The Charter Seasons: 1943 and 1944

1943–1944 · Manager: Bert Niehoff

Bert Niehoff, a former major-league infielder, managed the first two Blue Sox clubs, and both of them were good without being quite good enough. The league played a split season in 1943, and on the league's own split-season tables South Bend finished second in each half — 28–26 in the first, 30–24 in the second — for a whole-season line of 58–50. A second line in circulation, carried by the club's encyclopedia narrative, gives 51–40 and third place, a thousandth of a percentage point behind Kenosha; the two countings rest on different compilations of the same season and stand unreconciled in the record, and this history prints the league tables' figures and says so. Racine won the first championship; South Bend's distinction was the one it would keep for twelve years — it was there. The pitching in the softball season was workhorse work, and the surviving workload summaries name Margaret Berger and Doris Barr as the staff's carriers — Barr's very place on the club is one of the 1943 record's tangles, since she appears in the inaugural team photograph but not in the register's roster list, a difference this history flags rather than resolves. The club's drawing card was its catcher. Bonnie Baker — "Pretty Bonnie Baker" in the press — was the most publicized player in the league, and she remained its face in South Bend until 1950.

The 1944 club went 64–52, again second in both halves on the league tables (33–25 and 31–27; a narrative line gives 64–55), in a league grown to six teams with Chicago and Milwaukee added. The season's South Bend mark was made at the plate: Betsy Jochum, an outfielder from Cincinnati, hit .296 and won the league batting championship, in an underhand-pitching season when averages across the league were low. Milwaukee won the 1944 playoff championship over Kenosha. Two of the players who would define other clubs were wearing South Bend uniforms in these years and learning the league — Lois Florreich, who pitched for the Blue Sox in 1943–44 before becoming Rockford's ace, and Rose Gacioch, a 1944 Blue Sox player who would spend a decade as Rockford's star. The league they were learning was still, formally, a softball league in skirts, with chaperones — Rose Virginia Way rode with the 1943 club — and a code of femininity written into its rules; the marker's side one says plainly that the league required its players to project femininity even as it asked them to play a man's game in public.

Sources

1. All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, season tables, aagpbl.org, and StatsCrew franchise record — 1943 split halves 28–26 and 30–24; 1944 halves 33–25 and 31–27; season lines 58–50 and 64–52.
2. Wikipedia and Alchetron, South Bend Blue Sox — the competing narrative lines, 51–40 and third place (.001 behind Kenosha) for 1943 and 64–55 for 1944, printed here as conflicts, not adopted.
3. Baseball-Reference Register, South Bend season lists — Berger and Barr's workload on the 1943 staff; Jochum's .296 league batting championship, 1944.
4. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker 71.2021.1, side one — the league's femininity standards.