Simply put, Doris Sams was a great all-round athlete. She excelled in absolutely every sport she played. Track, softball, tennis, ping pong, bowling, badminton, swimming, horseshoes, volleyball, basketball – you name it, Sams was great at it. She was even Knoxville’s marbles champion! For this list alone, she’s hall of fame material. But Sams earned her place in the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame as a baseball player in the now-defunct All-American Girls Baseball League. Selected as most valuable player of the league, Sams played on the Muskegan club in the late forties, and she holds many All-American League records in both pitching and hitting. Her 1950 statistics include twelve home runs, twenty-five doubles, three triples and fifty-seven runs batted in, with a .314 batting average. Sams led her team to pennants in 1948 and 1949 as pitcher and outfielder. In fact, she was voted to the all-star team at both positions. Perhaps her greatest accomplishment came on August 19, 1947, when she pitched a perfect game against Fort Wayne. Like hitting a hole-in-one, pitching a perfect game is the closest thing to impossible in all of sports, but Sams did it! Not at all surprising from Doris Sams, perhaps Tennessee’s most versatile female athlete.
