Schultz’s fraud was as true to the catfish genre as can be. She told the people who discovered she was not who she said she was that she assumed the identity because she felt as if she couldn’t write about baseball professionally as a woman . . .
She must have been painfully unaware of the like of, among others . . .
* Alison Gordon (RIP), the first woman on the daily baseball beat when the
Toronto Starhanded her the Blue Jays in the late 1970s. (Her memoir of that work,
Foul Balls, is a
treat.)
* Claire Smith, who began covering baseball in the early 1980s for the
Hartford Courant,
then
The New York Times, has since become an ESPN senior editor, and was inducted
into the writers' wing of the Hall of Fame this year. (The J.G. Taylor Spink Award.)
* Susan Schlusser, the
San Francisco Chronicle baseball writer who convinced the San
Francisco chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America to nominate Roger Angell
for enshrinement in the writers' wing . . . and got Angell elected as the first such inductee
never to have been a daily beat writer. (If you've read any of Angell's baseball writings for
The New Yorker, which he began in 1962, you'd know he isn't baseball's Homer,
Homer was ancient Greece's Roger Angell.)
* Suzyn Waldman, who covered baseball in New York for WFAN for over a decade before
she was hired to be part of the Yankees' play-by-play broadcast team.
