The female reporter who broke baseball’s barrier

Doris O’Donnell was the first of her kind, said Pat McManamon in AOL.com. Back in 1957, O’Donnell was a cub reporter at the Cleveland News when her editor handed her a tough assignment: to shadow baseball’s Cleveland Indians on an East Coast road trip. Covering baseball had been considered a man’s job, and it wasn’t long before her fellow reporters and the Indians’ manager at the time, Kerby Farrell, let her know it. “He said, ‘Go home and make babies,’” O’Donnell, now 89, recalls. “That was my introduction to the Cleveland Indians.”

Booted from the press box multiple times, O’Donnell kept following the team and writing stories, slowly gaining the trust of individual players. Her biggest challenge came when she set out to interview the prickly Red Sox star Ted Williams. At first, Williams was openly hostile. “He called me every name you can think of. Bitch. Whore. Whatever,” says O’Donnell. She kept at him until she won his grudging respect. “I got probably the only interview he had given a newspaper person.” Williams later apologized, giving O’Donnell the same piece of advice she now gives to female reporters who aspire to follow in her footsteps: “Never let those guys push you around.”

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