Dottie Kamenshek, All-American: Was This Baseball’s Greatest Fielding First Baseman?
This article was written by John Holway
This article was published in 2002 Baseball Research Journal
The old Yankee first baseman, Wally Pipp, watched the diminutive first baseman, Kamenshek, dance around the bag in the 1940s and said he’d never seen a finer fielding first-sacker in his life. And Pipp had seen Lou Gehrig, George Sisler, and Hal Chase.
A left-handed leadoff hitter, Kamenshek once stole 109 bases in 107 games and led the league in batting twice, 1946 and ’47. But when a contract arrived from the minor league Fort Lauderdale club in 1947, “I turned it down,” Kamenshek says. “One, I thought it was a publicity stunt, and, two, I was only 5’6” and weighed 135. I thought, ‘How am I going to compete with those big guys?”‘
So Dottie passed up the chance to make history. Instead, she stayed with the Rockford Peaches of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the “league of their own” later made famous by the hit movie starring Geena Davis and Madonna.
“Our skills were as good as the men’s,” Kamenshek says. “We just weren’t strong enough to compete with them. It’s like golf: Women play in tournaments with men, but they tee off from the shorter tee.”
Many authorities consider her the greatest woman baseball player ever. “Kammie had no weakness,” says Lavone “Pepper” Paire Davis, a colorful catcher of the league. “She hit left-handed line drives and was a complete ballplayer, the Pete Rose of our league.”
Dottie spent two days on the film set helping the starlets learn how to start a first-to-short-to-first double play. On a hit to their left, instead of throwing across their bodies, she advised whirling completely around to make the left-handed throw.
The AAGPBL was the brainstorm of Chicago Cubs owner Phil Wrigley, who founded it in 1943, ready to put it into the major league stadiums if World War II forced men’s baseball to close down.
It didn’t, but the All-American League flourished anyway in cities such as Rockford, Peoria, Racine, Fort Wayne, Grand Rapids, and later even Chicago and Minneapolis. At the peak of its popularity, the late 1940s, the league boasted ten teams, its games were broadcast from Chicago, and they drew over one mil lion fans.
Kamenshek, the league’s all-time batting leader, won two batting titles, with averages of .316 and . 306. She was also a danger on the bases.
“I had speed,” she says. “The manager made me leadoff man. Your hitting tactics are a lot different; I was kind of a Rod Carew type.” She practiced by the hour bunting for hits.
In 1946 when Dottie stole 109 bases, she finished second—her rival, Sophie Kurys, stole 201. “I could have stolen more, but our manager wouldn’t let us steal unless it meant something in the game.”
And they did it wearing short skirts. (How many could Rickey Henderson steal in short pants?)
“We got used to it,” Kamenshek shrugs. “In the spring we’re always hoping we’d develop calluses. If you got your skin toughened up, you were pretty lucky most of year.”
The uniforms were also cold. “In May up in the Midwest, it gets pretty cold at night,” Dottie says. “We were on the Lakes a lot of times, with nothing to protect your legs.” While fans bundled in blankets with thermos jugs of coffee, the girls shivered. “Maybe that’s why we ran so fast.”
At first they played a modified softball, with a short pitching distance and base paths, underhand delivery, and a ball somewhere between a baseball and a soft ball in size.
Later, the diamond was enlarged almost to major league dimensions, the ball was reduced, overhand pitching was allowed, and batting averages climbed. “In 1951 I hit .345 and finished second.” Her lifetime average, .292, is the best in the league. But “I’m not one for statistics, really. I never paid any attention to that. I didn’t consider myself an individual player, team victories were more important to me.”
She didn’t even know her batting average until a few years ago, when league historian Sharon Roepke published them on a set of baseball cards. “I looked at my card,” Dottie says. “I was probably on base 40 percent of the time, counting walks.”
Kurys and Kamenshek fought it out year after year for the honor of being the greatest girl in the league. Which was better? “That could be thrown up for grabs,” Kammie smiles.
(Kurys starred in her own TV commercial for MasterCard in the 2001 World Series; she’s the lady who opens the door when a little boy rings to give her a picture of herself. See also SABR Baseball Research Journal, 1991).
The only time Dottie and Sophie played together was on a Latin American goodwill tour after the ’46 season. They visited Panama, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and other countries.
”You sure could feel the unrest in Nicaragua,” Dottie says, “you could tell it was a dictatorship.” They were invited to President Somoza’s palace and danced until everyone missed bed check. ”You didn’t leave when Somoza didn’t want you to leave.”
