Irresistible, inspiring Tyndall Tornado

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This article was published 05/03/2022 (1366 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Evie Moroz was the Bo Jackson of her time.

Check that. Bo Jackson was the Evie Moroz of his time.

Moroz, a multi-sport star in an era when most girls and women didn’t play any sports, let alone multiple ones, is best known as a slick-fielding second basewoman in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) from 1946 to 1951. A line-drive hitter, with a career batting average of .266 — 13th-highest in AAGPBL history — during stints with the Kenosha Comets (1946), Muskegon Lassies (1946-47), Springfield Sallies (1948) and Fort Wayne Daisies (1949-51). (Players were shifted around as needed to help keep the league afloat.) She was a first-team all-star in 1950. One newspaper headline called her the “Beltin’ Bambina.”

Moroz, who died last month at age 97, is a member of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame, the Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame and the Manitoba Softball Hall of Fame, but perhaps most impressive of all, she and other AAGPBL players were inducted in 1988 into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. In the latter, she bests another two-sport phenom, Jackson, of baseball’s Kansas City Royals and football’s Oakland Raiders, who is not in the HOF.

Gladwyn Scott, longtime friend and fellow inductee into the CBHOF, nominated her and other Manitoba players of the AAGPBL for the MBHOF in 1997.

“In her worst season, she stole 66 bases. She could run like the bloody wind,” he says. “She’s one of Manitoba’s greatest athletes. Ever.”

She was born Evelyn Wawryshyn in Tyndall, a town of 1,000 about 45 minutes northeast of Winnipeg. Her family didn’t have a lot of money when she was growing up. She did have a baseball-sized rubber ball, however, which she threw against the side of the house and fielded, for hours and hours.

She had three brothers and credits older brother Archie for inspiring her love of baseball and helping her develop into a great athlete.

“They always encouraged her,” says Sheryl Wagner, one of Moroz’s five daughters and six children.

“The boys would usually get together to play sports. They’d say, ‘Let Evie play first base or shortstop.’ After being able to play with the boys, she just kept going.”

But while baseball was her passion, she excelled in other sports in the off-season.

The 5-3, 135-pound dynamo was North-Eastern Manitoba Senior Girls’ track and field champion in 1940, played on the 1946 Provincial Senior Ladies’ Championship basketball team in Flin Flon, and was dubbed “The Tyndall Tornado” as the best women’s hockey player in Manitoba. She was the top scorer in Manitoba women’s hockey with the Varsity Doodlebugs and led a Winnipeg all-stars team to the Lady Bessborough Trophy as Dominion champions in 1950.

“It goes to show what a trailblazer she was,” Wagner says. “She would take heckling from some people who said, ‘You shouldn’t be playing ball, you should be in the kitchen.’ Mostly, the hecklers were blown away by their talent. They won over the hearts of a lot of people.”

The AAGPBL was the brainchild of chewing gum magnate Philip Wrigley, who owned the Chicago Cubs and worried about filling Wrigley Field during the Second World War.

He noticed millions of women stepping into roles traditionally filled by men and figured, why not baseball?

Moroz was studying to be a teacher at what is now the University of Winnipeg in 1945 while playing fastball for the Canadian Ukrainian Athletic Club Blues. A scout offered her a contract.

“I didn’t believe him and dismissed the incident as an impossible offer,” she said years later.

The following year, she was invited by telegram to a tryout at Wrigley Field in Chicago. This time, she accepted.

“It was offering her $60 a week to play baseball. At that time, that was really big money, especially for a female athlete,” Wagner says.

She passed with flying colours and was assigned to the Comets, becoming one of 11 Manitoba women to play in the AAGPBL.

“She was always worried about not making a team. She would say, ‘In baseball, it’s only you in the batter’s box. You’re the only one catching the ball in the field. When you miss it, you miss it on your own,’” she recalls.

One thing she shared with all baseball players was superstition.

“She’d always put her left shoe on first. She did that all of her life. If she got in a batting slump, she’d eat tomato soup or scrambled eggs,” she says.

Moroz was a big fan of the 1992 Hollywood blockbuster A League of Their Own, which was inspired by the All-American girls and starred Geena Davis, Madonna and Tom Hanks. “She lived that movie.”

She didn’t, however, hesitate to point out inaccuracies. For example, Hanks portrayed Jimmy Dugan, manager of the Rockford Peaches, as a foul-mouthed drunk.

“She would always say, ‘Our managers would never say any swear words. They were such gentlemanly people,’” Wagner says.

But Moroz confirmed there was, indeed, no crying in baseball. “They were a pretty tough group of women,” she says.

Playing in league-mandated short skirts, Moroz routinely iced the scrapes on her thighs from sliding into bases — called “raspberries” — while riding on the bus after games.

“They were the best years of her life. She had so much fun and made so many great friends who kept in touch with her throughout her life,” Wagner says.

The rules were far stricter for female baseball players compared to their male counterparts. They were allowed one beer at dinner and they were never to be seen out in public after hours. God forbid if they were spotted smoking or drinking.

“You’d get fined,” Wagner says. “They had to practise walking and sitting correctly. Their skirts had to be a certain length and their clothes had to be pressed, which isn’t easy to do when you’re playing doubleheaders and sleeping on a bus.”

One of Moroz’s highlights was flying to Havana, Cuba, for spring training in 1947. The women stayed at a swanky hotel, where they were forbidden from using the elevators because their coaches wanted them to get in shape by taking the stairs. They played two weeks of exhibition games against the Cuban women all-stars in front of crowds of 50,000 at Estadio Latinoamericano, reportedly attracting bigger crowds than the Dodgers.

“She’d never been to that kind of an exotic place. The furthest she would have gone would have been Ontario or Saskatchewan to play hockey,” Wagner says.

“Everything was larger than life to her. She’d never been on a train ride longer than to Winnipeg or been out of the country,” she says.

She retired after the 1951 season at age 26 and married John Litwin in Chicago. He died of a heart attack shortly after their second child was born and she moved back to Tyndall, where she operated a chip stand on the side of her parents’ general store, selling hotdogs, hamburgers and french fries.

In 1960, she married school principal Henry Moroz and they had four children together. They were married for nearly a half-century until his death in 2008.

Moroz is survived by children Linda (Derek), Greg (Teresa), Dawn (Tony), Sheryl (Bryan), Penny and Tammy (Larry); grandchildren, Shane (Lorrie), Kyle (Tiffany), Jarret (Tanya), Tabatha, (Brent), Tiffany (Marc), Breanna (Michal), Delaine (Aaron), Trevor (Kristina), Natasha, Dylan and Jenna; and great grandchildren Chantel, Jaedyn, Abigail, Gray, Griffin, Kayla and Devan.

Of course, she taught her kids to play baseball, including how to throw, steal bases and lay a bunt down the third base line.

“We all played on little league teams and into our late teens,” Wagner says. “She put just as much energy and excellence into being a great mom and homekeeper as she did into sports. … She made everyone feel like a million bucks. You couldn’t help but fall in love with her.”

Moroz was also recently inducted into the Ukrainian Sports Museum and Hall of Fame in Philadelphia, whose members include hockey icon Wayne Gretzky. Four of her daughters attended, singing the AAGPBL theme song in her honour.

“That brought the house down,” longtime friend Scott says.

And at the Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame’s annual banquet in 2018, Scott made a point of introducing her to the crowd of about 600 as its only female member.

“They gave her a standing ovation. We don’t have many standing ovations,” he says.

geoffkirbyson@mymts.net