c1910 Hopkins Bros. Champion Lady Baseball Club

Hall of Fame executive J. L. Wilkinson posing with members of his "Hopkins Bros. Champion Lady Baseball Club," circa 1910. The photo features Wilkinson standing in the center of the back row with eleven members of the club, some of whom are clearly men. Women's baseball teams, known as "Bloomer Girls," were a popular novelty during the early 1900s. Wilkinson, who was an outstanding player prior to suffering a broken wrist, led one of the most famous of those clubs. Sponsored by a local Iowa sporting goods company, Hopkins Brothers, the team barnstormed all over the Midwest. Traveling by Pullman Palace railroad car, the team brought everything they needed, including fencing, a portable grandstand, and even lighting so it could play night games. A few years later Wilkinson barnstormed with an "All-Nations Team," which was made up of players of different nationalities and ethnic groups, including Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, Frenchmen, Cubans, Filipinos, Germans, Jews and white American players.Although Wilkinson was a white man, he is best remembered today as a pioneer figure in the Negro Leagues. After the All-Nations Team disbanded, Wilkinson took the best black ballplayers from the club and formed the Kansas City Monarchs, which he developed into one of the most successful franchises in Negro League history. The Monarchs were inaugural members of the original Negro National League in 1920 and then later the Negro American League, and won an unprecedented seventeen League pennants and two Colored World Series. In the early 1930s Wilkinson helped revolutionize the game by introducing night baseball and in 1945 he signed Jackie Robinson to his first professional contract. The Monarchs sent more black ballplayers to the white Major Leagues than any other Negro League team, and nine of Wilkinson's Negro League players were eventually elected to the Hall of Fame, as well as Ernie Banks and Jackie Robinson. Wilkinson was elected to Hall of Fame in 2006, along with a sixteen other deserving Negro League players and executives.