Baseball’s color line was crossed in 1946 when Jackie Robinson played his first game for the Montreal Royals of the International League.
The game’s gender line lasted until 1978 when Melissa Ludtke and Time Magazine prevailed in a lawsuit against baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn contending that he had violated her 14th Amendment rights by denying her access to the Yankees clubhouse during the 1977 World Series.
Ludtke, born in Iowa but raised in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, visited Polar Park Saturday as part of the Larry Lucchino Writers series. The event coincided with the 5th Annual UniBank Women in Sports Day.
Her legal victory, Ludtke has said, “increased enormously the number of young women who came into sports media, as reporters, as employees of sports teams and league offices, in agencies representing athletes and in other aspects of sports work that earlier generations of women had not been involved with, such as working as team trainers or as umpires.”
Or, in the case of the Worcester Red Sox, general managers like Brooke Cooper.
Ludtke, 75, grew up in Amherst where her father was a professor at the University of Massachusetts. While she was born in Iowa, the family did not stay there very long. From the beginning there was a Red Sox connection.
Her birth happened in late May, 1951 while the Red Sox were sweeping the Yankees in a series at Fenway Park — sound familiar? Boston won by scores of 3-2, 11-10 and 9-4. The 11-10 game went into extra innings.
She did not set out to be a pioneer in baseball writing since she did not set out to be a baseball writer at all. Ludtke graduated from Wellesley College in 1973 as an art history major.
No box scores, deadlines or clever leads in any of those courses.
“As the daughter of two academics,” she recalled, “I might have written but in the passive voice, and that is not the voice of a sportswriter. I had never worked on school newspapers — majored in art history, what the heck — and had to come up with a Plan B, which was making banana bread.”
She might have had cranberry bread on her mind, however, when she wound up in the right place at the right time to become a writer. Ludtke’s grandmother had a place on the Cape, Hyannisport to be exact. One summer day Ludtke helped rescue neighbor Ethel Kennedy, who was having trouble bringing her boat ashore.
That resulted in an invitation to dinner at the Kennedy place. One of the other guests was ex-NFL star, and Monday Night Football broadcaster, Frank Gifford.
They conversed.
“You know, for a girl, you know a lot about sports,” Gifford told her.
He also invited her to see him the next time she was in New York. She did. That was the beginning of Ludtke’s new Plan B. Who knows how different banana bread would be today if not for that dinner with Frank Gifford?
Even for a girl who knew a lot about sports, navigating its male-dominated world was difficult. Eventually, Ludtke persevered and wound up writing about baseball, a craft that did not come naturally to her.
“I was a terrible, terrible, terrible writer,” she said, “but I found a few mentors and worked wih them.”
Not having access to baseball clubhouses put her at a disadvantage, naturally. When she tried to get it, Ludtke was accused of being a voyeur, not a reporter. The general baseball public figured, she said, “It’s because the players are naked. Oh my gosh, she’s gonna go in there and see them.
“Before the game, though, they were all in their uniforms so why wasn’t I in there? The bottom line is that it was never about nudity. That was the fig leaf. It was about exclusion.”
Ludtke won her lawsuit and crossed the gender line. The notion of women covering sports has gone from novelty to necessity.
She has written a book about her journey, “Locker Room Talk.” Ludtke will be back at Polar Park to expand on that on July 25 for another edition of the Lucchino Writers Series.
A light lunch is always provided for such events. If it is not on the menu for this one, banana bread should be.
Bill Ballou can be reached at vetgoalie@aol.com
