseball. What did this story bring, by centering her, how did this enrich the way that you look at that history?

Kat: First of all, it expands our knowledge and our understanding beyond the midwest of the United States. That is where the league started and where most of the teams were, but there were also – and I’m gonna get the numbers wrong – thirty something Canadian players who played in the league; there were the four Cuban players who played in the league. There were no Black players who played in the league, it was indeed segregated. What we know about that league, what we know about those women is compacted into for most people one season and a movie called A League of Their Own. All white, all what you would expect, and so what I did with this was…These women were in many ways multicultural, but it was also about expanding the definition of baseball. By that I mean it’s not just about stats.

As president of the International Women’s Baseball Center I am always talking about women’s baseball history and the importance of girls and women in the game and these myths that women are just now entering the game. We have been part of the game since the game’s inception. When I’m talking about those things I’m constantly asked, “Well, you know, a woman’s never gonna make it to the major league so what’s the point?” Well, who cares? The major leagues is so not the definition of baseball for me. How many men, how many boys who play Little League actually make it to the major leagues? It’s a tiny little percentage. Because of that I think it’s important to look at these different stories, look at politics, culture, society, all through the lens of sport. That’s what this book does – it gives us a little bit of insight into Cuban culture through the lens of sport, but it also gives us an understanding of women’s baseball in the middle part of the 20th century.

Brenda: With all of your historical perspective, can you give listeners a sense of how do you see women’s baseball today? How would you update their understanding? How would you epilogue your epilogue?

Kat: First of all, as one of the founders and the president of the International Women’s Baseball League, we got together because there was no place where women's and girl’s history in the game of baseball – all aspects of baseball, internationally – there was no place that that was preserved. So it starts there, but for me it’s not just about preserving the history, it’s about taking that history out of the shadows and using it. I am a firm believer in the saying, “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.” Girls have to know they stand on the shoulders of greatness, and girls that wanna play baseball stand on the shoulders of decades and decades of greatness. Women did not enter the game of baseball in 1943 with the All American Girls Professional Baseball League and they did not stop playing or being part of it in 1954.

If you drew a timeline of girls and women in baseball history internationally the All Americans would be a tiny little blip on that line – they’d be an important one, but they are a tiny little blip. So for us, we started to say, our history is alive! It’s exciting. We have to use that history to show girls today that they are not alone. If they wanna umpire or coach or play or tend the fields or keep the stats they can do that because they are not the first ones to do that. That’s our jumping off place, that’s what IWBC is about. In entering that world I have learned that there are a lot of organizations out there that have as their primary focus getting girls on the field, if they wanna play – Baseball For All is one. There are a lot of people out there making this happen.

The state of women’s baseball is we are not anywhere near where we should be, we have a long way to go. We are not new to this game. It is absolutely wrong to call baseball America’s game when 50% of Americans can’t play it! Girls need to have an opportunity to be on the field, they need to have an opportunity to play Little League, which they do, but it’s my opinion that what we need is an all-women’s baseball league, a professional or semi-professional baseball league. We need to have feeder leagues and we have people working toward that, but we have a long way to go. The biggest message I hope that people get from this is: we can’t stand back and wait for this to happen. No one is gonna do this for us, we have got to break the cycle. We have got to say no.

Brenda: I appreciate so much you being on the show, professor Kat Williams. I wanna remind our listeners the book is called Isabel 'Lefty' Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star; it’s at University of Nebraska press. It’s hot off those presses and highly highly recommended. Thanks again.

Kat: Thank you very much.

Brenda: That is the perfect amount of fire and passion for a podcast called Burn It All Down. [Kat laughing] Thank you.

Kat: I am all about burning it all down!

Brenda: We are too! Burn it down, build it up, rethink everything.

Kat: That’s right.