703: Dorothy Kamenshek
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Player
Born: 21 December 1925, Norwood, Ohio, United States of America
Died: 17 May 2010, Palm Desert, California, United States of America
Also Known As: Dottie or Kammie
Dottie played softball around town as a kid and was spotted by the AAGPBL at the age of seventeen. She played for the Rockford Peaches from 1943 to 1951 and then a final season in 1953. She is widely seen as one of the inspirations for Geena Davis’s character Dottie in A League of Their Own.
In 1950, a men’s team from the Florida International Baseball League attempted to recruit her but Dottie turned it down thinking it was a publicity stunt.
While with the girls’ league she was struck out only 81 out of 3,736 times!
Dottie worked as a physical therapist and then worked for the Los Angeles Crippled Children’s Service Department after leaving baseball.
The AAGPBL has been immortalized in the aforementioned film A League of Their Own. For those who haven’t seen the film, the AAGPBL was an all girls’ baseball league originally organized to replace men’s baseball during World War II. Because the majority of the male players had been drafted, baseball teams across the country couldn't play, and it was feared the baseball fields themselves would shutter and close. Philip K Wrigley, of Wrigley's Chewing Gum fame, formed a committee to find a solution to the problem. The AAGPBL was formed as a result.
Badges Earned:
Find a Grave Marked
Sources:
https://www.aagpbl.org/profiles/dorothy-kamenshek-kammie/67
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/sports/baseball/22kamenshek.html
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dorothy-Kamenshek
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/52697595/dorothy-kamenshek