HAMILTON'S  ALL-AMERICAN  GIRL
by Kaye Prince-Hollenberg

Entered into pop culture history and contemporary memory by the 1992 movie A League of Their Own (and two subsequent TV series of the same name), the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League existed from 1943-1954. During its 12-season history, 68 of the approximately 600 women who signed contracts with the league hailed from Canada. Only one came from Hamilton, Ontario.

Mary Margaret Stark was born 13 August 1923 in Toronto but moved with her family to Hamilton before her seventh birthday. Known as May to distinguish her from her same-named mother, Stark appears in dozens of Hamilton Spectator articles from 1937 onward, many noting her lethal left-handed pitching. While still in high school, a day before her 16th birthday, Stark broke the national junior baseball throw record at the Canadian women’s track and field championships. Earlier the same year, she won the same novice category—along  with basketball throw and shot put—while simultaneously being named the novice girls’ champion at Delta’s annual Collegiate Field Day.

Stark began pitching at just 11-years old, and for years played for multiple ladies’ softball and fastball teams in Hamilton including the Hamilton Pats, Good Wills, Remington Rands, Arliss Champions, U.E. Ladies, Circle Club, and Hamilton Ladies. Many of the home games for these teams were played at Hamilton’s Victoria Park. The southpaw was lured away from Hamilton in 1945 by Toronto’s Sunday Morning Class, which was considered one of the best teams in Canada at the time.

Throughout her baseball career, the spelling of her name varied between May and Mae, and after joining the Toronto team, the use of Mae seemed to become the norm; during her time in the AAGPBL, she was officially known as Mae Starck (without explanation for the spelling discrepancy), and that name appears on her travel documents, but the Stark spelling also appears in multiple newspaper reports. It was while pitching for Sunday Morning Class that Stark was scouted to join the AAGPBL. In April 1947, she travelled with the league to Cuba for spring training.

1947 was the first year that the AAGPBL held spring training outside the US. The Brooklyn Dodgers also trained in Havana that year because Jackie Robinson, attending his first major league spring training, was barred from playing with the team at their usual facilities in Florida due to policies disallowing white and black players from competing against each other. According to newspaper reports from the time, the AAGPBL drew larger crowds than the Dodgers—in part because most of the AAGPBL spectators were men getting their first chance to see skilled women baseball players outfitted in short-skirted uniforms.

In early May 1947, two weeks after arriving in Havana, Stark travelled back to the US with the rest of the league and joined the Rockford Peaches for a series of pre-season barnstorming exhibition games with the Grand Rapids Chicks. Reporting on these games shows that Stark played well, including a game in Lexington, Kentucky where she set down 16 batters in a row. The game in Lexington may have been her final one in the AAGPBL. Although AAGPBL president, Max Carey, called Stark “one of the best all-around players to be picked up by the scouts this year,” nine days later she was back home in Canada. A Hamilton Spectator article from the time claims that Stark “announced that she will stay in amateur ranks as the Big Time loop was too tough on players.”  Famed Canadian athlete, women’s sports advocate, and newspaper columnist Bobbie Rosenfeld wrote about Stark often in her Globe & Mail column, and noted upon her return, “it must be rough, because the gal from Hamilton is no less fragile than an Amazon.” Rules for the Sunnyside League (of which Sunday Morning Class was part) also disallowed “professional” players from playing on amateur teams. However, since Stark returned before playing in any in-season games in the AAGPBL, she was allowed to keep her amateur status.

In 1948, Stark briefly played for the National Girls Baseball League (another pro loop based in Chicago that used softball rules) but returned to Canada upon the death of her father. She rejoined Sunday Morning Class that same year and stayed through at least 1949. Her playing career seems to have come to an end in 1952 after back surgery and a dispute with the Provincial Women’s Softball Union regarding her amateur status.

In 1953 Stark coached the Steelworkers’ team as part of the Hamilton and District Ladies’ League, and by 1962 she was attending the University of Western Ontario, working towards a degree in recreation. She lived in the Homeside neighborhood of Hamilton, in the house she grew up in, and never married or had children. However, through her continued coaching and work as secretary of the Hamilton Fastball Association, Program Director at the Ottawa Street YWCA, and Supervisor of girls’ programs for Hamilton’s recreation department, she impacted the lives of many in the city.

Stark died in Hamilton in 1992 and, along with the other 67 Canadian members of the AAGPBL, was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1998. When I first began this research, Stark’s AAGPBL profile page was blank and misidentified her as pitching right-handed, but now with the reception of this article her profile has been updated and reflects the true spirit of the woman she was.