Dottie Collins dies, Pitcher for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League
A great baseball player has died. Dottie Collins played for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League which was created in 1943 to entertain the Americans at home while World War II took young men away overseas and Major League Baseball was on hiatus. Collins joined the league in 1944.
A New York Times article published on August 15 said, “She pitched underhand, sidearm and overhand; she threw curveballs, fastballs and changeups; and in the summer of 1948, she pitched until she was four months pregnant. She won more than 20 games in each of her first four seasons. She threw 17 shutouts and had a league-leading 293 strikeouts in 1945 for the Fort Wayne Daisies, when the women’s game resembled fast-pitch softball. … The All-American league went out of business after the 1954 season, and the images of the young women in their one-piece tuniclike dresses, skirt above the knees, playing before enthusiastic crowds in cities like Fort Wayne and South Bend, Ind.; Rockford, Ill.; and Kenosha and Racine, Wis., faded.”
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League has it’s own website and an exhibit at the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame which Collins helped create. She worked with curators and used her contacts to get materials donated for exhibition.
The 1992 Penny Marshall directed movie, A League of Their Own brought national attention to this great league of women who patriotically played ball when their country called on them. Unfortunately for the women who had grown fond of their league and each other, the war ended and men came back home, the women were told in no uncertain terms that they were no longer needed.
She died of a stroke. She was 84.
Library, National Baseball Hall of Fame
