1951: The Pennant and the First Championship

1951 · Manager: Karl Winsch

Karl Winsch — Jean Faut's husband, married to her since 1947 — took over the club in 1951, and the Blue Sox won the only true pennant in their history: 76 wins, the most the franchise ever recorded, against 36 losses, built in halves of 38–22 and 38–14, the second-half title theirs outright. The team was a blend of the old core and the 1950 arrivals, deep in pitching — Faut (15–7, a league-leading 135 strikeouts), Faralla (15–4), Dottie Mueller (10–2 with a 1.56 earned run average), Lou Arnold (10–2) and Georgette Vincent (13–9) all won in double figures — and it ran. Charlene Pryer led the entire league in batting at .312, in hits with 133, in runs with 106 and in stolen bases with 129. On July 21, 1951, at Playland Park before 1,490 people, Faut pitched a perfect game against Rockford, 2–0 — twenty-seven up, twenty-seven down — saved in the late innings by Betty Wagoner's shoestring catch in the outfield. Faut was voted the league's Player of the Year. Winsch told the Tribune afterward that the club had come from behind to win twenty-four games in 1951, against four the year before; it was that habit, more than the pennant, that decided the autumn.

The first round, against Fort Wayne, went the distance in three games. At Playland, Faut stopped the Daisies on six hits, 2–1, with Mahon driving in both South Bend runs. After a rain day, Fort Wayne won the second game 9–1 behind Pat Scott's eight and a third innings of shutout relief. The decider was played at Fort Wayne's Memorial Field and went ten innings: Shirley Stovroff doubled, Jean Weaver was thrown out stealing home in the ninth, and in the tenth Dottie Mueller laid down a bases-loaded squeeze bunt that scored Stovroff — 2–1, and South Bend was in its first final.

The final, against Rockford, went five games and twice changed cities on a schedule nobody has explained in the sources reached: the series opened on Saturday, September 8, not at Playland but at Fort Wayne's Memorial Field, a neutral ground. Rockford won the opener 5–4 behind Nicky Fox, the game ending on Dottie Key's two-out shoestring catch of Jane Stoll's bases-loaded line drive. Rockford won again on Sunday behind Rose Gacioch, who pitched a six-hitter and hit a solo home run; the surviving accounts give the score as 7–1 in Sargent's biography of Faut — Sue Kidd was knocked out for three runs in the first and Lou Arnold relieved — and as 5–4 in his biography of Mahon, and both are printed in this history's note rather than reconciled.

Monday's game was rained out in South Bend, and on Tuesday the series turned: Faut struck out eleven and allowed six hits to win 3–2, South Bend scoring three unearned runs in the third while Rockford's rookie Marie Mansfield walked thirteen and allowed only three hits. In the fourth game at Playland, South Bend won 6–3 in a game shortened by rain to seven innings — Georgette "Jetty" Vincent beat Fox, Stovroff had three hits, and Rockford's 3–0 lead dissolved. The fifth game, at Playland before 2,268 fans, was a rout: the Tribune's headline the next morning, September 14, 1951, read "Sox Trounce Rockford, 10-2 in Final Tilt." Faralla started; Faut came on in the third inning with the bases loaded and two outs and held Rockford scoreless the rest of the way; South Bend scored five runs in the first inning and made thirteen hits, Wagoner going 4-for-4. Across the final three games Wagoner batted .600, Stovroff .500 and Pryer .357. South Bend had its pennant and, behind it, its first playoff championship — the league's own table names the club both League Champions and Play-off Champions for 1951, the only year the two honors landed in the same place in South Bend.

Sources

1. All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, 1951 season table, aagpbl.org, and Baseball-Reference Register — 76–36 (halves 38–22 and 38–14, second-half title); South Bend named both League Champions and Play-off Champions; the pitching lines of Faut, Faralla, Mueller, Arnold and Vincent; Pryer's league leads.
2. Jim Sargent, SABR biographies of Jean Faut and Lib Mahon — the perfect game of July 21, 1951 and Wagoner's catch; Mahon's 1951 RBIs given as 60 in the biography's text and 68 in its summary; the final series game by game, including the conflicting Game Two scores, 7–1 and 5–4.
3. Baseball-Reference Register, 1951 South Bend batting list — Mahon, 104 games, .269, 68 RBIs, second in the league; the register's count is the one printed in the text.
4. South Bend Tribune, September 14, 1951 — "Sox Trounce Rockford, 10-2 in Final Tilt"; Winsch's count of twenty-four come-from-behind wins.
5. Jim Sargent, SABR biography of Sue Kidd — the young pitching staff of 1951 (Kidd, rookie Janet Rumsey, Georgette Vincent) behind Faut and Faralla.