In this photo from 2019, Barbara Gregorich stands with a selection of books that she wrote and was donating to Brookfield Local School District.
Barbara Gregorich has not actively researched baseball topics for some time, but the fact that she once did and that that work resulted in the 1993 book “Women At Play: The Story of Women in Baseball,” numerous magazine articles and an in-person lecture delivered all over the country means that baseball is never far away,
On Sept. 21, Gregorich, a Masury native, was awarded the Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for American Baseball Research and its Women in Baseball Committee. The award has only been around since 2018 and past recipients include Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson; Effa Manley, owner of the Newark Eagles of the Negro Leagues; and Maybelle Blair, who played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1948.
“It was a shock,” Gregorich said of receiving the award. “It is a great honor. I’m sort of still glowing from it. It was a wonderful thing for me.”
Gregorich, who lives in Chicago, has been a member of SABR since the 1970s and has attended many SABR conferences over the years. When she was conducting research for “Women at Play,” a request for information posted in the SABR newsletter brought her many items and leads.
“When you write a nonfiction book, you are responsible for it for the rest of your life,” Gregorich said on Nov. 21. “Just this past week, Monday, a woman who researches a history of women’s baseball in Australia and has written about it, she was visiting the U.S. and wanted to meet me.”
Gregorich, a 1961 Brookfield High grad and inductee into the Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame, and her husband, Phil, hosted the woman, Tanith Harley, for breakfast and then took her to sites associated with Maud Nelson, who played baseball in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and even played on the former Elks Field in Masury. Gregorich had helped unearth Nelson’s complicated biography.
“I can’t begrudge the time it takes,” Gregorich said of the occasional demands on her baseball knowledge. “It’s exciting to see what new things are being discovered because of the groundwork I did.”
Gregorich has had a rich and varied writing career, turning out works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and writing for adults, young children and the ages in between. The visit by Harley took her away from marketing her latest book, “Exit Velocity,” a political and science fiction story about social justice and the conditions of the working class set on Chicago’s south side. With a twist.
“As I was writing it, I realized that I didn’t want to sound pedantic, if I was talking about capitalism, socialism, the conditions of the working class,” she said. “If you’re writing fiction, then you have to put those words into the mouths of the characters and that could sound very stilted. I realized that I needed some way to have a fresh observer look at these things and comment on them in a way that wouldn’t be stilted.”
That fresh observer turned out to be an extraterrestrial parrot.
“You wouldn’t believe how many requests I get just to write a sequel just about the parrot, which I’m not going to do,” she said.
Learn more about Gregorich at barbaragregorich.com
