RIGHT FIELDER RONNIE MEEHAN POSED AS A BOY TO PLAY IN THE BIG GAME
By Tasha Tsiaperas
Ten-year-old right fielder Ron Meehan was excellent in the championship game of the inaugural year of the Philadelphia Police Junior Athletic League – excellent enough to catch the eye of the Great Bambino. Meehan, known in the neighborhood as Ronnie, was named the MVP for hitting the game-winning run, or driving it in; no one quite remembers that exact detail. But they do remember that the two National Baseball Hall of Famers who were in attendance – Babe Ruth and Chief Bender – wanted to meet the game’s hero.
The little athlete ran up to Ruth, hand out and ball cap coming off. Ronnie’s braided pigtails tumbled down, revealing what only her teammates knew – she was a girl.
Babe Ruth signs a baseball for 10-year-old Ronnie Meehan at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park in July 1947. At Ronnie’s request, Ruth autographed a second ball for her brother John. John’s signed ball has long been lost, but Ronnie’s ball is now available in Heritage’s August 23-25 Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction.
Ruth was delighted. Girls weren’t allowed to play baseball, and the best player managed to get through a whole season undetected. He and Bender signed Ronnie’s baseball, and then she asked for them to sign a second for her older brother John, who played first base. After the game, the Meehan siblings got home, one tucking her ball away, the other likely using his to play catch with friends before it was lost to the neighborhood.
For decades, the Meehans thought the second signed ball was also lost.
John and his family had left Philadelphia, where Ronnie remained. John’s sons grew up hearing about Aunt Ronnie faking it as a boy for a whole baseball season, hiding her pigtails and playing as “Ron.” The family was proud that their Aunt Ronnie was so good at baseball that even in the 1940s, the neighborhood boys didn’t mind her playing on the team. The family knew about that July 1947 game at Shibe Park and how their Aunt Ronnie got a ball signed by the Babe Ruth.
Ruth signed one side of Ronnie’s ball, and fellow National Baseball Hall of Famer Charles “Chief” Bender signed the other.
“I heard about the ball, but I never saw it. It was always a mystery ball,” says Dan Meehan, John’s son and Ronnie’s nephew.
Ronnie, short for Veronica, kept the ball tucked away in a closet. The family didn’t know she still had it until after her death in the 1980s. An older sister found it and gave it to John, because he was at the game when Ronnie met Ruth. All the boys were told was their mom had grabbed it from her husband.
“We always thought Mom lost it,” Dan says. “Mom wasn’t the athlete in the family. Why would Mom care about a ball? She hates sports.”
A photograph in the July 28, 1947, edition of the ‘Philadelphia Evening Bulletin’ captures the moment Ruth signed one of two baseballs for Ronnie.
The legend of the ball was lost to time for a bit. It would come up occasionally in conversation, and Dan remembers asking his mother repeatedly about it. She would shrug off the questions, and the family moved on – until last year when Dan was helping his parents move out of their longtime home. He asked again about the ball, and this time his mother pulled a key out of a curio cabinet and said, “Oh, the safety-deposit box.”
For years, no one in the family knew that she had taken the ball, wrapped it in cotton and paper and locked it in a safe-deposit box at a small-town bank in Wisconsin. The ball had sat, again, for decades, completely safe from the elements and rough boys wanting to play catch.
Dan drove to Wisconsin to see if the ball really could be in the safe-deposit box. He carefully unwrapped the paper and the pull-apart cotton and was hit with the smell of leather. The ball practically looks new, and the autograph looks like Babe Ruth signed it last week instead of last century. That’s when he realized, “My mom was smart enough to know to get that baseball and literally put it 250 miles away.”
The ball, which is now open for bidding in Heritage’s August 23-25 Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction, is pristine.
“It was never thrown. It was never played with. It’s because it was given to a girl,” Dan says.
TASHA TSIAPERAS is a contributor to Intelligent Collector.