Callie Batts Maddox, Assistant Professor of Sport Leadership and Management (SLAM) recently won the 2018 Doug Pappas Award for the best oral research presentation at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) annual convention. Her presentation was titled "'Ty Cobb has Nothing on Her': Early Twentieth Century Women's Collegiate Baseball in Ohio”.

Maddox was chosen to give an oral presentation based on a blind peer-review process of abstract submissions where only 34 presenters were selected. Her abstract reads as follows:

These days, it is a given that intercollegiate baseball is for men only; the only analogous sport for college women is fast-pitch softball. Eighty to a hundred years ago, however, that was not the case. Callie Batts Maddox reveals that southern Ohio was a hotbed of women’s college baseball, with established programs at Miami University, the University of Cincinnati, Denison University, and elsewhere. Building on prior research by Dorothy Seymour Mills, Leslie Heaphy, and others, the history of baseball played by women expands considerably, reaching beyond elite northeastern women’s colleges into the heartland.

“I was quite surprised; this organization is best known for pioneering the use of data analytics (called sabermetrics) in baseball, so I wasn’t sure how well my work about women’s collegiate baseball in the early 20^th century would be received,” said Maddox. “But I got great feedback and a lot of people were excited about the work.” 

Read the official SABR announcement

In other news

Callie Maddox also inspired a new project to start a collegiate women's baseball club. Listen to the episode of our Reframe podcast featured below to learn more about this project.