Jean Faut: The Best to Ever Do It

Blue Sox star pitcher did things that no pitcher had ever done before... or since.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED APRIL 10, 2025

The year is 1941, and a bored teenager named Jean Faut is standing fifty feet from a telephone pole in East Greenville, Virginia. She's armed with a small pile of rocks, and as she steps into her windup, she is emulating her heroes - Bob Feller, Carl Hubbell, Dizzy Dean.

Her target is just twelve inches across, smaller than home plate, although the telephone is quite a bit taller than the standard major league strike zone. Faut brushes her sandy blonde hair back, pulls her baseball cap low, and launches a stone. A half second later it connects with the pole, filling the air with a satisfying thwack.

By the time of impact, Faut is already armed with another rock, ready to drill the innocent pole all over again. It will go on like this for some time, and it will last beyond the sunshine. Even in the darkness, she knows what a strike sounds like.

During the summers, Faut will loiter around the baseball fields, at first watching over the practices of the semipro East Greenville team, before being invited to shag fly balls during batting practice. The first time she launches a ball back toward the infield, the action comes to a halt. All of the players realize it at once:

This girl's got an arm.

The semipro men's team recruits Faut to throw batting practice. The team's pitchers teach her a four-seam fastball, a curveball, a changeup. Sometimes, on a lark, they let the Girl with the Arm take batting practice off of the big boys. They take it easy on her at first, but when she keeps getting hits off of them, they start to take it more seriously. No more holding back. A deep breath, a windup, a fastball on the inside corner.

And then, a quick swing that loops the ball over the second baseman for a single.

In 1941, Faut might not be able to imagine a life as a professional ballplayer. The idea of a women's league isn't yet a whisper, but it's coming, and it's not far away. By the time Jean Faut retires from the game in 1953 - before the even turns 30 - she'll go down in history as the greatest player in the history of her league after just eight wildly dominant seasons, all of them for the South Bend Blue Sox.

Jean Faut was disappointed when she arrived in 1946 to try out for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. She'd thought that the women played baseball - it was right there in the name, after all. But during the tryouts, the pitchers were all throwing underhand. Faut had a lot of skills, but she was no underhand pitcher. The powers that be decided that her cannon arm would do best at third base. And as for her bat, well, that would play anywhere.

It so happened that the league shifted its rules during Faut's earliest years as a professional ballplayer. They allowed submariner sidearm pitching at first, then transitioned to full overhand pitching. Teams across the league scrambled to turn hard-throwing shortstops, third basemen, and outfielders into pitchers with devastating fastballs. Jean Faut was one of those, but she was also different than the rest of them, because she had a complete arsenal.

She had at least four pitches - a two-seam fastball, four-seam fastball, change-up, and curve - and she could change speed and throw from a variety of arm slots. She was Nolan Ryan and Greg Maddux.

And she was also Tony Gwynn.

It was 1949 when Jean Faut won her first batting title and it was 1950 when she won her first ERA title. She led the Blue Sox to a championship in 1951 and another in 1952. She won two more ERA titles. She tossed no-hitters. She won two MVP awards and was robbed of a third.

Jean Faut's stats looked like video game numbers before video games were ever a thing. She finished her career with a 1.23 ERA. In her worst season, she pitched to a 17-11 record with a 1.51 ERA. As a hitter, she finished up with a fairly pedestrian .242 batting average, but her 14% walk rate meant that her OBP was a monstrous .386.

It is not inaccurate to call Jean Faut the greatest pitcher in the AAGPBL, and it is not controversial to call her the league's greatest player.

But all of it becomes even more impressive when you realize that Jean Faut - the baseball player - was dealing with more strife and drama off the field than maybe any other player in the league.

Jean Faut was one of a small number of players to be married, and one of an even smaller number to have been a mother during her time in the league. In fact, she'd played out the last six weeks of the 1947 while she was pregnant - allowing her opponents to score just 7 runs during 9 starts while she was with child.

So she had a kid, but she also had a husband, and by all accounts, it doesn't seem the marriage was a very peaceable arrangement. She'd married Karl Winsch, a former minor league hurler in the Phillies system, and Winsch seemed jealous - at best - of his wife's sporting success.

Oh, and I should also mention:

For the second half of Faut's career, Karl Winsch was also the manager of the South Bend Blue Sox.

Winsch was a deeply unpopular manager among his players, a list of women that included his own wife. And yet, the other women on the team felt they couldn't trust Jean Faut either. After all, she was sleeping with the man who seemed intent on making their lives hell.

If there was one place the troubled star could find peace, it might have been on the lonely island of dirt atop a hill in the center of the infield. It was the one place where things were quiet and where she was in control.

In August 1953, on the penultimate start of her storied career, things were long past the point of being ugly. The Blue Sox had endured a walkout, watched their manager get into a fistfight with an umpire, and faltered down the stretch until the playoffs were a far-off pipe dream. Winsch had been an unhappy man when his team was winning. He was even more unhappy when they were losing.

There was a lot for Jean Faut to carry onto that ballfield, but she must have abandoned the distractions in the clubhouse before she made her way to the mound.

The lonely woman only became lonelier as the game went on. Through five innings, she'd sat down fifteen straight, and the unwritten rules of baseball required that her teammates shun her more than they already did, so as not to jinx the no-hitter. By the eighth inning, she had an entire half of the dugout to herself. She was planning a retirement she had yet to make official and was sitting on the cusp of a perfect game.

There was a lot to think about, and there was a lot to think about all alone.

But Jean Faut was used to being all alone.

She came out in the ninth inning and took care of business, getting one out and then another and then another, sealing the perfect game that would seal her almost-perfect career.

There was history that night, a record set that remains unbroken. That perfect game was the second of the legendary hurler's illustrious career. Jean Faut remains the only professional pitcher, man or woman, at any level, in any league, in any country in the world to throw two perfect games in a career.

As for the 27 consecutive opposing batters who tried and failed to record a hit that night, they could only shake their heads and admit that Jean Faut was the best to ever do it.

More than seven decades later, they're still correct.