Three decades ago, a pivotal moment in the history of women’s baseball took place in an office in Golden.
There, in the summer of 1993, promoter Bob Hope presented his idea of a women’s professional barnstorming team to Coors Brewing president W. Leo Kiely and chief marketing officer Bill Weintraub.
With the box office success of “A League of Their Own” the summer before catapulting the sport nationally, the brewery bought the pitch. And in 1994, the Colorado Silver Bullets started a four-year run playing against men’s minor league, semi-pro, college and independent teams.
Silver Bullets’ Kathy Morton slides on a steal to second as Moondog’s Sam Crivellaro covers for the play during the fourth inning in Allentown, Pa. on August 12, 1997. (Photo by John C. Anderson/The Morning Call)
For Hope, the team’s creation fulfilled a decade-long goal. And it gave Coors Brewing a unique publicity angle for its flagship product, Coors Light.
“We couldn’t afford to sponsor the NFL, MLB, NBA or NHL at the time, and we knew we needed to do something that was different to capture attention, and hopefully capture more beer drinkers,” Weintraub explained. “It was a way to get into sports that was something we could afford. … It felt right.”
Three decades later, one of the Silver Bullets is still lacing up the cleats.
Tamara Holmes, 50, is playing for the Blue Sox this weekend in the third annual All-American Women’s Baseball Classic in Durham, N.C., alongside other former and current USA Baseball Women’s National Team members.
She is among a handful of notable Silver Bullets engrained into the annals of women’s baseball history. And their impact has been felt long after the team stopped touring, with an influx of women entering the pro baseball coaching ranks and taking on front-office roles in recent years.
MLB’s also started backing girls baseball camps for Little League and high school-aged players via the Girls Baseball Breakthrough Series. USA Baseball uses those camps, as well as MLB’s GRIT Girls ID tour, to evaluate prospects for the women’s national team.
“The level of those girls has increased over the years, and now the overall quality of play has gotten better and is more impressive,” said Veronica Alvarez, the USA Baseball manager and a Denver resident. “Sometimes when it’s hard to see the progress of our sport, that’s what I’m analyzing, is the quality of women playing this game right now is high.”
The amount of history-making talent on the current national team underscores that point.
USA Baseball’s roster includes a who’s who of recent women’s baseball news-makers, including Olivia Pichardo (first woman to play in Division I), Kelsie Whitmore (barrier-breaker in the Atlantic and Pioneer leagues), Ashton Lansdell (first woman to play in the NJCAA) and Jillian Albayati (first woman to play Division II baseball and softball on the same day).
Oakland Ballers pitcher Kelsie Whitmore throws in the ninth inning of their game against the Idaho Falls Chukars at Raimondi Park in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, August 27, 2024. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
The accomplishments of those women have built on the legacy of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (which existed from 1943 to 1954 and was the inspiration for “A League of Their Own”) and the Silver Bullets. But Alvarez wishes women’s baseball got more exposure as a whole.
“(Media) loves to highlight these one-off individuals, and the whole time we’re over here screaming like, ‘They’re not the only ones!’” Alvarez said.
For Holmes, the ultimate step in the game’s evolution is not to have a woman make the majors. It’s to create a women’s professional league with talent from the U.S. and abroad, a dream that is likely still a ways off.
“The progress has been there, because MLB’s stepped in with camps and we’ve had this national team since 2004, but like with the Silver Bullets, we get to this point where we only have one team at the end of the road,” Holmes said. “And now, we have so many girls and women who can play baseball at a high level, probably more than ever before, and we’re starting to bottleneck the talent.”
Lisa Martinez, from Stockton, Calif., of the Colorado Silver Bullets, practices her underhanded pitching motion during a practice at Knights Castle in Fort Mill, S.C., Friday, May 5, 1994. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
For there to be more opportunity at the highest levels of the sport, Alvarez says the place to start is at the grassroots, which could in turn create enough numbers and demand for high school and college teams.
Until that happens, she said, the track for the best female players to remain in the sport will still be to play with the guys, like the Silver Bullets did back in the ’90s.
“There is a huge gap as far as the opportunities for these girls, and that keeps us from gaining more numbers for the sport,” Alvarez said. “… Because of that gap, a lot of those young players we see (in camps) do switch to softball or just stop playing completely because they want to play baseball and the lack of opportunity doesn’t allow them to keep playing.”
Of course, the challenges were even greater back when the Silver Bullets toured pro stadiums across the country.
With Coors Brewing’s backing, players earned a range of $20,000 to $30,000 per season over the four years of the team, with travel expenses and meals paid for. Coors gave Hope $50,000 up front to start the team, $2.7 million in the first year and about $7 million overall.
