Borders Pleased With First Season Female Minor Leaguer More Determined To Make Her Mark

She is immortalized on a stadium mural and also has a championship ring.

Ila Borders, the first woman to pitch in the minor leagues, has plenty of memories - both good and bad - after a season in the Northern League. Yet she is far less concerned about her place in history than the place she expects to fill with the Duluth-Superior Dukes in 1998.

“I told myself going there that I was going to enjoy this, because you never know how life’s going to turn,” the left-handed reliever said. “I honestly enjoyed it, but it was stressful for me every day.”

First, there was the anxiety of trying to make the St. Paul Saints. Then the disappointment of her failure the night she broke baseball’s gender barrier. She allowed three earned runs without getting an out in her first regular-season appearance.

But just as she seemed to be settling in with the Saints - she had a 3.00 ERA with St. Paul excluding her first outing - she was traded to the Dukes. She spent the rest of the season languishing in the bullpen with very little work because her coaches were skeptical of her ability.

There also was enormous fan interest wherever she went, and through the entire summer she faced the burden of proving she could compete with men.

Still, Borders played the full season, even pitching a scoreless inning in the championship series as Duluth-Superior beat Winnipeg for the independent league’s title.

“It was a dream, basically,” she said of the season.

Borders finished with no record and a 7.53 ERA in 15 regular-season games, allowing 24 hits over 14-1/3 innings while walking nine and striking out 11.

“I think striking out as many people as she did, which surprises me, that tells me she’s got the ability,” Phil Borders said of his daughter. “She just needs to work on some things to get ready for next year.”

Borders said the highlight of the summer was a return trip to play the Saints after she was traded. Her likeness had been included on a mural outside St. Paul’s Midway Stadium, an honor she compared with being in the Hall of Fame as the first woman to get a baseball scholarship (NAIA Southern California College, 1994) and a college victory.

“That was probably the biggest honor in my life, along with Cooperstown,” she said of the mural. “It doesn’t compute. It’s like, ‘That’s not me.”’

Borders appeared in only nine of 69 games after her trade to Duluth-Superior. She said the Dukes have told her they will bring her back next season.

Manager George Mitterwald, a former major league catcher, could not be reached for comment. He and pitching coach Mike Cuellar, who shared the A.L. Cy Young Award in 1969, both doubted Borders’ ability during the season.

Cuellar said last month that Borders should consider pitching for the Colorado Silver Bullets, a women’s professional team.

The criticism bothered Borders, but there were far more people cheering for her to succeed.

“All the people on the Saints treated me like a normal ballplayer,” she said. “It was awesome. But just talking to some scouts around, they were like, ‘Oh, a girl. What’s she doing here?’

“And in Duluth, it’s a little bit smaller town and I think at first they were kind of skeptical, too. But the fans there were great.”

The biggest knock on Borders is her fastball, which comes in somewhere in the mid- to high-70s (one pitch was clocked at 80 mph in a game at Thunder Bay). That was Mitterwald’s main criticism, and Borders plans an intense off-season weight training program she hopes will add 4-5 mph to her fastball.

She returned home after the Dukes won the title last week and is enrolled at Southern California College.

“I believe my fastball does the job,” Borders said. “I’m an off-speed pitcher. But I want to get (an extra) 5 percent on it so I can say, ‘Hey, this is what I do throw now. This is fast enough.’ I want to get it up to 82-83, and that’ll put the critics to rest.”