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1940 – 1941
The Sports leg carried the Bendix Brakes' fastpitch peak from the ASA champions list — runners-up in 1940, champions in 1941 — with Ike Bierwagen's figures carried as local recounting. This pass pulled the association's tournament record itself, and the banked lines stand in every particular, with the tournament's detail now behind them.
The record: The ASA men's major fast pitch champions list records 1940: champion Kodak Park of Rochester, New York; runner-up, the Bendix Brakes of South Bend. And 1941: champion, the Bendix Brakes of South Bend — tournament record 6–0, season record 61–22 — with the Schlitz team of Atlanta the runner-up; the tournament was held in Detroit in September 1941. The 1941 tournament account names Bierwagen the most valuable player: he went 3–0, pitched a nine-inning no-hitter, teamed with Len Murray to win a twelve-inning game over Pontiac, and pitched the first six innings of the championship game without a run, Stan Corgan — himself 3–0 in the tournament — taking the final three outs of the last inning to preserve the shutout. The account closes the season line: Bendix ended the year with 38 straight wins.
The pitcher's frame: The tournament record names him "Big Ike" and "Bonecrusher" Bierwagen; the city's own record gives him his full frame — Ervin Joseph Bierwagen, a 1938 graduate of South Bend Central, who pitched in the city for a decade, retired in 1950, and died on January 4, 1991, fifty years after the championship season. His season and career figures — 30–1 in 1941 with ten no-hitters and eight earned runs in 252 innings, 93 no-hitters across the career — remain what the Sports leg printed them as: the local record's recounting, attributed, and not the association's arithmetic.
The residue that stays open: The Brakes of the 1948 barnstorming lists could not be pinned to a sport with confidence by the Sports leg, and nothing that pins them; the item re-logs here unchanged. The documented Brakes are the 1928–30 basketball club of the Sports record and the 1940–41 fastpitch club of this entry.
Sources:
- Softball History USA, the ASA men's major fast pitch champions list and the 1941 national tournament account — the 1940 and 1941 champions and runners-up, the Detroit venue, the 6–0 tournament and 61–22 season records, Bierwagen's MVP line and the championship game's pitching detail, Corgan's 3–0, the closing 38 straight wins.
- South Bend News-Times (Bill Moor, March 17, 2025) — Bierwagen's biography and the local recounting of his figures, attributed as recounting.
- The banked Sports, entry spo-brakes-softball — the lines this entry verifies.