Dottie Collins: the Strikeout Queen of the Daisies

1945 - 1950

The claim: Starred for a Fort Wayne team. Dorothy Wiltse Collins (23 September 1923 - 12 August 2008) was born in Inglewood, California, and came to Fort Wayne with a ballclub: she had pitched her rookie season of 1944 for the Minneapolis Millerettes, going 20-16 with a league-high 205 strikeouts, and when the franchise moved to Fort Wayne in 1945 and became the Daisies, its ace moved with it. She spent the rest of her career in Fort Wayne, married a Fort Wayne man, stayed for sixty years, and died here; the city is entitled to her.

The 1945 season: It stands among the great pitching seasons in any league that has played in this city. Collins went 29-10 with a 0.83 earned run average, struck out a single-season record 293 batters, threw 17 shutouts and two no-hitters in seventeen days, and on 19 August 1945, with first-place Rockford in town, she pitched and won both ends of a doubleheader at North Side Field. She won more than twenty games in each of her first four seasons: 22 in 1946, striking out 294 to break her own record, and 20 in 1947, when she also led the league's pitchers in fielding. Her career line closed at 117 wins, 76 losses, a 1.83 earned run average, and 1,205 strikeouts.

The whole player: The record keeps her adjustments as carefully as her totals. She was a dominant underhand pitcher before 1948, a sidearm pitcher when the league allowed it, and an overhand pitcher when she returned in 1950 after sitting out 1949 for the birth of her first child, going 13-8 and retiring on her own terms. Then she did the second half of her work: as the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League faded, Collins became the players' association's main spokesperson and a keeper of its memory, instrumental in the revival that carried the league into Cooperstown's permanent Women in Baseball exhibit in 1988. Fort Wayne's Journal Gazette marked her death in 2008 as the loss of the woman who had starred for the Daisies and then kept their story alive for everyone else.

Sources:

1. All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, official player profile, Dorothy (Wiltse) Collins (Jim Sargent): the 1945 season, the doubleheader of 19 August 1945, the career line.
2. Carolyn M. Trombe, Dottie Wiltse Collins: Strikeout Queen of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (McFarland, 2005).
3. Journal Gazette obituary, 13 August 2008 (via The Deadball Era): the Daisies years and the Players Association work.
4. News-Sentinel, Right on the Dot, Collins profile (egen.fortwayne.com).