June Peppas: the Fort Wayne girl who won the last game ever played

1948 - 1954

The claim: Raised in Fort Wayne, and a Daisies player first. June Peppas (16 June 1929 - 14 March 2016) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana; the record prints both halves of that sentence, because the Fort Wayne half is the one that put her in professional baseball. She went to spring training at Opa-locka, Florida, in 1948 and was assigned to her hometown Fort Wayne Daisies, a first baseman who also pitched, in the league's first overhand seasons.

The honest start: Her Fort Wayne beginning was rough, and this section prints it rough, because her ending makes no sense without it. As a rookie pitcher for the 1948 Daisies she went 4-12 with a 4.62 earned run average, walking 91 batters against 39 strikeouts, ranked near the bottom of the league's pitchers. The Daisies traded her in 1949, and she passed through Racine and Battle Creek before settling at Kalamazoo, remaking herself as a hitter: a .273 career average, an All-Star first baseman in 1953 and again in 1954, and in the league's final season a .333 average with 16 home runs while still pitching well enough to go 6-4.

The last game: The All-American league's final championship series, in September 1954, set Kalamazoo against Fort Wayne, the grown player against the team that had traded her. Peppas won the first game, hitting a home run in it. In the fifth and deciding game, on 5 September 1954, she pitched a complete game, went 3-for-5 with four runs batted in on the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette's count, and beat the Daisies 8-5. It was the last game the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League ever played, and a Fort Wayne-raised player won it, against Fort Wayne. The Journal-Gazette called her the villain of the piece. The record calls her something else: proof that this city's sporting exports include the player who closed down a whole league by beating its best team.

Sources:

1. Society for American Baseball Research, BioProject, June Peppas (Jim Sargent): the Kansas City birth and Fort Wayne raising, the Daisies rookie line, the 1954 series and the Journal-Gazette quotation.
2. National Baseball Hall of Fame, Head, Heart, and Hustle (Google Arts and Culture): the 1953-54 All-Star seasons and the 1954 championship trophy.
3. StatsCrew, June Peppas AAGPBL statistics: the career batting line.