AMHERST — In the waning days of Major League Baseball’s 1977 regular season, Sports Illustrated writer Melissa Ludtke, who grew up in Amherst, received a clubhouse pass from the New York Yankees, giving her permission to be with the players before and after games and putting her on equal footing with her male counterparts.

With such locker room access previously off limits to her, Ludtke, in covering the last two games for the soon-to-be world champions, expanded her ability to interview players, including stars like Reggie Jackson, who soon would burnish his legacy as Mr. October.

But as the Fall Classic was about to begin against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the city that had been rocked by the Summer of Sam slayings, baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned Ludtke from entering the players’ dressing areas at the ballparks.

It wasn’t until nearly a year later that Ludtke won a lawsuit filed under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and decided by Judge Constance Baker Motley, a landmark case that gave women covering baseball the same access as men.

“For a long time after the original decision, the story, with me and the public, remained somewhat dormant,” says Ludtke, speaking from her home in Cambridge about her recently published “Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside.”

The book takes readers through her career and the groundbreaking case, filed in late 1977, that opened up big league baseball’s clubhouses and led to more women entering sports media careers.

For Ludtke — who would have graduated with her Amherst Regional High School classmates in 1969 if not for her father, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, being on sabbatical in Rome, Italy — her book comes as women’s sports continue to gain in popularity, with basketball players such as Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark becoming household names, making it the right time to take readers through both her struggles and triumphs that gained global news coverage.

“The emergence of women’s sports and the concurrent rise in the number of women broadcasters, and curiosity about covering sports — that was one of the instigators for me to write this story,” Ludtke said. “I had begun hearing from teachers in middle and high schools and journalism professionals that there was more and more interest in my story from the next generation of students.”

Ludtke said she believes the book is well positioned to speak to today’s aspiring journalists. Not only have journalism schools seen more women interested in covering sports, she has been able to tell her story more frequently, with Zoom widely expanding the number of talks she has given, along with interest in the topic as trailblazing feminists like Gloria Steinem and Bella Apzug.

This week, Ludtke will be at the University of Massachusetts’ Integrative Learning Center, Thursday at 4 p.m., where journalism professor Steve Fox will speak with Ludtke.

Then, on Oct. 10 at 7 p.m. at Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Ludtke will have a conversation with Madeleine Blais, the UMass instructor and writer whose book “In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle” chronicles the Amherst Regional High School girls state basketball championship in 1992-1993,

Blais said Ludtke’s book is essentially her victory lap, looking both backward and forward at how she leveled the playing field.

“She is a local girl made good and deserves a robust audience at her two appearances in the Valley,” Blais said. “Plus she is funny, and kind.”

Observing that she also was on the Amherst Regional basketball team, though in a time before the shot clock and when female players weren’t allowed to really play the same game, Ludtke expressed admiration for Blais.

That feeling is mutual. “When doors refused to open for Melissa Ludtke as a young reporter simply trying to do her job, she persisted in changing the culture that shut her out, the journalistic equivalent of a home run,” Blais said.

Starting at SI

Ludtke began her career at Sports Illustrated in September 1974, hired by Bill Leggett to focus on a television and radio column and being a reporter-researcher, a glorified name for being a fact-checker, rather than an editor or a writer.

“It was a very difficult road for a woman at Sports Illustrated at the time,” Ludtke said, pointing to others who left to become beat writers, like Jane Gross, who became the first woman to be in basketball locker rooms, and Susan Adams, editor at World Tennis Magazine.

In 1976, Ludtke did become one of the magazine’s baseball reporters, giving her a sense of confidence. “With that assignment I got a little card from the American League and National League allowing entrance to each stadium. You could go to any game at any time,” Ludtke said.

While mostly heading out from the office to either Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium, where the National League’s Mets played, Ludtke would mingle with players at batting practice and be in the press box during the game. Over the course of that season and the next, she began expressing privately to Yankees public relations staff, including director Mickey Morabito, her frustration that she couldn’t be with the players.

By mid-1977, though, Ludtke got to meet at the side door of the clubhouse and then enter manager Billy Martin’s office. “That was the beginning of opening up to be able to understand the dynamics,” Ludtke said.

