1954 and the End of the League

1954 · Manager: Karl Winsch

The last Blue Sox club was, on paper, a strong one, rebuilt out of the league's contraction: after the Battle Creek club folded, South Bend took outfielders Wilma Briggs (.300, with 25 home runs and 73 runs batted in) and Betty Francis (.350, eight home runs, 58 driven in) in the dispersal, infielders Mary Carey and Betty Wanless — Wanless hit fifteen home runs — and pitcher Dolly Vanderlip, who went 11–6. Betty Wagoner, in her seventh South Bend season, hit a career-best .320. The mound belonged to Janet Rumsey, the Indiana pitcher who had been a rookie on the 1951 champions: she won fifteen games with a league-best 2.18 earned run average and pitched a no-hitter, and in July she started for the All-Stars in the league's last All-Star Game, at Fort Wayne. Kidd, at twenty, went 9–5 by the recount of her games that her biographer prints — 9–6 in his narrative line — and hit five home runs. In July the league made its final rules change, to a regulation-size ball, 85-foot basepaths and a 60-foot pitching distance, on a schedule shortened to 96 games. South Bend finished second at 48–44, five games behind Fort Wayne.

The playoffs were the league's last. Grand Rapids, beaten 8–7 by Fort Wayne in the other first-round opener, forfeited the rest of its series. South Bend won its first-round opener against Kalamazoo 6–3 and lost the next two, 6–3 and 10–7 — Sargent's biography of Kidd says the semifinal loss was to Grand Rapids, but the season record, bracket and all, puts Kalamazoo in the series, and this history prints Kalamazoo. Kalamazoo then beat Fort Wayne three games to two for the championship, the deciding game on September 5, 1954, standing as the last game the league ever played — and Dottie Schroeder, who had played the league's first game as a fifteen-year-old Blue Sox shortstop in 1943, won her championship ring in it, as Kalamazoo's shortstop. The league's books closed on a reported operating deficit of $22,500 for 1954, in the Tribune's telling, and on January 30, 1955, the league voted to cease operations. More than 600 women had played in it across twelve seasons. South Bend's twelve-season line, adding the league tables year by year, is 717 wins and 605 losses, seven playoff appearances, one pennant and two playoff championships.

Sources

1. Jim Sargent, SABR biography of Sue Kidd — the 1954 rebuild from the Battle Creek dispersal (Briggs, Francis, Carey, Wanless, Vanderlip, Nordquist), Wagoner's .320, Rumsey's 15 wins and 2.18 ERA and no-hitter, Kidd's 9–6 in the narrative and 9–5 "according to a recount of games," the July 1954 rules changes; the biography's Grand Rapids semifinal line is printed in the text as the conflict it is.
2. Baseball-Reference Register, 1954 South Bend lists — the thirteen-player batting record (Briggs .300/25 HR/73 RBIs, Francis .350, Wanless 15 HR, Dunn, Froning, Kidd .238 with five home runs, Baumgartner, Carey, Drinkwater, Nordquist .310, Rumsey, Vanderlip, Wagoner .320); the season line 48–44, second, five games behind Fort Wayne.
3. 1954 season accounts (league season record; Kalamazoo Lassies history; SABR Games Project, the final All-Star Game, July 9, 1954) — the Grand Rapids forfeiture, South Bend's 6–3 win and 6–3 and 10–7 losses to Kalamazoo, Kalamazoo's 3–2 final win over Fort Wayne, the deciding game of September 5, 1954 as the league's last, Rumsey's All-Star start, and Schroeder at shortstop for Kalamazoo.
4. South Bend Tribune, as reached — the reported $22,500 league operating deficit for 1954; the vote of January 30, 1955, to cease operations.