Thanks to their star first baseman, Rockford reached the playoffs every year but the first two. In all, the Peaches won four championships in ten years, 1943-52.
One of Dottie’s greatest games was the seventh game of the 1946 playoffs against Kurys’s Racine Belles. “Our pitcher, Carolyn Morris, pitched a no-hitter for ten innings. Racine’s Joanne Winter was in trouble constantly but didn’t get scored on.” Finally the Rockford manager lifted Morris for a pinch-hitter. “The game was filled with sensational plays,” Kurys remembers. In the 15th inning Sophie got on, stole second, and started to steal third, when Betty Trezza hit a ball over the infield. “I kept going and hook-slid into home. It was close, but I just made it, and we won the championship.”
The old-time base-stealing champ, Max Carey, who was in the stands, called it the best-played baseball game he’d ever seen.
Kamenshek was born just before Christmas 1925, outside Cincinnati, and at the age of nine started playing baseball with the boys with a “wrapped-up, worn out ball.”
At age 14 or 15 Dottie competed in a track meet against Stella Walsh, the 1936 Olympic sprinter for the U.S. “I came in last, but that’s all right—I was good enough to run against her.”
At 17 she was playing industrial league softball when the All-American League was formed and she joined 30 other Cincinnati girls for a tryout. She was one of only two selected.
She practiced footwork in front of a long mirror in her bedroom, throwing a ball in the air and shifting her feet.
After their workouts, the girls had to go to “charm school,” walking up and down stairs with books on their heads. Most of them griped, but she didn’t. “We realized that Mr. Wrigley was trying to make it a very high ladies’ league. Back in those days no one wore a lot of makeup; if you did, you were called a floozy.”
Every team had a chaperone, who doubled as a counselor, getting the younger girls over bouts of homesickness, etc. The chaperones were also trainers, bandaging up the wounded after each game.
Some of the players clowned on and off the field. Outfielder Faye Dancer of Fort Wayne was famous for climbing fire escapes to sneak in after curfew.
But Kammie says she “didn’t get into a lot of escapades. I practiced a tremendous amount of time.”
At first the teams traveled by bus or train, each girl carrying her own bats and gloves.
Could they sleep on the buses? “We tried. We’d get some sleep and hope that we’d get into town early enough to take a nap.” If the rooms weren’t ready, they sprawled on lobby sofas until time to go to the park. During home stands the girls lived with local families, from one to four girls to a house.
At first the Peaches didn’t draw too well, but attendance grew as the team started winning. They played in the high school football stadium which didn’t have a fence. On an average night they drew 3-4,000 fans, with up to 10,000 for a big game. The local newspapers gave them excellent coverage.
Dottie played for $50 a week the first year. In later seasons she drew $125 a week, which was supposed to be tops. ”A couple of years I held out for bonuses, which I wasn’t supposed to do. We called it ‘under the table’ money. I was trying to go to college and used it for tuition.”
She enrolled at Marquette University in 1949 to become a physical therapist and reported to the team after the semester was over, arriving without any spring training.
In 1951 Dottie left the game at the age of 25 to go to school full-time. The next year TV and the lack of good young players finally killed the All-American.
Kamenshek spent 18 years working with crippled children as Los Angeles County’s chief of therapy services. Now retired in the California desert, she drove her van to Cooperstown in 1989 to see the Hall of Fame’s new exhibit on women’s baseball. “Yes,” she says, “my picture’s there.”
In 2000 Sports Illustrated named her one of the top 100 woman athletes of the century.
A stroke in 2001 put a sudden stop to her visits to Kurys. After an 11-month recovery, she regained her speech and was able to walk supported by a walker.
Until then Kamenshek liked to drive her van around the country sightseeing. Whenever she got to Phoenix, she stopped to play a round of golf with her old friends, Kurys and pitcher Helen Nicol “Nicky” Fox, and talk about the old days.
Kammie remembers the final playoff game against the South Bend Blue Sox in 1949. With Rockford leading 1-0, the Sox put a runner on third, the batter bunted, and “I came charging in and was able to tag the runner out at home and throw the batter out at first. I had sense enough not to throw it to the catcher but continued on in for the tag, which won us the pennant.”
Another year the Peaches played Sophy’s Racine Belles for the title. Rockford went into game six trailing three games to two but won it to tie the series.
“That kind of broke their spirit, and we won the seventh game, like the Angels did against the Giants.”
JOHN B. HOLWAY is a leading historian of the Negro leagues, a frequent contributor to the Baseball Research Journal, and the author of Blackball Stars.