Wilma Briggs
| Wilma Briggs | |||
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| Left fielder | |||
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Born: November 6, 1930 East Greenwich, Rhode Island |
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| Career statistics | |||
| Batting average | .258 | ||
| Home runs | 43 | ||
| Runs batted in | 301 | ||
| Games played | 691 | ||
| Teams | |||
| Career highlights and awards | |||
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Wilma Briggs [Briggsie] (born November 6, 1930) is a former left fielder who played from 1948 through 1954 in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Listed at 5' 4", 138 lb., she batted left-handed and threw right-handed.
Baseball historians rank Briggs among the most stellar hitters in AAGPBL history. She led the league in home runs during the 1953 season, ranks second in the all-time home runs list (43) behind Eleanor Callow (55) and over Dorothy Schroeder (42) and Jean Geissinger (41), and was one of only 14 players to collect 300 or more career runs batted in, yet she was never selected to the All-Star team.
A native of East Greenwich, Rhode Island, Briggs is one of eleven children in the family of Fred Briggs, a dairy farmer, and Edythe (née Hathaway) Briggs, a housewife. She grew up in a family farm in East Greenwich where baseball was considered of vital importance, as her father was a semi-professional pitcher, catcher and coach, while one of her six brothers played in the Chicago Cubs minor league system.
At early age, Briggs was interested in participating in baseball, thanks to her older two brothers, and she was never too young to follow in their footsteps. After milking the cows, her father used to hit ground balls in their back yard to Wilma and her brothers, and they would field the ball and pitch it back to him. No matter how poor the pitch was, he would hit it back. Mr. Briggs managed his own team, which came to be known as the Frenchtown Farmers. By the time Wilma was 13, her father would put her in the Farmers' games, along with her six brothers, though she never had a starting position. But he would always put her in the game and made sure she took at least a turn at bat. After turning 16, she played on her high school boys squad in a summer league.
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