BOSTON – During the 2020 Women's in Baseball Week, a worldwide celebration of girls and women in baseball, Suffolk Athletics reminisces on Patricia Brown's days at the University. 

Brown, who passed away June 17, 20212 at the age of 81, will always have a special place in the history of Ram Nation, a true pioneer who founded, coached and played for the school's first women's basketball team in the early 1950s. It was not the Winthrop, Massachusetts' days at the Cambridge YMCA along her eight teammates that makes us call attention to the Hall of Famer, instead it was her time before venturing to Suffolk when she pitched for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, that was featured in the 1992 movie "A League of Their Own."

Growing up in Winthrop, Brown played sandlot ball with her brothers and their friends due to the fact that Winthrop did not have a Little League team. Not that it mattered to her, because girls were not allowed to play baseball. It was not until 1974 that Little League announced, almost reluctantly, that its teams were open to girls.  

Her first year of organized ball was on Winthrop High School's softball team and it was after graduating that she became interested in the newly formed All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, organized by Chicago Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley. She sent a letter to the league's headquarters in Chicago and received an invite to a tryout involving hundreds of girls in New Jersey in 1949.   

Initially she "was told to go home and get more experience," she recalled in her own Memoir A League of My Own: A Memoir of a Pitcher in the All-American Baseball League.

A year later, in winter 1950, she tried out again in Everett and was one of six players signed from among some 700 hopefuls. She signed as a pitcher and was assigned to the Kenosha Comets, but Comets manager Johnny Gottselig felt she had control issues and need refinement, so she was sent to the Chicago Colleens development touring team. Brown was then promoted to the Battle Creek Belles (known as the Racine Bells in the 1992 flick starring Tom Hanks) in 1951. 

Brown's chances were limited. She collected a 9-9 pitching record for the Colleens, while posting a .298 batting average and .394 on-base percentage over 23 games. Her stint with the Belles was limited to two innings of shutout ball in one pitching appearance. 

In the offseason, Brown thought it was time for a college education. 

"I had been supporting family," she recalled in a 1991 interview for the Suffolk University Oral History Project, adding that "from playing ball, I didn't have that much money saved, and so it seemed like I was never getting anywhere, never getting to go to college or anything."

She met with a Suffolk official who arranged for a scholarship, and that was the beginning of her 41 years at Suffolk, which included time as a student, and during most of her years at the University served as an associate law librarian.  

Over her tenure, Brown earned three degrees from Suffolk; Bachelor of arts (1955), Juris Doctor (1965) and Master of Business Administration (1970). 

Suffolk honored her pioneering effort on behalf of the women's basketball team at the dedication of the school's new gymnasium in 1990. That same year she was recognized at the State House for outstanding service to women's sports and threw out the first pitch for a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. She would go on to be inducted into the University's Hall of Fame in 2011.  

Those honors came after she and other players in the All-American league were recognized by the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for their contributions in 1988. 

"When she was inducted at Cooperstown, Pat and other players from the league met Penny Marshall, who was director of 'A League of Their Own,' and they all helped her in her research," Alan of Glenview, Illinois, her nephew, said in an interview with The Boston Globe. "I think that weekend was the highlight of her life, among many cherished highlights." 

James E. Nelson, Emeritus Director of Athletics, dubbed her "Miss Suffolk because of her longevity here and her service to the University" via an interview with The Boston Globe.