She was 101 when she died Wednesday within the John Scott expert nursing facility in Braintree, her household mentioned in a death notice.

Ms. Pratt had lived most of her years in Quincy, the place she coached and taught public college bodily schooling for greater than 4 many years, spending every summer season within the mid-1940s within the Midwest, pitching for the Rockford Peaches and the Kenosha Comets.

“Mary was the final recognized authentic Peaches participant that performed on the 1943 group,” the league tweeted Friday. “Her tales, her power will probably be missed for a very long time.”

A left-hander famend for her finesse with the managed slingshot, or windmill windup, she received 21 video games in 1944, together with pitching a no-hitter.

“I nonetheless have to emphasise that you just don’t do it by your self — your group performed behind you. I’ve at all times felt that manner,” she mentioned in a 2009 oral historical past posted online by Grand Valley State College in Michigan.

Ms. Pratt, whose nickname was Prattie with the league, “was a strolling, speaking instance of how Title IX took place,” mentioned Richard Johnson, curator of The Sports activities Museum in Boston, referring to the federal legislation prohibiting gender-based discrimination in teaching programs, which expanded ladies’s sports activities alternatives.

“It wasn’t simply Billie Jean King on the market pushing the envelope,” Johnson added. “It was Mary Pratt doing so years earlier than.”

In an period when excessive colleges and faculties not often let women and girls play group sports activities, Ms. Pratt made essentially the most of each alternative.

She made her first look on the Globe’s sports activities pages in 1931 as a 12-year-old, profitable the ladies’ baseball throw competitors at a summer season youth competitors in Quincy.

As an undergraduate on the Sargent School part of Boston College within the late 1930s, she participated in 9 intramural sports activities.

Although she was inducted into a number of halls of fame and has her own webpage on the Nationwide Baseball Corridor of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., Ms. Pratt didn’t take into account baseball her high sport.

“Basketball was my finest,” she advised the Globe in 1994. “I’d be some extent guard in the present day. I’m solely 5-foot-1, however I may at all times try this two-handed set shot.”

Her most enduring legacy, nonetheless, lay in her many years of tireless advocacy on behalf of women and girls who wished a good likelihood on enjoying fields.

She had ably competed alongside boys in her youth and infrequently was the one feminine on summer season league groups as an grownup. She even made headlines in 1975 as the only real lady amongst greater than two dozen candidates for North Quincy Excessive College’s head soccer coach job.

Shrugging off her repeated ground-breaking moments, Ms. Pratt would have most popular that sports activities make room for all ladies, not simply these along with her willpower.

“Males at all times accepted me and boys on the playground let me play,” she mentioned within the 1994 interview, “however I do know now if there had been an choice to compete with women, I’d have executed it.”

Born in Bridgeport, Conn., in 1918, Mary Pratt was the daughter of William Y. Pratt and Daisy Gore.

Her father was a draftsman for an organization that constructed submarines, and in the course of the Nice Melancholy the household moved to Quincy, his hometown, the place he labored on the Fore River Shipyard, she recounted in “Preserving Our Legacy: A Peach of a Sport,” a 2004 self-published autobiography.

In Bridgeport, she shot hoops with neighborhood boys, however discovered her sports activities aspirations largely thwarted in Quincy, which supplied no women’ groups.

“It was towards the social dictates for girls to play sports activities after I was rising up,” she advised the Globe in 1992. “For those who did you had been tomboyish or mannish. It wasn’t the correct factor to do.”

Whereas in school, she performed for the Boston Olympets, an indoor softball group created to attract spectators to Boston Backyard throughout summer season months, and her success led to her five-year run as an expert pitcher.

Chewing gum magnate Philip Ok. Wrigley, anxious that World Conflict II may shut down Main League Baseball if too many males had been drafted, created the All-American Women Skilled Baseball League.

Ralph Wheeler of the Boston Herald sports activities division put Ms. Pratt involved with Wrigley.

Along with her baseball prowess — “I had at all times performed with the boys on the playgrounds and so I at all times threw overhand,” she mentioned within the oral historical past — she made first Peaches group.

By then, she was already a bodily schooling instructor and coach, having graduated from Boston College in 1940. She taught at Thayer Academy in Braintree, after which labored for the Quincy Public Colleges for greater than 40 years, ending her profession educating and training at Salem State School.

Amongst her Quincy college students was Ted Spencer, who went on to grow to be chief curator and vice chairman of the Nationwide Baseball Corridor of Fame, the place sooner or later he acquired a pamphlet concerning the All-American Women Skilled Baseball League.

“It appeared to me, after I was a child, that Mary used to go away in the summertime and play ball someplace,” Spencer, who has since retired, mentioned Sunday. “So I referred to as my aunt, who knew Mary very, very properly. She mentioned, ‘Yeah, she used to exit to Illinois to play baseball.’ ”

That second finally led him to assist launch the Girls in Baseball exhibit in 1988, which offered inspiration for Penny Marshall to direct “A League of Their Personal,” which starred Geena Davis, as one other participant, and Tom Hanks.

Whereas the Corridor of Fame exhibit and film mined her previous, Ms. Pratt seemed ahead to future higher alternatives for generations of girls who handed by doorways she helped throw open.

“She was an individual who remained engaged in sports activities,” Johnson mentioned. “She wasn’t a lot a yesterday individual as she was a in the present day and tomorrow individual.”

Ms. Pratt’s brother William died in 1977 and her brother Donald died in 2010. She leaves her nephew, Walter, and niece, Susan. The household’s loss of life discover mentioned a personal service was held Friday at Mount Wollaston Cemetery in Quincy.

“A League of Their Personal” was successful, and with newfound fame Ms. Pratt made a whole lot of appearances in quite a few venues, from colleges to awards ceremonies to throwing out the primary pitch at a Pink Sox sport in Fenway Park, the place many years earlier she had taken her mom when tickets had been 10 cents.

The movie highlighted the glory years Ms. Pratt skilled as an expert pitcher — the fierce competitiveness, the bus rides, the bruises from sliding into base whereas carrying quick skirts, and the etiquette classes, when groups practiced good posture by strolling with books atop their heads as a result of Wrigley wished the ballplayers to be considered “girls.”

“They had been essentially the most great years of my life,” she advised the Globe in 1992. “They’re a time I’ll at all times really treasure.”

Bryan Marquard may be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.