The Rockford Peaches Before A League of Their Own

For millions of people, the Rockford Peaches began in 1992. That was the year Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own arrived in theaters, with Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell turning a largely forgotten chapter of American sports history into one of the most beloved baseball movies ever made. Rockford suddenly had a famous baseball team again. Except Rockford had already loved the Peaches once. Long before Hollywood recreated them, people were buying tickets at Beyer Stadium, reading about the team in the local newspapers, following batting races and pennant races, celebrating individual players and turning out by the thousands for important games. The real Rockford Peaches weren't a movie story. They were Rockford's ballclub.

Opening Day, 1943

The Peaches arrived during an extraordinary moment in American life. World War II had taken thousands of professional baseball players into military service. Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley helped organize a women's professional league partly from concern that the war might seriously disrupt major-league baseball. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League began in 1943 with four teams: the Racine Belles, Kenosha Comets, South Bend Blue Sox and Rockford Peaches. Rockford was therefore not a later expansion city or a convenient name attached to somebody else's history. The Peaches were there at the beginning, and Rockford and South Bend would become the only two cities represented during all twelve seasons of the league, from 1943 through 1954.

The Peaches opened their first season at Rockford's 15th Avenue stadium on May 30, 1943, against South Bend. The ballpark later became known as Beyer Stadium. This was not quite the baseball shown in A League of Their Own. The early league was deliberately positioned somewhere between softball and baseball. The ball was larger, the pitching distance shorter, and underhand pitching was initially required. Over the years, the rules evolved steadily toward conventional baseball. Whatever uncertainty existed about what to call the game, however, the women playing it were professional athletes, and Rockford learned that quickly. Gladys "Terrie" Davis won the league's first batting championship in 1943 with a .332 average, while Rockford pitcher Olive Little threw the first no-hitter in league history that August.

Did Rockford Actually Care?

This is perhaps the most interesting question from our distance of more than eighty years. Were the Peaches primarily a wartime novelty? Did Rockford residents politely attend games because women's baseball was something unusual to see? The attendance figures suggest something considerably stronger. A history preserved by Midway Village Museum reports that nearly 895,000 paid admissions were recorded for Peaches games during the team's first ten seasons, from 1943 through 1952. That is an extraordinary number for a city Rockford's size during that period, and the surviving accounts describe overflow crowds and a community that had developed a genuine attachment to its team.

Consider what happened on August 6, 1944, when Rockford held an "Olive Little Night" honoring the Peaches pitcher. More than 3,100 fans came to the ballpark. That single crowd pushed Rockford's 1944 attendance past its entire 1943 attendance total, with roughly a month still remaining in the season. Four years later, in September 1948, the Peaches faced Racine in the Western Division championship playoffs at Beyer Stadium. More than 3,700 fans watched Rockford win 3-1 behind clutch hitting from Eleanor Callow. By then the war had been over for three years. Major League Baseball was fully operating again, the men had returned home, and the original wartime justification for women's professional baseball was disappearing. Rockford kept coming to the ballpark.

That is an important distinction. A novelty is something people go see once so they can say they saw it. A baseball team becomes part of a city when people return again and again, know the standings, recognize the players, worry about injuries, remember yesterday's loss and care about tomorrow's game. By that measure, the Peaches had become something much more substantial than wartime entertainment.

Rockford Knew the Players

The players themselves became recognizable local sports personalities. There was Dorothy "Kammie" Kamenshek at first base, regarded as one of the finest players in league history, and Dorothy "Snookie" Harrell at shortstop. There were pitchers Carolyn "India" Morris and Olive Little. Later came stars including Eleanor Callow, Lois Florreich, Rose Gacioch and Helen Nicol. These weren't anonymous women wearing identical peach-colored dresses. Rockford fans knew who could hit, who could steal a base, who should be pitching and who was in a slump.

The local newspapers increasingly treated the Peaches as a team whose performance required serious sports coverage. Contemporary Rockford newspaper material survives discussing individual matchups, performances and even arguments over who was the better pitcher in the league. That may tell us more about the team's place in Rockford than almost anything else. Once fans start arguing about players, questioning decisions and comparing statistics, the experiment is over. You have a sports culture.

