.susanorlean remembers Maxine Kline Randall (1929-2022), who was a pitcher on the Fort Wayne Daisies from 1948 until 1954.
Maxine Kline Randall was known as Mousie, because she carried a gray rubber mouse for good luck when she played baseball. Nicknames are practically regulation gear in the sport. Her teammates on the Fort Wayne Daisies, where she was a pitcher from 1948 until 1954, included a Swish, a Cookie, a Scoop, a Rebel, a Pinky, a Blackie, a Giggles, a Horsey, a Squeaky, a Toots, two Leftys, a Pee Wee, and a Grasshopper.
Randall grew up on a farm in a small town in south-central Michigan. She was dimpled and lanky. She played sports in school, and was known to throw a nice fastball and have iron-fisted control. She never imagined that someone someday might pay her to play ball. But her timing was on the mark. In 1942, the American armed forces drafted more than three million men. In 1943, the number reached almost three and a half million, the highest in U.S. history.
Randall tried out for the Daisies in her senior year of high school. Her parents, she said, “were all for it,” even though it meant that she was often away from home during the season. Some of the players were as young as fifteen. Randall was not much older and no more worldly, but she had a knack for nurturing her younger teammates. “I’d never flown before joining the team, never stayed in a hotel, never travelled,” Dolly Vanderlip Ozburn, who also pitched for the Daisies, told me recently.
Randall was a bit of a stealth weapon for the Daisies. She looked too thin to be strong, but she was steely. She pitched two no-hitters and a seventeen-inning game that ended only because of curfew. In one of her best seasons, she won twenty-three games. To honor that achievement, she was called to home plate after a game, where the fans draped her with a garland made of twenty-three one-dollar bills.
After the league folded, in 1954, Randall played several seasons with the Allington All-Stars, a team that barnstormed across the country—playing men’s teams. After that, she took a job at an auto factory. She met her husband Robert, a toolmaker, there. They lived on a farm near Hillsdale, Michigan, just a few miles from where she had grown up. It was a quiet life, at least compared with her seasons on the mound before thousands of spectators.
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