Bales’ Cubs Article Scores Big

UMW Reference and Humanities Librarian Jack Bales has hit a home run in the sports writing world, scoring the 2017 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award.

The award, from the Society for American Baseball Research, celebrates authors who publish outstanding articles that “significantly expanded our knowledge or understanding of baseball.”

Bales’ winning text, The Show Girl and the Shortstop: The Strange Saga of Violet Popovich and Her Shooting of Cub Billy Jurges, ran in the fall 2016 edition of the Baseball Research Journal. A self-described Cubs fanatic, Bales has written extensively about the celebrated Chicago baseball team, spending years on this particular story.

“Well-written and researched,” the judges said about the article, centered on the 1932 incident between Popovich, a 21-year-old show girl, and Jurges, a shortstop who thrice in the ’30s helped the Cubs to a National League championship. “Splendid storytelling.”

Popovich and Jurges had been dating about a year when Jurges broke off the relationship. The July 6 shooting followed at the Hotel Carlos, just down the street from Wrigley Field, where a jilted Popovich pulled a .25 caliber pistol from her purse and fired three shots. Though two of the bullets struck Jurges, and only one hit Popovich, the pair would ultimately tell the same story – that she had been attempting to kill herself when Jurges intervened and was injured.

Highly publicized in newspapers across the country, the case was riddled with mystery. Bales’ article sheds light on the incident, as well as on Popovich’s hard-luck life story.

Bales, who has worked at UMW’s library since 1980, is the 2010 winner of the inaugural Richard V. and Rosemary A. Hurley Presidential Commendation. With a bachelor’s degree in English from Illinois College and a master’s in library science from the University of Illinois, Bales has penned articles about the Chicago Cubs for the Baseball Research Journal and Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. He is currently working on a documentary history of the Cubs’ early years. A member of SABR, his website, wrigleyivy.com, is devoted to the team.

Bales shares this year’s McFarland-SABR Award with Dan Barry, whose The Big League Prospect Who Became a Mob Hit Man ran in The New York Times in October. “Good stories, well told,” a judge said of both winning entries. A cash prize accompanies the award to be presented at the 47th annual SABR convention this summer at the Grand Hyatt in New York City.

“I am so pleased that the Society for American Baseball Research thought my article was worthy of this award, as I spent several years poring over hundreds of newspaper articles, court records, photographs and other documents,” Bales said. “It also validates what I tell Mary Washington students all the time about conducting historical research: You need to go to the original sources.”