Finally, Morabito left Ludtke a press pass so she could be in the clubhouse before and after the game — the time of great chaos, as she describes it — and when most insights were offered into what had just transpired on the field. Not wanting to shock the system, Ludtke only used the passes before games, though several areas of the clubhouse remained private, like showers and restrooms. “No one tried to get me out of the clubhouse, no one didn’t want me being there,” Ludtke said.

World Series shutout

Before the World Series, the Dodgers took a vote on giving Ludtke similar access. “They had a mixed mind on that — they were taking a vote on male writers,” Ludtke said. But they gave her the OK, even if they were uncomfortable and she knew there would be jokes. Tommy John, as player representative, told her that since she was credentialed by the Baseball Writers Association of America, she should have access to the field, clubhouse and interview room.

But despite agreement from players on both teams that Ludtke could work the clubhouses, Kuhn denied her, forcing her to do interviews in the hallway outside.

“There was no one higher than him to appeal to in the game of baseball,” Ludtke said. “I had gone from absolute elation and on top of the world. It was a difficult decision to take in and I realized that I would be back to fact-checking, when Sports Illustrated had to go beyond daily coverage, and that I couldn’t soak in what players or managers were saying.”

Kuhn argued that there had to be “separate but equal” access. Sports Illustrated turned to counsel F.A.O. “Fritz” Scharz Jr. to go into federal district court and file the gender discrimination case. She didn’t see herself as a pioneer, only trying to do her job, but appreciating that legal barriers were falling, she felt empowered to do more and have an opportunity to be at games and ballparks.

The NBA had already opened its locker rooms under Larry O’Brien, where by April 1978 Ludtle had experience interviewing those players. “I had gotten accustomed to what it was like to report in the locker room,” Ludtke said.

Throughout the 1978 season, with the lawsuit still ongoing and Ludtke continuing to be denied access, she found other means to do her work, like taking rides with Reggie Jackson in one of his Rolls Royces, and other workarounds. “I built my own access in, created my own roadmap.”

There was an emotional toll and mocking of her, including critical editorial cartoons and articles.

Leaving sports writing

In early 1979, Ludtke left Sports Illustrated to work at CBS News, at the time when its evening news was hosted by Walter Cronkite and it was still considered the crown jewel of national news. She didn’t stay long, returning to her love of writing, doing news for Time Inc. and getting to be a correspondent at the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984, which she described as “an amazing opportunity and challenging.”

Ludtke later earned a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, editing a journalism journal and, as a single mother, raised a daughter, Maya Xia Ludtke, adopted from China. They later co-authored the book “Touching Home in China.”

Cambridge has long been her home, but Amherst couldn’t have been a better place during the civil rights movement and Vietnam War, where education is privileged. She returns on occasion, such as for her recent 55th high school reunion.

“Amherst was a glorious place to grow up and be supported and felt you were part of the world,” Ludtke said.

Explaining her story

Ludtke said she spent 10 to 12 years researching her story and wrote two drafts, settling on the focus of it being an equal rights case. Not everything is relatable to current times, Ludtke said, with sexual harassment, sexual objectification and misogyny not well understood then.

“We’re still not out of the old attitudes completely — there’s still remnants of them,” Ludtke said. “In some ways it’s easier to change the laws than the attitudes.”

She is grateful to see those who have followed, such as Melanie Newman, who handles play-by-play broadcasts on radio and television for the Baltimore Orioles; Jenny Cavnar, the television play-by-play announcer for the Oakland Athletics; and Suzyn Waldman, who has done color commentary on Yankees radio broadcasts for 20 seasons.

“There’s been enormous progress that would have been hard to envision in the 1970s,” she says of TV sports.

Yet newspapers and print publications, Ludtke said, continue to score poorly, even with sports columnists such as Sally Jenkins and Christine Brennan at The Washington Post and USA Today, respectively.

“For women covering sports today, many have amazing careers,” Ludtke said, observing The Washington Post in recent years had women covering each of the major sports, Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA and NHL. She strikes an optimistic tone.

“Women have lots of opportunities now,” Ludtke said. “The fact that women are having success is heartening, but we need more.”

Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.