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The Kid from Diamond Street: the extraordinary story of baseball legend Edith Houghton

A beautifully told picture-book biography about a little known bit of sports history.  Even though an all-woman’s baseball league may not have come to be until WWII, when all the men were overseas, but all-women professional teams go back at least until the 1920s.  This book tells the story of Baseball Hall-of-Famer Edith Houghton who joined the Philadelphia Bobbies (an all-female team, so named because all the players bobbed their hair), as starting short-stop at the age of 10.  In 1925, at the age of 13, when most people she knew had never been outside of Philadelphia, Edith traveled with the Bobbies to Japan and spent two months traveling from town to town playing against men’s teams.  The text is rich in details that really tell the tale, and the water-color illustrations do a fabulous job of setting the scene and capturing the mood of the era. It is a wonderfully inspiring bit of history.