Claim:
Jackie Mitchell, a 17-year-old girl, struck out baseball legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back-to-back in a 1931 game between the Chattanooga Lookouts and the New York Yankees.
Rating:
Context
Box scores in newspapers that covered the game recorded Mitchell’s strikeouts. Some have argued the strikeouts were staged, but there’s no record of either Ruth or Gehrig ever suggesting they intentionally missed Mitchell’s pitches.
According to posts that have circulated online for years, a teenage girl once struck out baseball legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back-to-back.
For example, one particularly popular post (archived) said 17-year-old Jackie Mitchell took the pitcher’s mound in an exhibition game for the Chattanooga Lookouts and struck out the two great hitters back-to-back, but baseball’s commissioner voided her contract and called the sport “too strenuous” for women days after Mitchell’s achievement.
The post read in full:
She struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig—and then baseball struck her out.
On this day in 1931, 17-year-old Jackie Mitchell stood on the pitcher’s mound for the Chattanooga Lookouts and made history. In a jaw-dropping exhibition game, she threw three pitches that stunned the world—two of the greatest hitters in baseball, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, walked back to the dugout shaking their heads. A teenager. A girl. And a legend was born.
Jackie wasn’t just lucky—she was trained by Hall of Famer Dazzy Vance, her neighbor growing up, who taught her his signature drop pitch. She signed one of the first pro baseball contracts ever given to a woman and proved she belonged on the field. But days after her unforgettable debut, the baseball commissioner voided her contract, calling the sport “too strenuous” for women.
Still, Jackie didn’t back down. She kept playing, barnstorming across the country, dazzling crowds who came to see the girl who struck out two icons. By the time she retired in 1937, she’d already changed the game.
Jackie Mitchell’s story isn’t just about baseball—it’s about the courage to throw hard when the world tells you to sit down.
Prior to that post, Mitchell’s story appeared on Instagram (archived) in October 2025, on TikTok (archived) in November, on X (archived) in December 2025 and on Facebook (archived) in January 2026. The various versions of the story add some details to the one in the above post, including that Mitchell pitched against the New York Yankees on April 2, 1931, and that she took four pitches to strike out Ruth and just three for Gehrig.
Mitchell’s story really happened, as can be confirmed in box scores published in The New York Times and Chattanooga Daily Times the day after the game. Video footage of Ruth’s at-bat against her also survives. As a result, we’ve rated the claim true.
Some have argued the strikeouts were staged and that Ruth and Gehrig were not actually trying to get a hit against Mitchell. Because Mitchell, Ruth and Gehrig are no longer alive, it’s not possible to independently confirm their intentions during the game. That said, no one involved with the Yankees or the Lookouts at the time ever claimed the strikeouts were staged.
Mitchell’s strikeouts
While sources agree on the basic facts of this story, they vary somewhat on the details of what happened immediately before and after the game. This is at least in part because contemporary reporting on the events of the game differed from newspaper to newspaper around the country.
On March 28, 1931, Joe Engle, owner of the minor league Chattanooga Lookouts baseball team, signed 17-year-old Jackie Mitchell to play in an April 1, 1931, exhibition game against the New York Yankees, according to an article on MLB.com. Bad weather postponed the game to April 2. The Yankees agreed to play the Lookouts while on their way back to New York from spring training in Florida, suggesting the reason for the game’s original date was just convenience.
Some sources, such as the National Women’s History Museum, say Mitchell was signed March 25, about a week before her game against the Yankees. While MLB.com said the game was postponed because of rain, the Society for American Baseball Research said the game was postponed due to cold.
The Lookouts started pitcher Clyde Barfoot on that day, and he was taken out of the game after the first two batters because he allowed a double and a run-scoring single, according to the Society for American Baseball Research. That’s when Mitchell entered the game — just in time to pitch against the legendary duo of Ruth and Gehrig, who an article in Smithsonian Magazine pointed out were the heart of a lineup called “Murderer’s Row.”
Mitchell started Ruth’s at-bat by throwing a ball. She then made him swing and miss on the next two pitches before catching Ruth looking at a called third strike. Then Gehrig came to the plate and proceeded to swing and miss at three consecutive pitches. Mitchell walked the next batter on five pitches before her manager took her out of the game. Smithsonian Magazine described the at-bats in more detail:
First up was Ruth, who tipped his hat at the girl on the mound “and assumed an easy batting stance,” a reporter wrote. Mitchell went into her motion, winding her left arm “as if she were turning a coffee grinder.” Then, with a side-armed delivery, she threw her trademark sinker (a pitch known then as “the drop”). Ruth let it pass for a ball. At Mitchell’s second offering, Ruth “swung and missed the ball by a foot.” He missed the next one, too, and asked the umpire to inspect the ball. Then, with the count 1-2, Ruth watched as Mitchell’s pitch caught the outside corner for a called strike three. Flinging his bat down in disgust, he retreated to the dugout.
Next to the plate was Gehrig, who would bat .341 in 1931 and tie Ruth for the league lead in homers. He swung at and missed three straight pitches. But Mitchell walked the next batter, Tony Lazzeri, and the Lookouts’ manager pulled her from the game, which the Yankees went on to win, 14-4.
Mitchell was supposed to pitch longer, but she had reportedly overworked her arm while preparing for the game.
