Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (22 page)

The next week, Chet Grant, the manual writer, decided to extricate himself from a two-year contract with Kenosha
. He went to the team president’s office and told Judge Ruetz that he wanted out.

“Well, Chet,” said Ruetz’s assistant, “you did good enough for us to let you resign.”  Unknown to Grant, the club has already chosen his successor.

No one realized at the end of 1948 that the All-American League had reached its high point. Girls’ baseball seemed to be on a roll, riding an ever-upward curve of popularity.

Attendance had risen steadily since 1943; surely it would continue to do so
. The League made decisions based on this optimistic outlook, but Fred Leo acknowledges that they were whistling in the dark, churning out public relations hype that a close look at hard figures failed to warrant.

But the figures were hard to read; the decline wasn’t absolute
. Some cities continued to rack up phenomenal attendance, given the size of the population base.

The League’s head office and the club directors kept telling each other that all their woes were simply growing pains, that a tighter control on the finances would put them in the black
. Like prairie farmers, they believed in next year. But they were wrong.

The summer of 1948 was the last time the League moved forward
. Soon it would slip, slowly at first, and then with ever-gathering momentum.

None of the problems that had plagued the League in 1948 were to be resolved
.

Training and recruitment procedures failed to provide an adequate number of promising players
. (In 1948, the League had attempted to inject a touch of exotica by recruiting a number of Cuban players who spoke no English and had very little in common with their teammates. Although a couple had successful pro ball careers, most of them finally succumbed to homesickness and left.)

Teams were aging in place, relying on long-time veterans
. Allocation was almost universally disparaged. Even winning teams believed they’d done well despite, not because of, the system.

Expansion had once again proved a failure
.

Springfield wound up costing the League thousands of dollars, a bill shared among the other clubs, who could ill afford it
.

Chicago was also a financial drain and brought few of the benefits that Meyerhoff had envisioned
. He had thought that the smaller cities would get fired up viewing the Colleens as new, exciting rivals:  “… almost every city in the League would work to slap Chicago’s ears down,” he promised Harold Dailey in 1948. But expansion hadn’t worked in 1944, and it didn’t work in 1948, either.

Crowds for games that featured the Colleens were noticeably smaller than usual, all around the circuit
. Nor did the Sallies draw particularly well.

In 1948, the League would claim that overall attendance had reached one million, but even this was an exaggeration
– the actual figure was 910,000. This was about 120,000 more than in 1947, but two-thirds of that increase was accounted for by home games in Springfield and Chicago.

In other words, both expansion teams together added a mere 80,000 people all season long
– a pitiful showing, especially considering the potential audience for a city the size of Chicago.

Only half the other teams showed any increase in the attendance at all
.

In Muskegon, where unemployment continued to rise because of postwar layoffs, 60,000 fewer people came out to the ballpark to see the Lassies play in 1949
.

Rockford, the play-off champions, ran an $11,000 deficit
.

The League grossed more money than ever before
– which was fine for Meyerhoff, he got his cut – but several teams had peaked, for any number of reasons, and had nowhere to go but down.

The League could make money by adding cities, or by extending both the regular season and the play-offs
. But an individual club had to face the fact that an extended season would do it no good, that its dwindling audience would be spread too thin over too long a period of time.

Still, the clubs wanted to believe that solutions were possible
. They sought a scapegoat and decided that poor financial management coupled with poor direction from Meyerhoff and Carey were the major culprits.

The clubs’ response was to tighten the League’s belt
. They cut expenses for administration, publicity and scouting.

As of 1949, collective spring training was abolished
. That decision had far-reaching consequences. Spring training – along with pre-season exhibition games – had provided the game with a sure-fire kickoff each season, attracted the national press and unearthed at least some worthwhile talent.

Despite the belt-tightening, Meyerhoff and Carey found the resources to chase the dream of setting up other female leagues, both in the U.S. and elsewhere
.

Carey had begun trying to make this fantasy a reality in 1947, with spring training in Cuba
. He and Meyerhoff planned a 1947 post-season mini-tour, involving an all-star team. It was to have played in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama, Venezuela, Mexico and Texas. The players made it as far as Venezuela, but the tour ran out of steam early on when the Latin American promoters proved unreliable.

One of the players, Mary Rountree, reported that “the people have loads of money; it flows like water.”  This welcome news compelled the League to press ahead
. In February, several players toured Cuba and Puerto Rico, to appear against local female teams.

The All-American hoped that these excursions could be parlayed into something called the International League of Girls Baseball, which would have played in Florida during December, Venezuela during January, Puerto Rico during February and Cuba during March
. But the players were just on loan to the Latin American organizers. The League had no responsibility except to insist on standards being maintained.

When schedules failed to pan out or salaries were slow in coming, there was nothing that Carey or Meyerhoff could do.

In early 1949, the All-American continued to ship players abroad – this time to Nicaragua, Panama and Costa Rica. Once again, the Latin American promoters failed to provide the necessities of life (including some of the salaries owed), and Meyerhoff covered the shortfall from the League treasury.

He also inaugurated a series of Players Development Tours, involving rookies and second-stringers, who wore the uniforms of the defunct Colleens and Sallies
. These tours ranged over Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Virginia and New Jersey.

Periodically, the League would call on one of the teams for a replacement and a rookie would get a chance to move up to the All-American “majors.”

