Claire Smith’s inspiring story a hit at Film Festival

Written by: Bill Francis

2018-09-25

Longtime sportswriter Claire Smith was one of many who attended the Sept. 21-23 Baseball Film Festival at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

The pioneering Smith, however, was also the subject of one of the entries.

A League of Her Own, a nine-minute documentary that tells the story of the trailblazing Smith, was one of 19 films screened at the 13th annual Baseball Film Festival.

Accustomed to working outside the status quo, Smith was not only a female in a male-dominated field, but she’s also African American.

Currently a news editor at ESPN, Smith covered baseball for 27 years at the Hartford Courant, The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

A League of Her Own – narrated by Sharon Robinson, the daughter of Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson – offers a unique perspective on the trials and tribulations Smith had to endure as a woman and a minority in her chosen field.

“I was asked by Kristen Lappas, the film’s producer, to come up to Cooperstown and show this. I look at the lineup of the documentaries and it’s pretty special to be included,” Smith said in an interview prior to the film’s early afternoon showing in the Bullpen Theater on Sept. 22. “Kristen had a vision and I love the final product. I must say that I’m a newspaper person so I had a hard time seeing her initial vision, but the final product came together and it brought tears to my eyes. She really fanned out across the game and got a lot of really good voices in there.

“I think the thing that touches me the most is it gives my son something palpable to hang on to and maybe show his children one day. And it was amazing how so many people in the game said, ‘We had no idea.’”

Certainly a low point in Smith’s career that is documented in the film came in the 1984 National League Championship Series between the Chicago Cubs and San Diego Padres when she was physically removed from the Padres clubhouse after Game 1. While the situation was eventually resolved, thanks to Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, it left scars for a number of years.

But for Smith, the trip from her home in Connecticut to Cooperstown is in a sense a triumphant return, as it was here a little over a year ago, on July 29, 2017, that she was honored with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award. Named in honor of the late publisher of the Sporting News, the Spink Award was established to recognize meritorious contributions to baseball by members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

The first female and fourth African-American winner in the 55-year history of the Spink Award, Smith said her life has changed since receiving the prestigious honor.

“It got really crazy last year in an amazingly wonderful way,” Smith said. “What it did was result in a lot of invitations from universities and colleges, so I got to meet a lot of young people, a lot of budding journalists, and it just made me feel younger to see it through their eyes. When you’re working every day you just work, but you don’t look around and see who’s watching, who’s noticing. One young lady came up and said she wrote her thesis on me and I was like, ‘Wow!’ That’s amazing that my story affected people that way.

“I hope people are inspired by my story. We still need more of what diversity can bring to the coverage as well as to the game. Just looking at it through a different lens, maybe, just a little slight adjustment. I think it helps a lot.”

Bill Francis is the senior research and writing specialist at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum