Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (20 page)

A few short weeks into the 1948 schedule, the All-American’s pennant seemed all but won, despite the large-scale shuffle in early June which did nothing except exacerbate ill-will between individual teams and the League’s head office.

As luck would have it, the first club that the rejuvenated Colleens had to contend with were the League-leading Grand Rapids Chicks, whose lineup included Pepper Paire.

Paire was still up to her old tricks. One week, without permission, she’d driven up to a town called Baldwin to celebrate with fans. She and the fans spent all one afternoon fishing, in what was perfect weather.

“I didn’t think I’d get burned, because I was used to the California sun,” she says
. “But in the Midwest, playing mostly night games, you don’t get much sun.”  Paire turned up at the clubhouse, red as a lobster. Dottie Hunter looked at her.

“If you want to save your neck,” said Hunter, “you’d better get your stuff on and get out on that ballpark right now.”

The guilty Paire had even got sunburned on the back of her knees:  “I had to strap on shin guards. I had to get down in that squat and try to get back up I don’t know how many times all through the game. I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t let Johnny Rawlings know what was happening.”  Dottie Hunter kept Paire’s painful secret.

“I didn’t tell Johnny anything,” she says
. “He would have raised Cain. But he’d have told Pepper the same thing I did. He’d have made her go in and play.”

In any case, the Grand Rapids fans and management
– unaware of Paire’s ordeal – were in bad humor. The June reallocation had cost them the popular Ernestine “Teeny” Petras. Petras was one of only three original Chicks left (along with Wisniewski and Ziegler).

Nate Harkness, the club president, had been moved to write a public plea to fans to accept her departure
.

“It was a most difficult choice for our directors, Johnny Rawlings and me personally to make,” he said
. “We had a shortstop with ability, experience and spirit, badly needed at Chicago. Our sense of obligation gave us no choice.”

An enormous crowd attended the last game Petras played in Chicks’ uniform, to say goodbye.

Petras then went to Chicago, where the prospect of an improved team drew larger crowds than usual.

The Chicks arrived for a four-game series and won three
. Before the reshuffling, the Colleens would have lost the lot. Indeed, the Colleens had picked up a head of steam. They also managed to draw nearly 2,000 fans per game. But it was too little, too late. They continued to trail their division by an enormous margin.

Meanwhile, in Springfield, the Sallies stood revealed as a lost cause
. By this time Fitzpatrick had returned the franchise to the League, and the Sallies (as had the Minneapolis Millerettes in 1944) now traveled constantly, a band of orphans, while Max Carey strove to find them a permanent home in some other, more hospitable city.

This was intolerable
. Carey and Meyerhoff had planned on hot pennant races in both east and west divisions, capped by a three-week round of play-offs that would enable the All-Americans to reach its long-predicted one-million attendance mark.

Instead, the pennant race was confined to the same three or four teams
. Chicago was on life-support and Springfield was roaming the back roads; neither club would affect the eventual outcome.

Players dropped out for various reasons
. By mid-June, one player had been released for the murky catch-all “disciplinary action.”  A couple more – both married women – bailed out of their own accord. And, as usual, there were a handful of players who simply didn’t measure up.

What would really affect the championship, however, was injuries
– the wild card that sent experienced players to the bench, rookies to fill their places and teams to the League’s doorstep, crying aloud for replacements.

In the course of 1948, Marge Stefani, Rockford’s second baseman, was out with a sore leg
. Muskegon’s outfield lost two first-stringers in a row. South Bend’s pitching staff was hurting badly. Bonnie Baker, its star catcher, had arm troubles of her own. Her replacement, Norma Metrolis, had a bad knee. Fort Wayne lost the capable pitcher Annabelle Lee. Then Dottie Collins, its best hope on the mound, announced that she intended to resign at season’s end.

All this came at the worst possible time, as managers scrambled desperately to find overhand pitchers who could carry a four- or five-game series
. No one could foresee how even the old reliables would perform in clutch situations.

As if that weren’t enough, the All-American was blindsided at this critical juncture by none other than its old nemesis, the Chicago League
. The two bodies had reached an uneasy truce in 1946. This détente was shattered by the All-American’s expansion into Chicago itself. The Colleens weren’t the violation. It was two minor farm teams set up by the League that the Chicago organization objected to.

The two leagues had met in the spring of 1948 in attempts to resolve their difficulties
. Carey wanted to formalize the working agreement because clashes were inevitable; the leagues had butted heads over the same player on a number of occasions.

Doris Satterfield had been spotted by the All-American in 1945
. While she was still a nursing student, the League offered her a contract. She’d signed. But, before graduation rolled around, a representative of the Chicago League offered yet another contract.

“It was a better contract, so I signed it, too,” she says
. “Oh, sure, I realized what I was doing. I figured sooner or later it’d work its way out, and it did.”

Having made this double-booking, Satterfield reported to the Chicago League and played with one of its teams at a salary of $185 a week
. The All-American maximum was still $100.

This exposure, she says
, gave the All-American a chance to see what she could do without having to pay for the privilege. And Satterfield was hot:  “I couldn’t do anything wrong, I was just literally on fire. I was leading the [Chicago] League in hitting, in fielding, and all of a sudden the All-American is interested again.”

When Satterfield refused to honor her original League contract, the All-American applied heavy pressure on the Chicago owners and succeeded in getting Satterfield barred from play
. She was reduced to taking a factory job – not for $185 a week. She therefore phoned Carey:  “And he couldn’t have been nicer. He picked me up, brought me to Grand Rapids, introduced me to the team and I loved it there.”

Carey won that round
. But he didn’t always gain the upper hand.

