All-American Girls Softball League · Chicago, Illinois · 1943

Softy Girls Plan Major Pro Loop

March 2, 1943. Eight lines in the Evening Star announce something new under the sun: the all-American Girls' Professional Softball League, bankrolled by Phillip K. Wrigley of the Chicago Cubs, scouting for talent throughout the Nation. The headline writer files it under Softy Girls. History files it rather differently.

On March 2, 1943, the Evening Star ran eight lines from Chicago under the headline “Softy Girls Plan Major Pro Loop.” The wires had news of “the new all-American Girls’ Professional Softball League, backed financially by Phillip K. Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs,” which planned “to operate this summer mainly in the Chicago area” while scouting “for talent throughout the Nation,” with tryouts coming in May “in cities throughout the United States.”

That is the entire birth announcement of what the world now remembers as the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. With half his minor leaguers headed into the service, Wrigley wanted professional ball ready to fill the parks no matter what the war did next, and he decided the players would be women.

Notice what the league is called here: a softball league, and the headline goes further and calls the players “Softy Girls.” Hold that thought. Over the next eleven seasons this league would shrink the ball year by year, move the pitcher from underhand to sidearm to full overhand, stretch the base paths toward regulation and end up playing something nobody could call soft. We’ll be following that whole transformation in this space, one clipping at a time, right through to the day the papers finally admitted it was baseball.

League president Ken Sells promised those May tryouts, and the scouts delivered. By the end of the month the recruits would be winding up spring training at Wrigley Field itself, and softball would never look quite the same again.