The Fourth City Chosen: The Founding, Spring 1943

April–May 1943

South Bend was the fourth and last city chosen to complete the new league's first circuit, after Rockford, Racine and Kenosha. The league was Philip K. Wrigley's wartime creation, organized to keep professional ball in front of Midwestern crowds while the men's game emptied into the armed forces, and its local adoption followed the pattern the league wanted everywhere: businessmen first, ballplayers second. The South Bend Tribune's headlines, preserved in the annotation to the state's historical marker for the club, trace the sequence. On April 17, 1943, the paper was writing about girls' softball; on April 28 it reported "South Bend Approves Team in Girls' Softball League: Business Men Back Plan to Join Circuit"; on May 13, "Girls Softball Club Gets Aid of Veterans." The players came out of a central tryout camp the league held at Wrigley Field in Chicago in May 1943, where the recruits — among them a Regina catcher named Bonnie Baker, who had been spotted by the scout Hubert Bishop — were divided among the four clubs. Play opened on May 30, 1943, and South Bend's first game was against Rockford; Baker caught it, and a fifteen-year-old shortstop from Sadorus, Illinois, named Dottie Schroeder was in the South Bend lineup — the youngest player in the league, signed at fifty-five dollars a week. She would still be playing, for another club, in the league's last championship game eleven years later.

The club's name is the one founding fact the surviving record does not explain. The league's teams were usually given names with a feminine turn — Belles, Colleens, Daisies, Chicks, Lassies, Millerettes, Peaches, Sallies — and the reviewers of the published team history have noted that "Blue Sox" was an exception to that practice. Why South Bend's club took a plain color-and-stockings name of the old baseball kind, and who chose it, is not documented in any source this history could reach, and it is printed here as an open question rather than filled in. What is documented is the club's first roster, twenty-three players as the season register lists them, and its first home: Bendix Field, the Bendix corporation's grounds, where the Blue Sox played their first three seasons. The club was a local corporation in the league's structure, with local men on its board; Harold T. Dailey, a South Bend oral surgeon, sat on that board from 1945 to 1952 and served as team president from late 1947 to 1950, and the nine loose-leaf notebooks he kept on the club are now among its fullest surviving records.

Sources

1. All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (Players Association), team history page for the South Bend Blue Sox, aagpbl.org — fourth city chosen; History Museum holdings.
2. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker 71.2021.1, "South Bend Blue Sox," annotation and bibliography — Tribune headlines of April 17, April 28, May 13 and May 30, 1943.
3. Jim Sargent, SABR biography of Bonnie Baker — Bishop's scouting, the May 1943 Wrigley Field tryout camp, her first game against Rockford on May 30, 1943.
4. Champaign County History Museum, exhibit biography of Dottie Schroeder — signed at fifteen at $55 a week; played in the league's first game, May 30, 1943.
5. Review of Jim Sargent and Robert M. Gorman, The South Bend Blue Sox (McFarland, 2012), BooksRun — the "Blue Sox" name as an exception to the league's gendered naming practice; name origin otherwise undocumented in sources reached.
6. University of Notre Dame Archives, All-American Girls Baseball League Collection (MSSP 0014) — Dailey notebooks and board service.