Changemakers: Jean Fruth - Inside America's Favorite Pastime

Jean Fruth’s trajectory as one of baseball’s preeminent photographers has taken her on a round-the-horn tour of the sport’s most indelible landmarks. Growing up in New York City, Jean’s earliest memories are of her Grandfather listening to his beloved New York Mets on a tiny transistor radio. In school, Jean fell in love with the alchemy of photography. When she moved west as a young adult she immersed herself in the business, becoming a portrait photographer in the wine country of California.  When life got busy and she found herself spending hours at the field of her son’s Little League games, she started shooting the action, eventually submitting images to the local paper. That’s when the local editor spotted her keen eye for sports photography and invited her to submit more. Jean tried her hand at different sports but found that nothing compared to the art and poetry of baseball—to outsider’s: a slow-moving sport, to the aficionado: an orchestra of strategy, timing, and sheer athleticism.

Jean would eventually meet legendary San Francisco sports photographer Michael Zagaris “Z,” as he’s known in the sports world.  Z took Jean under his wing and invited her to shoot alongside him at the Oakland Coliseum—the only major ballpark without a railing in front of its dugout.  Jean began producing front page-worthy shots, then the real magic happened when Jean stepped away from the pack and began shooting from novel perspectives, including the cheapest seat in the house, the upper deck of the outfield. These images captured the attention of the MLB and the NFL, and would guide the next decade of Jean’s career, which she spent covering the San Francisco Giants, Oakland Athletics, and San Francisco 49ers. In between seasons, when most sports photographers take a break from the longest season in sports, Jean found herself chasing it, covering the Caribbean League in Winter months, then traveling with La Vida Baseball, a digital media company, that tells the story of Latino baseball across the United States and Latin America. In 2014, Fruth was invited to give a presentation of her grassroots baseball images at the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, where she grew even more convinced of the unique ability of baseball to reflect the culture of where it’s played. Eventually, she approached the Baseball Hall of Fame and proposed that they hire her as their traveling photographer, to add a contemporary voice to the museum’s marketing and connect it with the sport’s rich history, to attract a younger audience through social media. The original concept for the position grew organically and Jean’s work became a cornerstone of the organization’s marketing efforts and its permanent archive, which she helped assemble.

Through her journey, Jean has recognized the transformative power of baseball to help young people develop strength, skills, friendships, and to learn and practice the concept of teamwork.  As a result, together with her partner, former Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson, she formed a non-profit organization called Grassroots Baseball, to promote and celebrate the amateur game around the globe, with a focus on encouraging interest and participation at the youngest levels.  She is documenting their journey in a series of books, starting with Grassroots Baseball: Where Legends Begin (Simon & Schuster, 2019) with an introduction by Cal Ripken, Jr., and an afterword by Johnny Bench.