When Bonnie Baker was approached by the Chicago League, she didn’t try to hide the fact
. When she met with one of the Chicago League officials, she made a point of phoning Carey, to let him know. Carey countered with a lunch date, and dragged along the then-eminent major-league player Rogers Hornsby. Baker was underwhelmed. Carey told her how disappointed he was that she’d even consider leaving the All-American.

“Well Max,” she said, “what would you do?  Would you leave your team if another offered you twice as much?”  Carey allowed as he might “consider it
.”

“You wouldn’t consider it,” said Baker
. “You’d make a deal.”

And so
– by the time lunch ended – had Carey and Baker. She was free to negotiate a higher salary with the South Bend club – a contravention of the rules, since she was already making more than the maximum, but that was the price you paid to keep a star catcher and prototypical All-American girl in the fold.

So it was that, in early 1948,
Meyerhoff, Carey and several All-American team presidents (including Nate Harkness of Grand Rapids, Judge Edward Ruetz of Kenosha, Bill Wadewitz of Racine and Dr. Harold Dailey of South Bend) sat down with Archie Wolf, president of the Chicago League.

They discussed a formal contract that would regulate recruitment and trade
. The All-American pledged not to introduce more than two expansion clubs into Chicago during the next five years. Nor would a second club be established without prior notification to Wolf and the Chicago League owners.

This meeting ended on an uncertain note
. Dr. Dailey later wrote that Harkness, who acted as chairman, was the worse for drink, which Dailey suggested had shocked the Chicago League’s representatives. This was silly. These men were tough customers; even stumbling drunkenness would not have shocked them.

In any case, matters remained unresolved until May, when the All-American chose to alleviate its chronic player shortage by setting up two farm teams, bang in the middle of Chicago
.

Fred Leo remembers that these enterprises were glorified tryout sessions, held irregularly at best
. But the Chicago League, eager perhaps for an excuse to declare open season, revoked the gentleman’s agreement, thus raising the specter of widespread raiding one more time.

Here, the All-American was vulnerable
. It had been trying to reduce costs, and had already imposed salary limits. The Chicago League owners had the edge, because they had more to offer.

There wasn’t a wholesale desertion from the All-American, but a few more players opted for greener pastures
. Added to the League’s other woes, it was simply another problem in a season that had seen more than its share.

By June 1948, the All-American’s east and west divisions were headed by the Grand Rapids Chicks and the Rockford Peaches. The Chicks in particular looked well-nigh unbeatable. Their closest competition was the Fort Wayne Daisies, who were struggling to play .500 ball. In the west, the Peaches had a smaller lead over the team on its tail, the Kenosha Comets.

As June ticked away, circumstances changed
. The Daisies began to creep up on Grand Rapids, winning almost entirely on the strength of their pitching, led by Dottie Collins.

The Daisies’ good fortune was augmented by a Grand Rapids slump
. When the Chicks and Daisies met for a three-game series, Grand Rapids took the first game, aided by Pat Keagle’s speed on the base paths, but Fort Wayne won the remaining two. The Chicks might have split these contests, but Rawlings handed the pitching chores to rookies who needed the exposure; they also needed more practice; one game was lost 10-1.

This brought the Daisies to within two games of the division leaders going into a series with the much weaker Colleens
. But luck took a hand. Soon after, injuries struck half the team, including the invaluable Collins.

By mid-July, Grand Rapids was six games ahead of Fort Wayne and the Chicks’ lead grew
. Any hope the Daisies had of launching another challenge to the Chicks was smashed in late July when Collins announced her immediate retirement.

In fact, the Daisies were in danger of losing their play-off berth to the cellar-dwelling Colleens.

In the western division, it was a livelier story. Rockford topped the standings in mid-June, led by the fielding skills of Snooky Harrell and by Dottie Kamenshek’s power at the plate. But the Peaches were overtaken by the Peoria Redwings.

Within a couple of weeks, both clubs had been displaced by the Racine Belles, whose savvy manager, Leo Murphy, had husbanded his resources and fielded a team of healthy veterans
. Murphy and the Racine directors had taken the long view, building a solid roster and resisting the temptation of seemingly advantageous quick-fix trades.

As the League entered the final week of the season, everyone expected Grand Rapids to top the standings, but no one was sure who it would end up battling for the championship
.

Nor were things quiet on the financial front
. By 1948, those players who had enlisted in their early 20s, beset now by aches and pains that signal advancing age, had begun to take stock of their future,  They loved to play, but they saw that events were catching up to them. They knew their careers weren’t forever. Many had begun to cast a wary eye on their bank balance.

Individual players were reluctant to discuss salaries with their teammates
. They knew that certain star players – those with proven fan appeal and drawing power – were getting sometimes huge under-the-table supplements to the supposed weekly maximum of $100.

The amounts involved depended on their bargaining position, on how assertive they could be and on the resources of their individual clubs
. Negotiations were very private. To this day, players refuse to confirm or deny exactly what they got.

Bonnie Baker was supposed to have received at least one $2,500 signing bonus
. She denies it was that much, but refuses to name the figure. Dottie Kamenshek, probably the League’s most valuable player, confirms that she got $500. Harrell got $100, not as much as she’d been promised.

Such piecemeal special treatment led to wounded feelings, especially since salary increases were subjective in the extreme, based not on performance measured by statistics but on intangible star quality
.

Betsy Jochum, who’d proven herself a talented outfielder and hitter, was being groomed in 1948 as a pitcher for the South Band Blue Sox because of her strong arm
. Manager Marty McManus told her she deserved more money, and should ask for it. Jochum went to Dr. Dailey, who said that he wasn’t allowed to pay her more than the $100 maximum – a blatant lie.