Largely composed of ex-softball players who acclimated to baseball, the Silver Bullets posted a 58-127 record while struggling to beat their male counterparts. Still, they produced several memorable moments that live on in team lore.
Lisa Martinez threw a no-hitter with her windmill delivery in one of the Silver Bullets’ six wins in ’94. Holmes hit an inside-the-park grand slam in ’96, and Kim Braatz-Voisard followed with the team’s first over-the-fence homer a couple of months later. According to a SABR report that Hope disputes, attendance waned in ’97. Yet the team still drew national headlines for a brawl that saw Braatz-Voisard charge the mound one night in Albany, Ga., after being intentionally beaned.
This television image taken Wednesday, June 12, 1997, from an amateur home video shows the bench-clearing melee between the Colorado Silver Bullets women’s team and the Americus Travelers, the state champions in the Georgia Recreation and Parks 18-and-under league. Silver Bullets’ Kim Braatz-Voisard, who was hit in the back on an 0-1 pitch with two outs in the ninth inning, charged the mound on her way to first base after the pitcher began laughing. (AP Photo/Sonny Lofton)
Along the way, the Silver Bullets played seven games in Colorado, including one at Mile High Stadium in ’94 and three at Coors Field. While the team drew an average of 5,687 fans per game in its peak first year, the contests in Denver brought out substantially larger crowds.
The first game at Mile High drew about 35,000, Hope says, while the final game in Denver at Coors Field in ’97 drew roughly 28,000, according to a SABR recount. Both games were played on July 3 and featured postgame fireworks.
Manager Phil Niekro of the Colorado Silver Bullets looks on during a game on May 15, 1994 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images)
“Because we didn’t have a home, it was an electric atmosphere in Denver each year, and we felt like we belonged somewhere when we went to play there,” said Braatz-Voisard, one of five players to suit up for the Silver Bullets all four seasons. “The rest of the years, while on the road, we had our head down and we were nose to the grindstone. … (In Colorado) we felt more of the magnitude of what we were doing.”
Even with elite female athletes and a notable coaching staff headlined by Hall of Fame pitcher Phil Niekro as manager, Weintraub said the physical differences between the Silver Bullets and their male competition made it difficult for the team to be successful in the eyes of Coors Brewing.
A switch to metal bats midway through ’96 helped level the playing field but couldn’t save the team.
Weintraub called the Silver Bullets “kind of a shooting star,” but the sponsorship didn’t help Coors Light capture enough of the male consumers the company was courting through its advertising and promotion.
“We wanted to become more male in our consumers of Coors Light, but that really wasn’t the reason we dropped the team,” Weintraub said. “The reason we dropped the team is because they couldn’t get enough following of consumers.
“At the beginning, it was something new, something exciting, something different; it got a lot of press and a lot of ink. If the Silver Bullets would’ve been more successful, it would’ve been more sustainable. It was too late (by their 23-22 season in ’97) because there wasn’t the fan support and popularity that we had hoped. Our dreams were higher than reality.”
While the players believed their success in ’97 was enough to keep the team going — Holmes said it “was our proof that we were a competitive baseball team” — the inability to keep using the Silver Bullets trademark was a major factor in the team fizzling out, according to Hope.
In this undated photograph, North Fort Myers resident Kitty Stanford, wearing a Silver Bullets T-shirt and earrings, reacts to a play during a Silver Bullets game in Fort Myers, Fla. (Photo Marc Beaudin/Sun Sentinel)
Still, the team remained a cultural force years after its last game.
Alvarez vividly remembers watching the Silver Bullets on TV as a 12-year-old baseball diehard growing up in Miami. When her softball career came to an end more than a decade later, the memory inspired her to Google the team’s name in hopes that it was still around.
While the team was long gone, that search led her to USA Baseball and a life in the game, first as a a national team player and then as its manager for the past six years.
“I was the girl who played baseball — that’s who my friends knew me as, that’s all I wanted to do,” said Alvarez, who also works for the Oakland A’s as a coordinator of player development. “To see these women on TV, doing the sport that I loved, and obviously people were bothered by my presence in the sport (as a girl in a boys’ league), it was amazing and something I’ll never forget.
“… To me, the history of the sport is so important, and the Silver Bullets’ path and their careers and their impact in those four years is very important. Them, and the women who played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, those two groups of women are a huge part of our growth in this game and they still deserve to be recognized as we move forward.”
Pam Davis, pitcher for the Colorado Silver Bullets, suited up with the Jacksonville Suns on June 4, 1996, for an exhibition game with the Australian national team at Wolfson Park in Jacksonville, Fla. (AP Photo/Will Dickey–The Florida Times–Union)