If you hang out at Guv’s Place in Houlton, you’re likely to come across a former baseball pitcher who like some chooses to throw underhand in darts, but has the same fastball that breaks off their tips.
Oh, one thing. It’s a she.
Near the start of her sporting career, Lisa Segelstrom excelled at being a baseball chucker (overhand), to start a series of decades where she made a name for besting the guys.
These days, Segelstrom, 50, of Somerset, continues in that mode by going beyond umpiring in things like slo-pitch leagues; rather in more competitive contests like under-18 mens baseball, in the Hudson area and the Twin Cities suburbs. She does it all as an ump for all kinds of leagues.
A difference she cites is that she gets to wear the full gear such as a mask. Segelstrom says one thing she enjoys about it is — despite being a woman in a predominantly man’s activity — she gets to be in charge and tell the guys what the call is.
Segelstrom entered tryouts and was a first round pick, as an overhand pitcher, in an effort to establish a regional team for a veritable League Of Their Own. The Women’s National Adult Baseball Association was to be based in California and have a Twin Cities franchise, for which she would play, and up to seven other teams across the country. Segelstrom had the ability to blow a fastball by you and also hit the corners with her pitches, just like other Big League pitchers, and she even had a “hovering knuckleball.”
During tryouts, held at Bryn Mawr Park in Minneapolis, she was featured in a four-column photo on the front sports page for the Minneapolis-based Star-Tribune. Segelstrom, who’s tall and angular and lean — to a degree where some call her “spiderwomen” — was shown on the mound uncorking a pitch, with about a dozen other hopefuls behind her. In all, thirty women tried out that day.
That was 20 years ago. That particular part of the dream, before the umpiring, was shortly-lived however. First, a lack of numbers meant that the Twin Cities franchise folded. Second, Segelstrom was in a car crash and suffered several broken leg bones, so her playing days, throwing either overhand or underhand, were cut short. She’d have to show ‘em how to do it from behind the plate, again, while wearing a mask.
“There has been no other (such women’s league) till this day,” she said, adding that teams continue in California and Texas, where she was tempted to move. “That (discontinuation) was heartbreaking for me.”
Segelstrom says that some other farm league players, over the years, have told her she is their idol. The most vocal of that group, Dan King, plays for the Minnnesota Senators, a 35-and-over amateur baseball team that’s only a step down in prominence from the St. Paul Saints.
“She’s a baseball player and I’m a baseball player. She’s an umpire and I’m an umpire,” King said about how he met Segerstrom, who he added is heads and tails above anyone else in her situation. “She has a high skill level, much better than most. And she really hustles to make the calls.”
In fact, Segelstrom got King his first umpiring job, and she soon may add umping games for his league to her repetoire. She has done things in the sport that few if any women have done in the region, King added.