The South Bend Blue Sox: A History of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Team and Its Players, 1943-1954

Jim Sargent and Robert M. Gorman. The South Bend Blue Sox: A History of All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Team and Its Players, 1943-1954. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2012. 302 pp. Paper, $39.95. Long forgotten, even during halcyon days of women's movement, it took a glorious but very inaccurate movie, A League of Their Own, to bring All-American Girls Professional Baseball League back to life. Books on league appeared almost simultaneous with film. Lois Browne's Girls of Summer (1992), Barbara Gregorich's Women at Play (1993), and Sue Macy's A Whole New Ballgame (1993) began serious studies of league. Sargent and Gorman have written first full-scale team history. Both authors are seasoned baseball historians, so this is a carefully researched, detailed, and thoroughly documented study. They mined newspapers of South Bend and other league cities, but their extensive interviews with former players give feeling, vibrancy, and emotion to their story. The book details permutations of league's name (from All-American Girls Soft Ball League to All-American Girls Professional Baseball League), size of ball, pitching distance, length of base paths, and position of pitcher's arm, all of which changed almost yearly. From 1943 to 1954, all changes were in one direction, from softball to baseball, until women's game became almost identical to that played by men. South Bend is not best known, nor most successful team in league's history. The Blue Sox, however, did win two championships, and featured one of league's finest players. In hands of Sargent and Gorman, Blue Sox become a fascinating lot of baseball-playing women as they navigate a myriad of rule changes, dominating managers, and always trials of playing in skirts that became shorter each season. The authors follow team's exploits year by year and game by game, as well as players' off-field adventures. Sargent and Gorman succeed in evoking a sense of time and of people whose careers they chronicle. We come to know players, and, just as authors do, care for our favorites. Mary Bonnie Baker, the photogenic star catcher, was traded to Muskegon in 1950 to bolster a floundering team. She took over as manager of a club with a 4-11 record and guided them to fourth place. Her reward was a new league rule prohibiting female managers. Betsy Jockum posted a league-leading .296 batting average in 1944; batting averages were low in softball years. Pitcher Sue Kidd was a fifteen-year-old kid from Arkansas when she joined Sox. Outfielder Lib Mahon drove in 400 runs in her nine-year career, before quitting in home stretch of 1952 season following battles with club executives and an overbearing manager. Charlene Shorty Pryer led loop in batting and stolen bases one year. …