Melissa Ludtke blazed a trail in MLB that women in sports media are still following

Melissa Ludtke simply wanted to do her job.

It was 1977 and that job involved covering games interviewing Major League Baseball players to write articles for Sports Illustrated. But MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned women from locker rooms. In response, SI’s owner, Time, filed a complaint, triggering a federal court case.

Just 24-years old and the only woman on the full-time MLB beat at the time, Ludtke won.

Forty-six years since the groundbreaking trial, Ludtke wrote about the court case, her journey to sports writing and experience in the field in the 2024 book “Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside.” On Feb. 4, Ludtke chatted about the book and the current sports environment with another trailblazer, Jenny Cavnar, the first female primary play-by-play announcer in MLB history in 2024 as the announcer for the Oakland A’s, at Tattered Cover in Denver.

The groundbreaking victory changed journalism forever, knocking down doors for women reporters and ensuring they had the same access men reporters had all along. The media didn’t cover the facts of the case at the time and Ludtke didn’t write about it contemporaneously either. Until now that is. Ludtke said doing so was challenging, but also “extremely healing.”

“The best part of it is what I have always loved the most about being a journalist – and I lived in arguably the Golden Age of Journalism so we were actually given time to go and research, do the digging, look for the facts – I really loved digging and to tell this story,” Ludtke said. “It meant digging into my own life. That was hard.”

With MLB’s ban in1977, MLB was able to segregate women and create rules based around protecting men’s “sexual privacy,” according to Kuhn. Ludtke was prohibited from entering the area when men talked to reporters after games. No reporter was allowed in the shower area and players could wear towels or robes for privacy, but Kuhn was clear that players’ rights to be naked in their locker rooms with male reporters trumped women’s rights to be there as well.

Ludtke was also prevented from going into locker rooms before games when players were fully clothed and male reporters were allowed to observe and talk to the team.

Being young and new to the profession, Ludtke didn’t know that she was entering an equality battle that had been raging for years. She didn’t know women had been banned from the field during batting practice, not allowed in the press box, not allowed to eat dinner at press functions in clubs where men were, nor allowed at the Baseball Writers of America Association (BBWAA) gala.

“There are four things I’ve mentioned that women were not allowed to do, none of them, in none of these instances was any man naked,” Ludtke said.

However, nakedness and sex became the story. Ludtke became a common joke on late night shows, Saturday Night Live and in sports columns and editorial cartoons across the country.

“The story got hijacked. It got hijacked into, and we’re not unfamiliar with this today, but it got hijacked into the notion of women’s morality and the protection of men who were going to be naked,” Ludtke said. “The words equal rights never appeared in a headline, rarely in a story. Women’s rights, only if it was to be demeaned. The whole women’s movement was to be mocked. That was sort of part of the coverage.”

As Ludtke worked on drafting “Locker Room Talk,” she realized that her chronological construction without historic context was boring. She threw it out and started again, deciding to dive into the untold story of the trial. This was especially important since part of the fabricated narrative was that Ludtke had “separate accommodations” to talk to players, according to Kuhn. Ludtke never asked for nor was given “separate accommodations,” but no one knew that because no reporter at the time ever asked her about her experiences covering games.

“I realized the story that was never told in the 70s is the one I tell in this book,” Ludtke said. “There was a hearing in the courthouse in Manhattan. All these men, who wrote about me and spilled gallons of ink writing about my immortality, etc., weren’t interested enough to attend 2 ½ hours of a hearing on the legal issues. There was not one story done on that.”

Flashback to the 60s and 70s

On the heels of the Civil Rights Act passing in 1964, women were still working to have their human rights recognized. Some of history’s most impressive women stepped up to the plate for the fight.

In 1966, civil rights strategist and lawyer Constance Baker Motley became the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary when she was named to the bench for the Southern District of New York. Two years later, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress and then went on to be the first Black candidate for a major-party nomination when she ran for president in 1972.

As the 70s continued, Gloria Steinem started Ms. Magazine, telling the story of the women’s rights movement. Women’s rights leader and activist Bella Abzug’s slogan “A women’s place is in the House,” got her elected to the House of Representatives. Ruth Bader Ginsberg argued gender equality cases in front of the Supreme Court.

Women across the country were fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, which was drafted in 1923 and proposed a Constitutional Amendment saying, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” The amendment has yet to be passed, losing its momentum after Ludtke’s case as an example of the often-non-linear battle for rights and progress.

In the end, Ludtke’s book ended up being centered around four characters: herself, her lawyer, Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., aka Fritz, Judge Motely and the 14th Amendment, which was added to the U.S. Constitution in 1868 to grant citizenship and equal protection of the law.

“Through the characters, through bringing their stories into really a very complete telling of the hearing, which was never covered, you are able to also feel the history of that time. What happened? Why did this case happen and why did it matter? And what were the things that were happening in society like the ERA battle and the rest.”

Road maps and milestones

When Ludtke graduated from Wellesley College, Chisholm was the keynote speaker at graduation. She instructed the female graduates as they went into the world that if they didn’t have a seat at the table, they should bring a folding chair. It ended up being very apt advice.

“The pioneering women of my generation, we had no road map, and we had no one who was a woman ahead of us, giving us road signals,” Ludtke said. “… without having a road map, we were sort of each of us on our own.”

Decades later, Cavnar’s experience has been different. She’s had women in media serve as mentors, women leading production in the broadcast booth and she’s witnessed more women get jobs in baseball and women’s sports gain in popularity.

“I am really grateful for [Melissa and other trailblazers]. It’s really neat that all these decades later to know that I have a big world in front of me and a huge responsibility in front of me,” Cavnar said. “I hope that the next generation, some of them in this room that I’ve talked to a lot about their careers, feel that they have a much easier path in moving forward.”

Ludtke faced mockery in her pursuit of her career. Broadcasters and writers after her were and continue to be met with harsh criticism, harassment and even death threats for having the audacity to love sports and want to work in the industry. When Ludtke first started at SI and walked on to the field at Yankee Stadium, she noticed she was the only woman there and that carried a lot of weight.

“I knew that I was under an intense microscope, and I knew that if I made mistakes, they weren’t going to be forgiven. You know that? I mean, now if a woman broadcaster makes a mistake, God help her. It’s going to be all over the web.”

Ludtke often mentors young reporters now or speaks to journalism classes. She often tells them that they have it worse than she did because of the attacks on social media and its virality, a reality Cavnar knows all too well.

“I didn’t realize at the time that there was a civilizing effect to a man having to put his name at the top of a column and usually his picture,” Ludtke said. “In comparison to the anonymity and literal death threats on social media now, it was better.”

When asked how she views the sports environment for women in sports now, Ludtke said that she thinks it’s easier to win lawsuits and change rules than it is to win the hearts and minds of men sports fans who still don’t feel like women belong in sports. When there is progress, there is often backlash when there could easily just be more chairs at the table.

“People do view it as a pie where there are only a set number of pieces,” Ludtke said, “instead of saying, ‘well, why don’t we just bake more pies?’”