"Tiby"

She was a baseball star. At bat, a good hitter. On the basepaths, a fast and fearless runner.

Born in 1922 in Los Angeles, CA, Thelma "Tiby" Eisen became interested in sports when she was around twelve or thirteen years old. By fourteen, she was playing in a semi-pro softball league. At eighteen, she was a fullback in what would be a short-lived professional football league for women. And in 1944, Tiby joined the American Girls Professional Baseball League, where she would play in 966 games, stealing 674 bases. After her professional baseball career ended, she played in a local Los Angeles softball league.

Years later, while helping establish the women's exhibit in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1993, she said, "We're trying to record this so we have our place in history. It's important to keep our baseball league in the limelight. It gets pushed into the background ... [just as] women have been pushed into the background forever. If they knew more about our league, perhaps in the future some women will say, 'Hey, maybe we can do it again.'"

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Sources: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/eisen-thelma-tiby / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelma_Eisen / photograph taken in 1945, American Jewish Historical Society Photography Collection, Center for Jewish History, NYC (https://www.flickr.com/.../center_for_jewish.../5530700036/)