In 1943 with half of the players on the sixteen major league baseball teams in the armed forces, the All-American Girls Baseball League (AAGBL) was formed. The AAGBL was the idea of Philip Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, and Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Wrigley, who was based in Chicago, chose midwestern home cities for the four teams in the league. There were the Racine (Wisconsin) Belles; the Kenosha (Wisconsin) Comets; the South Bend (Indiana) Blue Sox; and the Rockford (Illinois) Peaches. City leaders paid $22,500 for each franchise in support of the belief that women's professional baseball was a patriotic effort to provide diversion for wartime workers laboring under extraordinary pressure. The league recruited players and assigned them to one of the four teams on the basis of ability, with a view toward forming a competitive league. Recruits came from...