09/06/2025
Praise for The Stray Pitch by the audio book's narrator
I couldn’t help but fall in love with 24-year-old Private Investigator Wendy Winkworth tackling her first job as a PI. She’s funny, fearless, irreverent, determined, with natural investigative instincts. I’m quite certain she was channeling Phillip Marlow as she narrates her inner thoughts on each piece of the puzzle she encounters working undercover in the Star-Spangled Girls Baseball league, where the star pitcher is murdered. The story got me interested in the real All American Girls Professional Baseball league (AAGPBL) operating from 1943-1954, made famous again by the movie A League of Their Own, with Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Madonna and many others.
The Stray Pitch takes place in 1950 when girls professional baseball began showing signs of wear. Its heyday was during WWII when every able-bodied male went off to war giving space for girls to take the field and help to raise the spirits of war weary public. But by the 50’s the men were back and re-taking front stage on the field. The players Wendy encounters in the Star-Spangled Hornets are an extremely competitive bunch, fighting to keep their place in a game whose days are numbered, making the players edgy, defensive, and suspicious of any perceived underlying motives. This atmosphere makes Wendy’s job even more challenging and she is not welcomed with open arms into the league. But as you’ll see she doesn’t scare easy!
Wendy, grew up in the backwoods, on a dilapidated farm in Northern Arkansas, with two brothers, a rather absent Maw and a Paw she didn’t meet until age 12, who wasn’t known to be law-abiding. She learned quick the ways of outlawing and eventually decided maybe it was better to put this hard-earned knowledge to work on the right side of the law.
