Earlene Risinger
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Born: March 20, 1927 Hess, Oklahoma |
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Died: July 29, 2008 (aged 81) Hess, Oklahoma |
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Helen Earlene Risinger (March 20, 1927 – July 29, 2008) was a pitcher who played from 1948 through 1954 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.
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.
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