Betsy Jochum, an original member of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that inspired the hit movie “A League of Their Own,” died at her South Bend, Indiana home on May 31.
She was 104 years old.
Jochum’s death was confirmed by Carol Sheldon, vice president of the league’s player association.
“We lost one of our superstars, the last original 1943 player,” the league told People.
Jochum first signed with the South Bend Blue Sox ahead of the 1943 season, where she ultimately spent six years with the team as an outfielder.
The Blue Sox were rivals of the Rockford Peaches, the team that the fictionalized 1992 film was primarily based upon.
During a 2012 interview with the South Bend Tribune, Jochum described being selected to play in the league as “amazing.”
“I was actually going to get paid for playing a game,” she said then. “Girls didn’t do that back then.”
The Baseball Hall of Fame has since commemorated the league by dedicating a permanent display in the Cooperstown, New York museum in 1988.
Jochum’s Blue Sox uniform currently sits on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
“We were lucky, the ones that started out,” Jochum said in an interview in 2010 with Grand Valley State University in Michigan. “We started out with a softball, and as we kept playing, the balls got small and the bases got longer and the pitchers moved back, underhand, sidearm to overhand, so we were kind of eased into it, the older players.”
Jochum started her path into professional baseball by playing softball at a young age, as well as winning a national baseball throwing contest when she was a teenager with a heave of 276 feet.
“The kids in the neighborhood would play on a vacant corner lot, choosing up sides and playing `scrub,’” she told author Jim Sargent in an interview posted on the league’s website. “If we had enough people, we played softball. Sometimes we played with a baseball, or any old ball, until we knocked the cover off.
“Then we would put friction tape on it and keep on playing `till that flew off. Whatever equipment was available was good enough for us!”
