1954 AAGPBL Recap
View the 1954 FABL Lineups Here!
Last summer, in conjunction with the new A League of Their Own series on Amazon Prime, I analyzed the inaugural 1943 season of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Now that I’ve reached 1954 in my reverse-chronological journey, it seems fitting to revisit the AAGPBL in its final season. During its 12-year history, the league had expanded from four teams to as many as eight (including two minor league squads), but by 1954, the AAGPBL was back to just five teams. Since that’s not a large enough player pool to fill 12 astrology rosters, here’s a roster made up of the top AAGPBL players in 1954.
The best overall player in the 1954 AAGPBL was Fort Wayne Daisies outfielder Joanne Weaver, who won the league MVP award. Weaver did it all: 29 home runs, 79 stolen bases (with an uncertain number of times caught-stealing), and an incredible .429 batting average over 333 at-bats. This stat line works out to a fantasy season of 2,922 points and 31.4 points-per-game for the Sagittarius slugger. If you’ll recall, Sagittarius was the best-represented sign in the inaugural 1943 season, but in ’54 the Archers were tied with Aquarius and Pisces for the least number of players: just two each.
The next two players in terms of fantasy points for batters were both Weaver’s teammates on the Daisies: second baseman Jean Harding (1,999 / 21.5) and first base/outfielder Betty Foss (1,715 / 18.6). However, if you look at each of their “Last Name” columns in my database, you’ll notice that they’re both italicized. That’s because the names listed in their online player pages differ from the names they played under during their actual careers. To find the names they actually used (i.e. Jean Geissinger and Betty Weaver, respectively), you’d have to look at the “Maiden Name” column, which I’ve bolded in the appropriate cases. Once again, the patriarchy wreaks havoc on the world of women’s professional sports.
In fact, the combination of maiden names and nicknames means that some AAGPBL players would be completely unrecognizable to their contemporaries. For example, no fan of the 1954 Grand Rapids Chicks would know the name Marguerite Tesseine (1,462 / 17.2), even though the Virgo shortstop led the team in fantasy points-per-game. That’s because of two factors: 1) she was born as Marguerite Pearson, but 2) played professionally using the nickname Dolly. In a fun bit of trivia, Pearson would share shortstop duties on this All-Star Team with Dorothy “Dottie” Schroeder (1,493 / 15.2), an Aries, who was the only player to appear in all 12 AAGPBL seasons.
The fantasy points accrued by the 1954 All-AAGPBL pitching staff are not nearly as impressive as what we saw in 1943. I’m not sure if the league environment was simply more offensively charged, or if the shift in pitching roles over the years is enough to account for the change. But gone are the 4,000+ point seasons we saw at the start of the league. In fact, only two pitchers broke the 2,000-point barrier in 1954: Maxine Kline (2,423 / 86.5) – or Maxine Randall, if you’re searching for her on aagpbl.org – and Janet Rumsey (2,277 / 91.1) – the only member of the starting five to not eventually change her maiden name.
Actually, we don’t technically know which pitchers were starters and which were relievers, since the “games started” stat is not listed online. More likely than not, these staffs did not have defined roles, as was the case for most MLB teams in the 1950’s. But it’s safe to say that you don’t rack up PPG totals in the 80’s and 90’s coming out of the bullpen – even when you consider that the crucial negative “hits allowed” statistic for pitchers was not recorded at the time.