Helen Earlene Risinger (March 20, 1927 – July 29, 2008) was a pitcher who played from through in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Listed at 6' 2", 137 lb., she batted and threw right-handed.
One of the tallest players in the league's history, Earlene Risinger was an All-Star pitcher who helped the Grand Rapids Chicks win a championship title in 1953. Unlike many of the AAGPBL girls she played with, Risinger never played organized softball when she was growing up in Oklahoma and entered the league after full overhand pitching was adopted in 1948.
Early life
Earlene Risinger was born and raised in Hess, a tiny village of Oklahoma with less than thirty people, located in the southwest part of the state just above the Texas border. She was the oldest of four children into the family of Homer Francis and Lizzie Mae (née Steen) Risinger, and grew up in a sharecropping family surrounded by hard times. Her father worked in a gas station, and when his salary did not stretch far enough, his skill hunting jack rabbits put food on the family table. Meanwhile, her mother was a housewife and had a garden; there were always pinto beans to fill empty stomachs. Tall and slender, her parents dubbed her ″Beans″ because she liked pork and beans for breakfast. She especially enjoyed watching her father play at first base on a sandlot ball team that played on Sunday afternoons.
Mr. Risinger taught her daughter to throw a baseball at an early age, and they played catch almost every day. By the time she was six, Earlene was a regular on Sunday afternoons down at the cow pasture playing ball with her father, her uncles, and her cousins. Baseball ran in the Risinger family, and he taught me to throw 'overhand' from the jump go, she explained in her autobiography.
After graduating in 1945, Risinger had few prospects in her own right, because she did not have money to attend college immediately. Instead, she was forced to work for more than two years in local cotton fields earning 50 cents an hour, thinking this might her future as there were no factories or anything like that anywhere nearby. I started working in the cotton fields so I could have shoes on my feet and clothes to wear. I was with no future, she clarified.
An avid reader, Risinger stopped daily at the local grocery store after her daily work in the fields, where the sympathetic owner let her read The Oklahoman newspaper without charge. In the spring of 1947, she was reading the newspaper in the store and knew about a traveling All-American Girls baseball team. At the time, she had no idea that girls could play baseball professionally. Then she sent a postcard to the sports page editor, whose by-line appeared in the article. He forwarded her card to the league's office in Chicago, and pretty soon she received a letter asking her to attend a tryout at Oklahoma City. Encouraged by the men of her family, with whom she had been playing baseball and perfecting her pitches for years, the reluctant girl attended the training camp and passed the test. After that, she received an offer to play for the Rockford Peaches, a well-balanced team managed by Bill Allington.
Delighted with the opportunity to play, Risinger borrowed money from a bank and started on a train for Rockford, Illinois, the home of the Peaches. But she became homesick and got only as far as Chicago before returning home. She then went back to the cotton fields to repay the bank loan.
But in 1948 a second chance came. Risinger was scouted again, this time by Shirley Jameson, and the league also expanded to ten teams while creating two divisions. Risinger decided to try again. This time she boarded the train for Springfield, Illinois, where she reported to the expansion Springfield Sallies.
AAGPBL career
1948-1949
In her rookie season, Risinger compiled a 3–8 record with a 3.35 earned run average in 22 games for the awful Sallies, who finished as the worst team in the league, getting roughed up as a last-place club with a 41–84 record, ending 35 and a half games behind the Racine Belles in the Western Division. The Sallies, along with the expansion Chicago Colleens, folded at the end of the season because of poor attendance and a lack of local support. The next year, both franchises became rookie training teams. Some players remained in Colleens and Sallies uniforms while travelling, but other players were sent to teams across the league, Risinger among others. From 1949 through 1954 she played for the Grand Rapids Chicks, a team that became her surrogate family based in a town that she came to call home.