Queen of the Diamond: The Lizzie Murphy Story

Queen of the Diamond: The Lizzie Murphy Story

By Emily Arnold McCully
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, 2015. Biography.

Lizzie Murphy loved baseball and was a natural at it, but in the early 1900s it was considered improper for a girl to play a man’s game. But with the encouragement of her father and brother, Lizzie proved herself a valuable player for her brother’s team and then moved onto amateur teams as a teen. When she was 18 her mother was concerned that she could not support herself and get married if she continued playing baseball and encouraged her to stop. That’s when Lizzie went out and joined the city’s team that paid their players where her talent and oddity of being a girl player drew a crowd. She had to stand up for equal pay and razzing of the crowd, but in the end she played professional baseball for seventeen years, living her dream and earning both respect and the title “Queen of Baseball.”

You don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this picture book biography showing the determination of a girl who followed her own path instead of conforming to the standard that society placed on her.

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