#Shortstops: A poster and a dream
Most fans who visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum remember baseball’s greatest hits: Babe Ruth calling his shot, Willie Mays sprinting to make “The Catch,” and the rise of Japanese superstars like Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki and Shohei Ohtani. But some stories lie on the road less traveled.
In the Museum’s Dean O. Cochran, Jr. Manuscript Archives, a colorful poster featuring a cartoon superhero and a team photo full of grins preserves the story of the Colorado Silver Bullets and their exhibition adventure to Taiwan. In November of 1996, the Silver Bullets – founded almost three years earlier as America’s first women’s professional baseball team since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League folded in 1954 – boarded a plane for a six-game series against players trying out for the brand-new Taiwan Major League (TML). This invitation was not a simple marketing ploy but a real effort to inspire women’s baseball around the globe.
In years prior, only Major League Baseball organizations had been asked to play exhibition games in Taiwan. This time, Dr. Dean Yuan of the TML extended that invitation to a team of women, marking the first time in Taiwan’s history that men and women competed against each other in the same professional sport.
Donna Lopiano, then the executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation, helped promote the exhibition series, saying, “These are women playing men in a part of the world that traditionally has limited opportunities for women. It is also baseball, the sport that is most cherished not only in our country but theirs. Progress is made in steps. Some are small, some are large. This one is huge.”
From Nov. 7-17, the all-women barnstormers traveled from Taipei down through Taichung, Chiayi, and Tainan to Kaohsiung, playing hard but ultimately falling to TML’s tryout squads.
But the final tallies mattered far less than what happened in the stands. Fans didn’t just watch the Silver Bullets compete, they followed the team from city to city, trailing the team bus on bicycles and collecting autographs. After the trip, star pitcher Melissa Coombes recalled in her travel journal: “The people in Taiwan take more photographs than I’ve ever seen. Some of us even received gifts from various fans.”
The most lasting image from the exhibition series, however, may be of a Little Leaguer named Lu Kwan Ji, who had just helped Taiwan win its 17th Little League World Series title in the summer of 1996. At a gala dinner honoring the Silver Bullets, Chinese Taipei Baseball Association president Felix S.T. Chen made a point of celebrating her, noting that this young baseball star could now watch grown women play professional baseball on Taiwanese soil and imagine herself doing the same.
Tristan Latham was an Archives intern in the 2026 Frank and Peggy Steele Internship Program for Leadership Development
