Author goes nine chapters

Elia Powers

When the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim open their 2005 season tonight

against the Texas Rangers, Corona del Mar resident Jean Ardell will

be at the ballpark, likely with a beer and a scorecard in hand.

She is an Angels season-ticket holder, captivated by the Halos

from April to October.

This off-season, Ardell found another way to immerse herself in

the sport. She released her first full-length book, “Breaking into

Baseball: Women and the National Pastime,” a culmination of 13 years

of researching, interviewing and writing that took her to places like

Chicago and Cooperstown, N.Y.

The concept came to Ardell when she was a graduate student at USC.

She began researching the topic in early 1992, a few months before

the release of the renowned women’s baseball film “A League of Their

Own.”

“If I wanted to have confirmation that I was on the right track,

that movie was it,” Ardell said.

Baseball anthologies that document pennant races and record chases

dominate library shelves. Few retrospectives give considerable space

to the role of women in the sport.

Ardell began the process by writing nine paragraphs explaining her

attraction to the national pastime. Raised in Queens among passionate

sports fans, she said playing baseball with friends on the streets of

New York gave her a feeling of acceptance.

The original passage serves as a preface to the nine-chapter,

278-page text, which sells for $19.95 on selected websites.

She said the sport also helped her forge a relationship with her

father, an ardent New York Giants supporter.

“He was relaxed at the ballpark, and I always associated baseball

games with sharing good times together,” she said.

Ardell’s father taught her how to keep score. He taught her how to

compute batting averages and read the scoreboard.

She learned to appreciate the game and some of its most

charismatic characters.

The infamous Yogi Berra saying, “When you come to a fork in the

road, take it,” is printed on a wall in Ardell’s home.

She moved to Southern California in 1964, six years after the

Giants relocated to the northern part of the state.

She married Dan Ardell, a former Angels player who spent a few

weeks in the big leagues and a few years in the minors.

For her book, Jean Ardell conducted interviews with prominent

female athletes, including Ila Borders, a former starting pitcher at

Vanguard University who also played in a men’s professional baseball

league.

The majority of Ardell’s information came from pouring over

historical texts. She made frequent trips to the Baseball Hall of

Fame and joined the Society for American Baseball Research.

The organization invited Ardell to speak at one of its conventions

in San Diego.

“I walked into the room and saw 400 men,” she said. “I thought to

myself, ‘What am I doing here?’”

Ardell said she received a positive response from the audience.

But research taught her that women historically found themselves

outside the baseball mainstream. They were seen as distractions in

the stands and disturbances in the bars after the game. But the sport

still needed women to fill the seats and look after the families,

Ardell writes.

Women also served as baseball executives and members of the sports

media.

Ardell consulted photojournalist Tammy Lechner, who covered the

Los Angeles Dodgers for the Los Angeles Times, on sections of the

book.

“It’s wonderful she has put forward the fact that women have been

involved in baseball from the beginning,” Lechner said.

Ardell’s book highlights women’s involvement on the field. It

includes a section on the Colorado Silver Bullets, an all-female team

that played against men’s professional and collegiate teams in the

1990s.

Of particular interest to Ardell are women who fraternize with

baseball players. Dubbed “baseball Annies” in the movie “Bull

Durham,” she devotes an entire chapter to their motivations for

courting athletes. (Ardell, in the book, admits to a crush on former

Yankee Mickey Mantle.)

The book ends with a look back at the Angels’ 2002 World Series

championship and the excitement it produced in the Ardell household.

Ardell said she intended the book to be uplifting.

“I worked hard not to make this a victimization story,” she said.

“I wanted to show the amazing things women did despite the setbacks.”

* ELIA POWERS is the enterprise and general assignment reporter.

He may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or by e-mail at

[email protected].