Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (19 page)

Or would the Racine Belles reprise their championships of 1946 and 1947?

With Allington back in Rockford, a number of observers were betting on the Peaches, while others maintained that this would finally be South Bend’s year.

Harold Dailey liked to point out that the Blue Sox franchise had done all the right things
– giving up veterans to allocation, backing its manager against fractious players, launching massive ticket-selling drives resulting in League-leading attendance. Despite all this, he said – and because of the League’s refusal to give South Bend quality players in return – the Blue Sox, the League’s perennial bridesmaids, had been cheated of the championship season after season. Maybe this year their time had come at last.

It was hard to build anticipation during the season’s early weeks
. News reports centered endlessly on the abysmal weather. Depending on the writer’s point of view, the ceaseless rain either excused low attendance or pointed up the courage of those fans who braved freezing temperatures.

In Muskegon
– not a prime contender for the championship – the local newspaper attempted to rally the faithful. The Lassies’ fans were noted for their loyalty, but this year, faced with a depleted team, their patience was sorely tried.

An editorial harked back to the glory days at Marsh Field, pointing up baseball’s value as an entertainment where anything goes
.

“Last year at one of the games,” it read, “the fans had the opportunity to watch a Lassie rally at the plate in the ninth inning, a building burning across the road and a trouble-maker being dragged bodily from the stands by two burly guards
– all this at the same time and at no extra charge.”

It wasn’t what you would call Triple-A publicity, but at least it got the Lassies’ name spelled right.

As May gave way to June and the weather at last improved, a pattern began to emerge. As expected, the established clubs had come to dominate the standings.

Grand Rapids set the pace in the eastern division, while Rockford headed the west, by a conspicuous margin
.

The Springfield Sallies were performing dismally
– no hope for them – but, then again, nobody had expected very much.

All eyes were on the Chicago Colleens
. Despite good players and the services of the experienced Bancroft, they were at the bottom of the western division. They weren’t simply bad, they were terrible, having played 14 games and registered only a single win.

Carey and Meyerhoff went into a panic. If Chicago failed, it would prove beyond all doubt that the League couldn’t cut it in major-league cities, and that the dissenters had been right all along
.

The League’s response was to take the Colleens apart and put them together again
. Carey presented a new resolution to the allocation board, suggesting specific “emergency trades” – to be made without the managers’ approval, although he had talked matters over with the club directors. He maintained that such trades “will not hurt the ability of any club to win, and will put a ball club on the field in Chicago which can compete with the rest of the League.”

The board must have approved his plan, which went into effect on June 1 as requested
. Chicago got what amounted to an entirely new team, composed of players dragooned from all the other clubs.

Only Springfield was left untouched.

The Grand Rapids Chicks lost ace shortstop Ernestine “Teeny” Petras, part of their prized double play combination. Dottie Hunter remembers that “it had to be either Teeny or Zig [Alma Ziegler]. Well, Zig was captain and had been forever. So Teeny had to go.”

The only happy note was struck when the Fort Wayne Daisies decided to send Arleene Johnson back to the Muskegon Lassies
.

A great many players were sent scurrying to and fro in this massive
– though in the end fruitless – exercise. But, with the exception of Rita Briggs, an outfielder with the Rockford Peaches, none of the players who were parachuted into Chicago did particularly well. They could not salvage the Colleens’ miserable fortunes.

In fact, all that the board’s machinations accomplished was to confirm many people’s worst fears
. Ever since the days of Philip Wrigley’s benevolent dictatorship, the League’s critics had sought more power in the hands of the individual clubs. Wrigley had at least commanded respect. Meyerhoff and Carey, on the other hand, could not make the clubs pull together. Unless Chicago showed immediate improvement and began to pull its weight, the men responsible for its place in the League would have another strike against them.

And what of the introduction of the overhand throw?  Why did the League insist on it anyway?  Because deep in the hearts of the All-American’s organizers was a primary allegiance to “real” baseball
. Max Carey, despite his reaction to the 1946 play-offs, saw the All-American’s lack of tradition as something to be taken advantage of.

“It is our obligation to go forward instead of standing still or going backward,” he said
. “It has taken men’s baseball 50 years to settle on its distances and rules. We have made tremendous strides in five years, and feel that we are well on our way to accomplishing our aims – to bring about the best-looking sports spectacle in as short a time as possible.”

And so the pitchers struggled afresh
. Joanne Winter had learned to cope with the sidearm delivery just in time for it to become obsolete. A sidearm pitch – full, modified or disguised with something plucked from a bag of tricks – was outmoded overnight. A good overhand throw would beat it every time.

Winter wasn’t totally unprepared; she’d made one successful transition already
. Nor were many other pitchers. Most of them had tried the overhand in sandlot games as they were growing up. And a fielded ball was always thrown that way.

“But,” says Winter, “although I had a good arm, I’d never used it as a stressful pitching motion for that number of innings and throws in a row
. It’s a much more difficult physical maneuver, but I thought it was a challenge. I was kind of excited to see if I could do it.”

In fact, there wasn’t any option
. During the winter months, the League had sent all the pitchers a supply of new, slightly smaller balls (which now measured 10-3/8 inches). As for the overhand throw, the instruction was:  “You’d better get used to it.”

Winter wasn’t concerned
– at least at first:  “When you’re twenty-something, you don’t worry as much.”

After a winter’s practice at the local YWCA, Winter had barely kicked off the season, under the watchful eye of Racine’s manager, Leo Murphy, when she discovered that she had a relatively rare medical condition
.