Smithsonian Magazine uploaded footage from Mitchell’s outing, which it said was a newsreel Mitchell saved of Ruth’s three strikes. The footage starts at 4:27 in the video below:
The Smithsonian Magazine article noted that many reports said baseball’s commissioner voided Mitchell’s contract on the grounds that the sport was “too strenuous for women,” but the magazine did not find evidence of this. Either way, Mitchell did not continue pitching for the main Lookouts roster after this game.
She played on numerous teams under days-long contracts for the next couple of years. In June 1931, the Huntsville Times in Alabama reported she was playing for the Junior Lookouts, which is largely where the Lookouts’ owner put rookies he couldn’t fit on the main roster. In February 1933, the Chattanooga Daily Times reported Mitchell had pitched in 100 games for minor league teams and gave up just six home runs in those games. She wound up playing for a show team for a few years before retiring in 1937, possibly because she grew tired of the “circus-like” antics of the team, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
The box scores
Box scores of Mitchell’s game appeared in both the Chattanooga Daily Times and The New York Times. Both papers showed the same stats.
According to the box scores, Mitchell walked one, struck out two and allowed zero hits while getting two outs. Although the box scores don’t specify who Mitchell struck out, the numbers align with the story of her game above, and the articles attached to the box scores both reported that Mitchell struck out Ruth and Gehrig.
Further confirming the story, The Atlanta Journal’s article about the game included a photo of Ruth swinging and missing at one of Mitchell’s pitches. It matches what can be seen in the newsreel Smithsonian Magazine shared.
Some believe strikeouts were staged
Various baseball historians have argued for or against both versions of the story: one being that Ruth and Gehrig struck out on purpose, the other being that Mitchell’s strikeout was entirely legitimate.
Some of the circumstances around the game do support the idea that the strikeouts were staged. Joe Engle, the Lookouts’ owner, had the reputation of being a showman who put on stunts to promote the team. For example, he once traded a player for a turkey, which he then cooked and served to sportswriters, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
Engle was the one who signed Mitchell and organized the game with the Yankees, which he scheduled to take place on April 1 — April Fools’ Day.
But there are also many reasons to believe that Mitchell’s success against two of baseball’s greatest hitters was legitimate.
Mitchell grew up learning to pitch from her neighbor Arthur “Dazzy” Vance, an MLB pitcher who was later inducted into the sport’s Hall of Fame and who led the National League in strikeouts for seven consecutive seasons, according to an article on MiLB.com, the MLB’s minor league baseball website. On top of this, Mitchell was already playing semi-pro baseball (and basketball) for both men’s and women’s teams when she was 16, MLB.com reported, and was training with former Major League Baseball pitcher Kid Elberfeld when Engle signed her.
And aside from her background, Mitchell had the advantage in being a left-handed pitcher with an unusual throwing motion that batters hadn’t seen before. The article on MiLB.com cites former National Baseball Hall of Fame research director Tim Wiles as saying, “much of batting has to do with timing and familiarity with a pitcher, and everything about Jackie Mitchell was unfamiliar to Ruth and Gehrig.”
Wiles told Smithsonian Magazine something similar. He believed Mitchell was arguably favored in the matchup, being a left-handed pitcher throwing with an unusual sidearm style to left-handed batters who had never faced her before. Not to mention that Ruth struck out often — to the point that he led the league in the stat five times.
Jean Patrick, the author a book on Mitchell’s legendary strikeouts, told MLB.com that she believed the strikeouts were legitimate, but that the Yankee legends would have likely “figured Mitchell out” if they got to face her a second time.
The newsreel’s low quality makes it difficult to discern speed and break of the pitches. However, some skeptics have pointed to Ruth’s seemingly theatric anger, which can be seen in the newsreel when he slams his bat against the ground, as suggesting that he was putting on an act. These skeptics included many of the newspapers then reporting on the game, many of which dramatized Ruth’s reaction, such as in a Long Beach Sun article that erroneously claimed Ruth threw his bat against the dugout.
Many newspapers of the time used language implying the strikeouts were staged, rejecting the notion the two batters could genuinely strike out against a teenage girl. Wiles suggested this narrative may have been an effort to preserve male egos. “Even hitters as great as Ruth and Gehrig would be reluctant to admit they’d really been struck out by a 17-year-old girl,” he told MiLB.com and Smithsonian Magazine.
Much of the debate over whether the strikeouts were legitimate has been centered on whether the people involved would be willing to stage the strikeouts. One of the Yankees players at the time said the team’s manager was too competitive to have instructed his players to strike out. The player who was next up to bat when Mitchell was taken out of the game said he planned to hit the ball and had no intention of striking out, but he believed Ruth and Gehrig may have agreed between themselves to strike out because it was “a good promotion, a good show.”
Tony Lazzeri, the batter Mitchell walked, reportedly said he was told not to “hit one up the middle and kill her.” According to him, “don’t kill her with a line drive” was the only instruction he received.
None of the players — from the Yankees nor the Lookouts — ever claimed the strikeouts were staged. Statements from Mitchell suggest that if Ruth and Gehrig had colluded to miss her pitches, she wasn’t in on it.
For example, according to the Chattanooga Daily Times, when Mitchell left the mound and returned to the dugout, where her father was reportedly waiting for her on the bench, she told him:
“Daddy, do you reckon he really tried to hit that ball?” then, decisively, “I’d rather he’d knocked it out of the park than to think he’d fanned out on purpose!”
