Millie Deegan

Deegan was one of 25 players who made the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League clubs and hailed from New York City and State, including Muriel Bevis, Gloria Cordes, Nancy Mudge, Betty Trezza and Margaret Wigiser. Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, she was a star athlete at Abraham Lincoln High School and in 1935 was the "champion woman baseball thrower" in New York City. "Mildred Eleanor Deegan was born on Dec. 11, 1919, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst.... She excelled in track and field at Lincoln High School, and after graduation played amateur softball with a team called the Americanettes." She learned baseball from her father, coach of the Brooklyn Bloomer Girls team. As a teenager she placed second behind Babe Didrikson Zaharias in the javelin throw in the national meet before the 1936 Summer Olympics. However, at 16 she was too young to compete in the Olympics. Later, she played fastpitch softball for the New York Americanettes in 1938–39. In 1939 her batting average was .406. That year she was the guest of New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (along with other celebrities) at the opening day of the New York World's Fair. She played later with the Manhattan Beach Girls, who competed in the Metropolitan League in Madison Square Garden. Deegan hit a 250-foot home run inside the building. Babe Ruth, the only other player ever to hit a home run inside the Garden, was in attendance, and posed for a photograph with her, squeezing her biceps. Then, she gained the nickname of "the Babe Ruth of Women's Softball". ==Professional career==