Author Description

Joan Joyce still remembers the night in vivid detail. The twilight sky above Municipal Stadium in Waterbury, Conn., was clear, the summer air thick with humidity and growing excitement on that August evening in 1961. Some 17,000 spectators from in and around the working-class, metal-manufacturing city packed the old minor league ballpark. The 1930s-era park seated only half that number, so the crowd spilled onto the field, 10 rows deep, for a glimpse of history in the making. It was a showdown, pitting the man long known as baseball's best hitter, Ted Williams, against a woman regarded as the best pitcher in softball, a fiery 20-year-old sporting the uniform of the national champion Raybestos Brakettes. Courtesy of Florida Atlantic University athletics Joan Joyce, now 70, won 753 games as a pitcher and has 714 victories as softball coach at Florida Atlantic University. Fifty years to the month later, Joyce sat behind the desk of her office at Florida Atlantic University, her eyes still the same piercing blue that Williams saw from the batter's box. She recounted an event that to this day transcends the jaw-dropping statistics she amassed in a career as perhaps the greatest female softball player ever: a 753-42 win-loss record, 150 no-hitters and 50 perfect games, a record 42 wins in a season (including 38 shutouts), a lifetime earned run average of 0.09, and a batting average of.324.