Meyerhoff would have been better advised to keep an eye on matters close to home.

The autumn of 1948 saw the departure of players such as Christine Jewett
– not a star, but a solid performer, hard-working and popular with the crowds. The injured Pat Keagle wouldn’t be coming back, nor would Dottie Collins. The 1948 switch to the overhand throw had sorted out those who couldn’t or wouldn’t adjust, and there were plenty of other reasons to say goodbye.

Daisy Junor found that the years had caught up with her
. She was about to turn 29 and thought it was the right moment to hang up her cleats. “I’d had about enough,” she says. “I was always getting blisters on my heels, always getting fixed up in the dugout rather than running.”

Bonnie Baker, who was now past
30, extended her career by switching positions, forsaking her catcher’s mask for the slightly less punishing duties of a second baseman – but she, too, was buying time.

Others made a choice between marriage and career
.

Arlene Johnson played her last game in 1948
. That winter, back in Saskatchewan, she had met a man she wanted to marry and she didn’t think it appropriate for a wife to play ball.

It was a dilemma that many players faced, although not all of them made the same decision as Johnson
.

Pepper Paire got engaged in mid-1948 and promised to marry her sweetheart when the season ended, but the chance of a tour in Latin America convinced her to break her promise
. “He told me, ‘If you go, that’s it,’ ” she says. “So I said ‘Adios,’ and I went.”

A very few women married and kept on playing, but most would realize sooner or later that they couldn’t mix the two careers.

Still others had begun to realize the financial costs of continuing to play pro ball. Every autumn they would return home or settle down in their team city to look for a winter job. If they were lucky, they had a steady job they could leave in the spring and pick up again at the end of the season.

Several players entered college and studied all winter, financed by their baseball savings
. But many All-Americans lived a fairly hand-to-mouth existence, making ends meet with low-paying temporary jobs.

As the League pursued its relentless cutbacks, salaries failed to keep pace with inflation
. To a woman in her 20s, her playing days numbered, a steady job of any kind began to look attractive. No one could make long-term plans.

Doris Satterfield, for example, didn’t take up nursing until after she left the League, because no employer would hire a person who hit the road every time May rolled around
. For the majority of players, staying in the All-American meant putting the rest of their lives on hold. This sacrifice would eventually become too great.

The winter of 1948 had marked a turning point for Betty Tucker
. At the end of previous seasons, she’d gone back to Detroit just as her mother was returning to her job as a schoolteacher. Tucker had fallen into the easy role of unpaid housekeeper, and it made her lackadaisical about finding another job, especially the kind she might pick up for just a few months.

“I can remember going shopping for groceries and looking at the girl behind the counter and thinking, ‘Oh, my goodness, she stands there all day long f
or eight hours doing this.’ ”

Against her mother’s advice, and with $150 in her pocket, Tucker drove to California
.

“I thought I was rich with that kind of money in those days,” she says, “but there was a recession that year and not much work.”

By the time she finally found a job as a cashier, she was down to her last quarter. She remembers rolling her car into a gas station and telling them to put in 25 cents’ worth. When she had made it back to her rented room, the landlady told her there’d been a telegram. Alarmed, Tucker assumed there was bad news from Detroit and wondered how she’d get back home. But her mother was psychic, not ill:  “She’d sent me a $20 money order and I thought, ‘How did she know?’ ”

When she returned home, Tucker vowed she’d never be out of a job again
– a decision that would cause the All-American League one or two headaches.

In 1949, the players assembled once more, training with their individual clubs
. The League had shrunk to eight teams, grouped once again in a single division. And once again, in mid-season, there were more changes for players to grapple with.

The ball was made even smaller and the pitcher’s mound set back five feet
. Pitchers who were still trying to adjust to throwing overhand were once more playing off-balance.

The changes had the desired effect, though
. The pace of the game was altered. There were more home runs, more .300 hitters. Late-inning rallies were possible, and fans once again stayed around until the last out.

Such changes made it even harder for rookies to get time on the field
. The League had a solution; it introduced the highly contentious “Rookie Rule,” which masqueraded as player development.

Every team had to have a rookie
– someone who played fewer than 50 games – in the lineup at all times. These players tended to get dumped into right field, a baseball diamond’s least active corner. Even so, veterans felt that the rule blunted a novice player’s edge. She got to play whether she deserved to or not. That, says Dorothy Ferguson, changed a player’s attitude for the worse, and it showed when she made an error.

“Rookies would be shown up in some way, and they’d be trying to hold back a grin
. Old timers would never have done that. It was all business to them.”

Finding new baseball talent was one of the responsibilities of Meyerhoff’s Management Corporation
. Its failure to do so, coupled with other League problems, began to make converts to Harold Dailey’s position – that the League should buy Meyerhoff out.

The clubs had been reluctant to come to that conclusion for a couple of reasons
. Meyerhoff had done well when it came to generating publicity, and the club owners realized that they were ill-equipped to drum it up themselves. They concentrated on their towns: it made them think small, an attitude that had forced on Meyerhoff many of the actions they now blamed him for.

Now, as gate receipts began to drop and clubs began to talk of folding, the question of where to find new franchises arose
. That, too, would be Meyerhoff’s task, and nobody else wanted to spend the time or energy to take it on. But if the clubs couldn’t agree to be rid of Meyerhoff, they could do without Max Carey, whom they perceived as unduly free-spending.