Minneapolis, MN
Sherman Elementary Stars
Favorite food: Nachos
Favorite animal: Snow leopard
Patronus: Sea Turtle
Current team: Bookenders, Minneapolis- 2022 league champs!
Favorite position to play *in softball*: Second base
A Sea Kitten original, G Hansen played 47 games over the course of 6 seasons and between the birth of two children. G-bomb is remembered for both her prowess with the stick and glove. She is one of only two women to have homered for the Cats, having clubbed an inside-the -parker in Fall, 2012. A major catalyst of the Boise League Champions she slashed 0.455/0.471/0/.576 and established a team record that hasn’t been topped: runs scored (12) in a season. Hansen’s 9 RBI in that same magical 2012 season was a single-season record that stood for five years. G-bomb’s 0.407 career batting average is 4th on the all-time list among Sea Kitten women. She’s one of three Sea Kittens who have walked three times in a game.
Hansen is one of the few Sea kittens who have played every infield position at one time or another, and also brought a palpable calmness to the Sea Kitten defense when she handled shortstop. She was perhaps not quite as entertained by “Sea Kitten Innings” as some. Asked her least favorite thing on the diamond, Hansen listed “base runners from the other team who got there by Sea Kitten errors,” but perhaps she’d blocked out the moment Tommy Tom Tom Seahorse Shabidu Cichosz, Jr. played umpire in the amazing “Out at Third” game.
Favorite Sea Kitten moment: Hitting a home run (“I think I did that once, right?”)
Most memorable Sea Kitten moment: “I remember playing in the summer tournament 6 weeks after Ada was born – my first real post-partum exercise – and peeing in my pants while running the bases :-)”
Indeed, “Gretchen” played first base for the Cats August 21, 2001 in the Harmony Tournament, rapping a 6th-inning single in the Cats’ losing effort. What she does not recall was her actual return to the diamond: the Sea Kittens’ Summer season finale on August 10, 2011, only 42 days post-partum, in the second game of a double-header. While she went 2-3 in a designated hitter role, some recall her saying something like “I think my insides are going to fall out.”
Hansen returned to the Cats for a single-game cameo August 25, 2022 and added three hits to her career total in a Sea Kitten win.
Earliest softball/baseball memory: “Being one of the best pitchers on my mostly boys baseball team (along with the two other girls on the team) and never being allowed to pitch in a game.”
NOTE: Gretchen twirled 2 innings for the Cats in 2015.
