The Rockford Peaches: Dottie Kamenshek and the Girls of Summer

In the summer of nineteen forty-three, with most of the country's professional baseball players overseas in the war, a team called the Rockford Peaches took the field at Beyer Stadium on Fifteenth Avenue. They wore peach-colored dresses with the city seal on the chest, red caps, and red socks. They were one of the founding teams of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a circuit created by Chicago Cubs owner Philip Wrigley to maintain interest in the sport while the men were away.

Nobody expected the league to last. It ran for twelve years.

The Rockford Peaches were the best team in it. They won the league championship in nineteen forty-five, nineteen forty-eight, nineteen forty-nine, and nineteen fifty, four titles in twelve seasons. No other franchise in the league came close.

The reason they were so good had a name: Dorothy Kamenshek. She joined the Peaches in that first season of nineteen forty-three and played first base for most of her career. She won the batting title in nineteen forty-six with a three-sixteen average and again in forty-seven at three-oh-six. She was named to the All-Star team seven times, every year the league selected one. Over her career she accumulated one thousand ninety hits and struck out just eighty-one times in more than a thousand games. A scout from the Fort Lauderdale Braves, the men's minor league team, once offered to sign her. She declined.

Kamenshek retired in nineteen fifty-three. She went to California, became a physical therapist, earned a master's degree, and ran a clinic. She did not talk much about the baseball years. When the nineteen ninety-two film brought the story to a new generation, she was quiet about it. She died in two thousand ten.

The Peaches played every season the league existed, from its first year to its last. Beyer Stadium is still there on Fifteenth Avenue.