Then They Started Winning

It probably didn't hurt that the Peaches became extremely good. Rockford won its first league championship in 1945, finishing the regular season 67-43 before winning the postseason. Then came one of the great runs in the history of the league. The Peaches won championships in 1948, 1949 and 1950, giving Rockford three consecutive titles and four championships altogether. No team in league history won more.

Imagine being a Rockford baseball fan during those years. You could walk into Beyer Stadium and watch one of the best women's baseball teams in the country and, very often, simply the best one. There was another professional baseball team in Rockford during part of this period. The men's Rockford Rox played minor-league baseball nearby from 1947 through 1949, with schedules arranged so the Rox and Peaches wouldn't create conflicts at the adjoining facilities. The Rox struggled financially, became a road-only team late in the 1949 season and then disappeared. The Peaches kept playing.

There is something worth lingering over in that fact. Women's professional baseball had supposedly been created as a temporary answer to a wartime problem. In Rockford, it outlasted the men's minor-league team.

The Peach Orchard

Beyer Stadium became the center of this little baseball universe. The Peaches called it the "Peach Orchard." It stood on 15th Avenue, about a mile from downtown, and for twelve summers it was part of ordinary Rockford life. It is worth trying to imagine the place without the layer of nostalgia that now surrounds it: people arriving after work from Rockford neighborhoods, kids in the stands, vendors working the crowd, players warming up, the lights coming on and that peculiar excitement that exists in a small ballpark when a few thousand people are paying attention to exactly the same thing.

A recollection of a 1951 Peaches game preserved by Midway Village captures precisely that atmosphere: Dottie Ferguson Key stepping toward the plate, vendors calling through the crowd, teammates exchanging signals and spectators roaring when the action began. Nothing about the scene would have seemed particularly historical to the people experiencing it. That may be the most difficult thing for us to recover. The Peaches weren't history yet. They were tonight's game.

The End

The league's greatest success came in the late 1940s, when attendance across the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League reached more than 900,000 in 1948. But professional entertainment was changing. Television was entering American homes, Major League Baseball was thriving again, and operating a league whose teams traveled throughout the Midwest was expensive. Attendance declined, and by 1954 the economics had become increasingly difficult. League documents indicated that individual clubs needed approximately 45,000 fans that season merely to break even, and the league finished the year with an operating deficit.

The Rockford Peaches played their final season in 1954. There was no grand historical conclusion because nobody yet knew exactly what was ending. There would simply be no 1955 season. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was finished, and then something curious happened: America began to forget.

Before Hollywood

The Peaches never completely disappeared in Rockford memory. Former players remembered, fans remembered, and families remembered going to Beyer Stadium. Nationally, however, the league receded from popular culture. That changed dramatically with A League of Their Own. The movie performed an enormous service by returning women's professional baseball to American memory, but it also created an odd historical effect in Rockford. The fictional Peaches became more famous than the real ones.

Jimmy Dugan never managed the Rockford Peaches. Dottie Hinson wasn't their star catcher. Kit Keller didn't pitch for Rockford. The famous championship game at the end of the movie didn't happen. Rockford didn't even reach the championship series during the league's inaugural 1943 season; the real Peaches won their first title two years later. The movie is fiction built around something that, from a Rockford perspective, is considerably more interesting: Rockford actually did this.

For twelve years, women came from across the United States and Canada to play professional baseball wearing Rockford across their chests. People here bought tickets, learned the players' names, celebrated their stars, complained about losses and watched pennant races. They packed Beyer Stadium for playoff games, and four times they watched their team become champions. Today people travel to Rockford because they saw A League of Their Own and want to find the place where the Peaches played. That's wonderful, but it reverses the chronology. The movie did not teach Rockford to care about the Peaches. It helped the rest of America remember something Rockford had already cared about.

The best way to understand that may be to strip away the movie altogether and imagine a warm night in Rockford in 1948. There are more than 3,700 people gathered around a baseball diamond on 15th Avenue. Rockford is playing Racine in the playoffs. Eleanor Callow comes to the plate with two outs, drives in the tying run and later knocks in two more. The crowd erupts. Nobody there is watching history. Nobody knows Tom Hanks will someday yell that there's no crying in baseball. Nobody knows anyone will make a movie about any of this.

They're watching the Rockford Peaches, and they want their team to win.