She was born with an extra lumbar vertebra, which had fused to the next one in line
. Her former pitching habits hadn’t aggravated it. Now, throwing overhand for any length of time caused the extra vertebra to slip and cause severe pain.

Doctors suggested an operation, which Winter refused
. “They wanted to open up my back, take some bone off my fibula and graft it and – oh my God! – the procedure they described was three pages of typewritten stuff and it scared me to death.”

Instead, she opted for the advice offered by another doctor, whom Mildred Wilson, the club chaperon and Winter’s business partner, had recommended
. His solution was somewhat more straightforward:  simply tape the offending vertebra in place.

So it was that, before every game, Wilson would criss-cross Winter’s entire back with a roll of surgical tape, cinching her in like a mummy:  “Towards the end of the game, when I got a little heated, it would work loose and I would feel that doggone pain in the coccyx, but I would muster through it
. You just ride through it, and we didn’t have a lot of painkillers in those days.”

As a result of these primitive expedients, Winter continued to throw
– and throw extremely well. Nor did she publicize the true extent of her condition. It became general knowledge during spring training that she had a “crick” in her back; that was all.

In early June, she and the Belles traveled to South Bend
. In front of 4,500 Blue Sox fans, Winter pitched superbly, winning 5-1.

A local sports editor, unaware of the fact that she’d thrown, as always, in some pain, suspected tales of her bad back had been a ruse to deceive the opposing team
.

“Winter threw sharp-breaking hooks and smoky fast balls past the Blue Sox with such deadly effect that she retired
24 hitters without one of them reaching first,” he wrote. “She fanned 12, didn’t give a walk after she passed Shoo-Shoo Wirth to open the game, and received the benefit of perfect support throughout. Maybe a good backache would help out some of the Blue Sox pitchers.”

Generally speaking, most players coped remarkably well with 1948’s rampant rule changes
. But there were some misgivings. Some mourned the loss – now absolute – of windmill pitchers, who had delivered balls with sweeping, ferris-wheel swoops.

Joanne Winter cites another hazard:  the newer, smaller ball came off a bat that much quicker
. On the mound, having completed your delivery, you were vulnerable:  “I felt that we weren’t going to be up to it, to have someone jamming that ball back at us as hard as they could hit it.”

And other perils lurked
. A skilled pitcher, having mastered the overhand throw, could make a smaller, harder, faster-moving ball do more. Thrown by erratic hurlers, it became a threat. These were the days before the batting helmet, and hitters were justifiably leery of beanballs thrown by accident or with intent.

Otherwise, the game was zippier, more complex
. It called for subtle almost unconscious adaptations. Arleene Johnson found that “the strategy changed slightly, because the delivery was different. Base running depended on the pitcher’s windup and presentation – all of which altered with an overhand pitch.”

The game changed, but opinions differ as to whether it changed for the better.

It meant a wholesale shift in the fortunes of a team’s pitching staff. The League knew that certain players would be unable to adapt.

Perhaps they could be relocated, and some like Connie Wisniewski, were
. She went to the outfield and concentrated on hitting, but continued to pitch from time to time; she was allowed 10 starts a season.

Her first was in June, in the course of an inconsequential series against the Springfield Sallies
. In the second game of a double-header, she had a rocky first inning, during which the Sallies scored twice. Wisniewski settled down, but lost 3-2. It didn’t endanger the Chicks’ first place standing, but it was a humiliating defeat.

Fortunately, Wisniewski’s value to the Chicks could be read in her batting statistics
. In 1948, she ranked third in all the League.

Other pitchers went into the discard file.

Oddly enough, the League actually thought that the overhand toss might alleviate the chronic pitcher shortage. There was a considerable reservoir of unused talent in the infield and the outfield. Perhaps some of these players – who tossed overhand as a matter of course – could be retrained. And this was correct to some degree.

Betsy Jochum was a five-year veteran in 1948, a mainstay of the South Bend Blue Sox
. She was a solid hitter, and had done particularly well in 1944, winning the batting championship.

When the underhand throw arrived, she
– like everyone else with a vaguely reasonable arm – was given a chance on the mound, and she rejuvenated her career in this new position.

Her first chance as a starter came on a chilly Saturday night near the end of May, when South Bend hosted the Fort Wayne Daisies
. The final score was 6-0 – not bad for a maiden outing. And just as well. Jochum’s emergence as a pitcher with unusual speed and remarkable control came at a time when South Bend’s pitching staff was riddled with injuries.

Elsewhere, others made the transition work
. Lois Florreich was another outfielder, one of the League’s original players. She’d started with South Bend in 1943, and moved from third base to center field at the urging of manager Bert Niehoff. Traded to Kenosha in mid-1945, she’d continued to prosper in the outfield, began to assume occasional pitching duties in 1946 as a sidearm pitcher, and by 1948 – now with the Rockford Peaches – was the fourth-highest-ranked pitcher in the entire League.

One thing was certain:  the overhand throw made for less frequent appearances
.

When Helen Nicol was the top-ranked pitcher in 1943, she played in 47 out of 108 scheduled games
. By comparison, Alice Haylett, the 1948’s pitching leader, was at the mound (sometimes for a couple of innings only) in no more than a quarter of the contests.

“Underhand, it never used to hurt,” says Connie Wisniewski
. “It was effortless. I used my whole body and I could pitch two, three games in a row.”

No more
. Pitchers couldn’t last a double-header as they’d done in the old days. In fact, they couldn’t last the game.

For the first time, relievers were needed in volume; but where were the closers to come from?  As the season wore on, the winning pitchers and high-scoring hitters were the same old faces, those who’d been playing the game for many years.