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1943 – 1945
The league: The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was founded in 1943 by Chicago chewing-gum magnate Philip K. Wrigley, to keep professional baseball in the Midwest while the men's game was drained by the war. South Bend was one of the four charter clubs, with Rockford, Racine and Kenosha. It grew to six teams in 1944 and, at its 1948 peak, ten.
The distinction that frames the club: The Blue Sox and the Rockford Peaches were the league's only two teams to play in every one of its twelve seasons without relocating. Every other AAGPBL club moved, folded or was replaced; South Bend's club was there at the founding and there at the end.
The parks: The Blue Sox played their first three seasons, 1943–45, at Bendix Field. In 1946 they moved to Playland Park — the old Springbrook Park ground — and stayed there for the rest of the club's life.
The managers: The dugout line runs Bert Niehoff (1943–44), Marty McManus (1945, and again in 1948), Chet Grant (1946–47) — the former Notre Dame quarterback and coach — Dave Bancroft (1949–50), the former major-league shortstop, and Karl Winsch (1951–54), who managed the championship teams.
The early standing: The league record describes the early Blue Sox plainly: often a second-division team. Their first playoff appearance came in 1946.
The game they played: It was not yet quite baseball, and it became baseball under them. The league opened play on May 30, 1943 as a softball game in all but ambition; sidearm pitching was approved in 1946, and overhand pitching in 1948, when the basepaths stretched to 72 feet, the pitching distance to 50 feet, and the ball shrank toward regulation. By the final season of 1954 the game used a standard nine-inch baseball, a sixty-foot pitching distance and eighty-five-foot basepaths — five feet short of the men's game, and a world away from 1943.
Sources:
- Baseball-Reference Bullpen, South Bend Blue Sox — ballparks Bendix Field (1943–1945) and Playland Park (1946–1954); one of two teams to play every season; the managers' line.
- AAGPBL record — the league founded 1943 under Philip K. Wrigley; South Bend a charter club.