Jack Bales

Jack Bales retired in 2020 as Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus after more than 40 years at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Although a librarian by vocation, he is a writer by avocation and has published numerous works for books, journals, magazines, literary encyclopedias, and newspapers. His books include literary studies on American authors Horatio Alger, Jr., Kenneth Roberts ("Northwest Passage"), Esther Forbes ("Johnny Tremain"), and southern author Willie Morris (best known for the award-winning "North Toward Home" and the memoir "My Dog Skip," which was made into a popular motion picture).

A member of the Society for American Baseball Research, he has written articles on the Chicago Cubs for a variety of publications, including the "Baseball Research Journal" and "NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture."

Bales drew upon more than 2,000 primary and secondary sources to write his in-depth history of the early Chicago Cubs, titled "Before They Were the Cubs: The Early Years of Chicago’s First Professional Baseball Team," released in 2019 by McFarland & Co., a leading independent publisher of baseball books and academic nonfiction.

Bales interwove true-crime intrigue throughout a fascinating baseball story in his "The Chicago Cub Shot for Love: A Showgirl's Crime of Passion and the 1932 World Series" (The History Press, 2021). In the summer of 1932, Chicago Cubs shortstop Billy Jurges enjoyed spending his free time with Violet Popovich, an attractive dark-haired former showgirl. When he broke off the relationship, she got more than just angry; she confronted her former lover in his hotel room and pulled a revolver out of her purse. In the ensuing struggle for it, both were wounded, though not seriously.

The Cubs managed to win the National League pennant despite this and other distractions that threatened to derail their entire season. It’s a Chicago-New York World Series, but the New Yorkers’ anger at the Cubs for not awarding the person the Cubs brought in after Jurges was shot—a former Yankee—a full share of the World Series bonus money fueled a fiery Fall Classic that culminated in Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot” home run.

Using hundreds of newspaper articles, interviews, archival documents, court records, and never-before-published photographs, Jack Bales traces the shooting and its aftermath, as well as profiles the lives of both Jurges and Popovich. Babe Ruth may or may not have signaled his home run through his “Called Shot,” but with her own shots earlier that summer, a young Chicago woman unwittingly set in motion events that indirectly changed baseball history.

Jack Bales maintains a Chicago Cubs website titled WrigleyIvy.com.