The Game They Played: Softball Growing into Baseball

1943–1954

The Blue Sox of 1943 and the Blue Sox of 1954 were playing recognizably different games under the same name, because the league rebuilt its rules almost every year in one direction — from softball toward baseball. The ball shrank steadily: a 12-inch circumference in 1943, 11½ inches in 1945, 11 in 1946, 10⅜ in 1948, 10 inches with red seams from 1949 (a livelier cork-center ball arrived in mid-July of that year), and finally 9¼ inches, the regulation baseball size, in 1954. Pitching moved the same way. It began underhand from 40 feet in 1943; the distance lengthened to 42 feet in 1945 and 43 in 1946, sidearm delivery was permitted late in 1946 and in full in 1947, and from 1948 the pitchers threw overhand, as baseball pitchers do, from 50 feet, then from the mid-fifties — the league's own accounts of the final change, in July 1954, describe the mound going back from 56 feet to 60. The basepaths lengthened in step, from 65 feet in 1943 to 85 feet in 1954, the last change also coming in July of the final season. Leading off and stealing bases were allowed from the first year, which is why the early Blue Sox box scores are full of stolen bases even when the hitting was thin. By 1954 the women's game, as the reviewers of the team history put it, had become almost identical to the men's game being played across town.

The league's own name changed as often as its ball. It began in 1943 as the All-American Girls Soft Ball League, became the All-American Girls Base Ball League in mid-1943, the All-American Girls Professional Ball League for 1944–45, the All-American Girls Base Ball League again from 1946 through 1950, and the American Girls Baseball League for its last four seasons, 1951–54. The name by which everyone now knows it — All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — was taken up again by the players themselves when they organized their association in the 1980s, and it is used in this history for the whole twelve years, as the association uses it.

Sources

1. Jim Sargent, SABR biography of Jean Faut, drawing on Merrie A. Fidler, The Origins and History of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — ball sizes, pitching distances and styles, basepath lengths by year.
2. Baseball-Reference Bullpen, league overview — the year-by-year rules table (the Bullpen table prints 55 feet and 72 feet for the years before 1954 where Sargent's account of the 1954 change gives 56 and 75; both are carried, neither averaged).
3. Jim Sargent, SABR biography of Sue Kidd — the July 1954 changes: regulation ball, basepaths 75 to 85 feet, mound 56 to 60 feet.
4. Review of Sargent and Gorman, The South Bend Blue Sox, The Free Library (Midwest Book Review) — the game's one-direction evolution, 1943–1954.