Then we got Betsy
During World War II, when Major League Baseball went quiet, Betsy was one of the sixty trailblazing women who took the field to keep the spirit of the game alive. She joined the South Bend Blue Sox, not knowing that their cleats would carve a path for generations to come. Fans called her “Sockum” for a reason—because she could hit, and hit hard. In 1944, she led the league with a .296 batting average and stole an astonishing 127 bases in a single season—seven in one game.
But long after the cheers faded, the memory of what these women accomplished was almost lost to time—until the film A League of Their Own reignited the world’s love for them. "Nobody believed us until the movie came out," Betsy once said. “Without the movie, nobody would have ever heard about us.”
When her uniform was displayed at the Smithsonian and the Baseball Hall of Fame created a permanent exhibit in Cooperstown, Betsy stood with quiet pride. At the exhibit’s opening, a woman took her hand and said, “Thank you for what you did for women in sports.” Betsy, ever humble, simply replied: “My pleasure.”
She remembered playing in front of 10,000 fans on July 4, 1948, and marveled at how far things had come. "I was actually going to get paid to play a game,” she said once, still surprised by the idea. “Girls didn’t do that back then.”
Betsy Jochum didn’t just play ball. She played her part in rewriting history.
#WomenInSports #BaseballHistory
~Old Photo Club
