Rockford Peaches · Rockford, Illinois · 1954

Girl Softballers Finish Their Transition To Professionals

August 1954: after eleven years of shrinking balls and lengthening base paths, the league founded as a softball circuit completes its transition to baseball as played in the major leagues. The headline still calls them girl softballers. The last paragraph says the quiet part: the new game must save the league at the gate or the girls will be back in the amateurs. It was the final season.

The Key West Citizen of August 2, 1954 carried the final chapter of the story this month’s clippings have been telling. “The American Girls Baseball League, founded 12 years ago by Phil Wrigley and Branch Rickey as a four-team professional softball circuit, has completed its gradual transition to baseball as played in the major leagues. Regulation nine-inch men’s baseball went into use for the first time July 1.”

The story then recites the whole eleven-year evolution, better than any history book: “the AGBL had used balls of 12 (1943), 11½ (1946), 11 (1947), 10⅜ (1948), and 10¼ (1949) inches. Sidearmed pitching was introduced in 1946 and overhand pitching came two years later.” Base paths stretched to 85 feet, five short of the majors, and “the mound is 60 feet, 6 inches from the plate, just as in the majors.” Every step we’ve watched in this series, the underhand hybrid of 1944, the sidearm spring of 1946, the overhand leap of 1948, compressed into two sentences of wire copy.

The players, “who come from all parts of the United States, Canada, and, naturally, Cuba,” met the hardest version of their sport head on. In the new ball’s first game the Rockford Peaches, “one of two remaining original franchises,” played errorless ball against the Kalamazoo Lassies, and one night later “Rockford’s Marie Mansfield… hurled a 5-3 four-hitter.” Catcher Ruth Richard, six-time All-Star, supplies the photograph. “Observers agree the game is snappier, more interesting, and more exciting.”

Two details make this clipping the right ending. First, the headline: after eleven years, a regulation ball and overhand pitching, the papers still reached for “Girl Softballers.” The naming confusion that started at birth outlived every rule change. Second, the reason for the final leap: “Falling attendance, which has threatened the AGBL with bankruptcy, forced the changeover. Now the new game must save the league financially through gate appeal or the girls will be back in the amateurs.” It didn’t, and 1954 was the last season. But read Guy Bush and Jimmy Foxx from two years earlier and the verdict stands: this was not softball. This was girls’ professional baseball, period.