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1914, and the fastpitch era
1914: Mishawaka's industrial-era sport is visible in a single week's paper: the South Bend News-Times of 10 March 1914 carries a Mishawaka Moose indoor baseball club winning games at its hall — indoor baseball, the winter game of the lodge and works teams, documented in the city in the year the Great War began. The semi-pro and factory nines of the Ball Band and Dodge works era surrounded that game; their rosters and seasons were not recovered and stand as a named gap, with the Tribune's morgue and the digitized Miskodeed yearbooks the settling sources.
Wagner Steel: The strongest documented town team is a fastpitch softball club: the Gordon Wagner Steel men's team of Mishawaka, state champions, managed by John Moore. The South Bend Tribune's retrospective and reunion account (2002) records the team's world in detail — when it lost its facilities at Dodge Park, Mayor Margaret Prickett, in her first term, saw to it that a new ballpark was built for it at Twin Branch; its shortstop, Jack Wiltrout, had played on a South Bend Central state championship basketball team; and its pitchers included Ralph DeMeyer, a former sheriff, Royal Church of Valparaiso, and Tony Catanzarite of Mishawaka.
The unpinned years: The account reached does not fix the championship season or seasons, and this section does not guess them. The settling sources are the ASA/USA Softball Indiana champions list and the Tribune's morgue.
Sources:
- South Bend News-Times, 10 March 1914 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — the Mishawaka Moose indoor baseball club.
- South Bend Tribune, 2002 (retrospective/reunion account, via its ProQuest summary) — Wagner Steel: the state championship team, Moore, Prickett and the Twin Branch park, Wiltrout, DeMeyer, Church, Catanzarite.