Ella

Ella

Ella Black stopped writing for sporting life in November 1890, but every now and then, her name reappeared in its pages.

On December 3, 1892, the paper published an unby-lined list of baseball notes.

Red's player manager and future White Sox and Black Sox owner Charles Kamski's head, it said,

was becoming liberally sprinkled with gray hairs. 40-year-old Chicago Colts first baseman, Cap Anson, reportedly had no intention

of retiring, and also said he was quite ready to shoot John Montgomery Ward or any other man

in the baseball profession. He may have meant in billiards, or it would

have been bigger news. 1890 Pittsburgh Berger's player manager Ned Hanlon, by then in Baltimore,

believed that all bunted hits that go foul should be called strikes in order to prevent

intentional fouling of the ball. And Al Reach, founder and president of the Philadelphia Phillies,

considered baseball far from dead and said that with a few changes in the playing rules

and a little strengthening of the weaker teams, everything would be all right again.

Amid all of that news, this item appeared.

Ella Black and Irene Meredith, the rival Feminine Writers on the game,

seem to have gone out on strikes together.

The almost certainly pseudonymous Irene Meredith was a woman in Cincinnati who had written about baseball for a local Pittsburgh paper, the Pittsburgh leader.

In 1890, Ella Black, the first woman to write about baseball for a national publication, had called Meredith the only

other feminine baseball writer than myself. Irene's writing has been lost, but it seems to have

stopped around the same time Ella's did. When that 1892 note appeared, readers hadn't heard from

Ella in the two years since her last sporting life column ran, nor would they hear from her again.

The words that closed her penultimate column, which she wrote about the Players League,

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