Isabel Álvarez obit

Women's Baseball Star Isabel Álvarez has died

She was not on the list.

She was a Cuban pitcher and outfielder who played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League between the 1949 and 1954 seasons. She batted and threw left-handed.

Isabel Álvarez was the youngest Cuban player to join the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a women's circuit born during World War II and made famous in the 1992 film A League of Their Own.

Álvarez was born and raised in Havana, Cuba, and learned to play baseball from a neighbor. At age 13, she joined the Estrellas Cubanas (Cuban Stars), an All-Star team modeled after the AAGPBL. The first AAGPBL spring training outside the United States was held in 1947 in Cuba, as part of a plan to create an International League of Girls Baseball.

From 1948 to 1949 seven Cubanas played in the AAGPBL: Isora del Castillo, Luisa Gallegos, Mirtha Marrero, Migdalia Pérez, Gloria Ruiz, Zonia Vialat and Álvarez. At the age of 15, she joined the league with the encouragement of her mother, who felt United States offered better opportunities than Cuba did. Álvarez had difficulty communicating in her new country, but credited some teammates with helping her through the rough times.

Álvarez moved around for a while, as the AAGPBL shifted players as needed to help teams stay afloat. She entered the league in 1949 with the Chicago Colleens, playing for them two years before joining the Fort Wayne Daisies (1951) and then found herself on the move again, this time to the Battle Creek Belles (1951), and then the Kalamazoo Lassies (1953) and Grand Rapids Chicks (1954), before returning to the Daisies in the league's final year (1954).

Álvarez had three teammates in Chicago who were also from Cuba, so they could help one another with the language and other customs. When she moved to Fort Wayne she had no one who really spoke the language, which made the adjustment a bit tougher. Her most productive season came in 1950 with the Colleens, when she posted a 6–6 record and hit a career-high .256 in 12 games. She pitched 13 games with the Daisies in 1951, earning two wins and no losses with seven strikeouts and a 3.23 ERA in 39 innings of work. In 1953 she hit .195 for the Lassies, while collecting career-numbers in games (53), at-bats (123), runs batted in (12) and hits (24).

By the time the league disbanded, she had become a U.S. citizen, was learning English and began laboring at a number of jobs, eventually finding work at General Electric in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Many years later, she returned to Cuba to visit her family and to try to locate some of the early AAGPBL players, in order to make a documentary titled Cuba on My Mind: The Baseball Journey of Isabel Alvarez. The film was made possible with support from the Indiana Humanities Council.

Álvarez displayed talents in a wide range of other sports and activities in her native Cuba, including fencing, bowling and modeling bathing suits. "My mother wanted me to be a talk-show radio broadcaster or go into physical education as a gym teacher", Álvarez said. "She had me like a little doll. I didn’t know about that. I just played ball."

A longtime resident of Fort Wayne, she was still active as a reporter and columnist for Touching Bases, the AAGPBL Players Association newsletter, and as an active AAGPBL and NEIBA member.

Teams

 

    Chicago Colleens (1949–'50)

    Fort Wayne Daisies (1951, 1954[end])

    Battle Creek Belles (1951)

    Kalamazoo Lassies (1953)

    Grand Rapids Chicks (1954[start])