It began, as so many American stories do, in response to crisis. In 1943, with the Second World War draining the country of its young men—including professional baseball players—there was real fear that the game itself might disappear from the national consciousness. Philip K. Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, envisioned an answer: the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), a hybrid of baseball and softball played by women, to keep fans in the stands and morale on the home front alive.
Rockford, Illinois, was one of the four original cities to host a team. The Peaches were born that year and played their first game at Beyer Stadium—a WPA-era structure built in 1942, just in time to become sacred ground. With its arched red brick façade, narrow corridors, and steel-beamed bleachers, Beyer was never ornate. But it was ours—a place where young women could stretch their legs, swing a bat, and play with fire in their eyes under the lights.
The Peaches, clad in their now-iconic peach-colored skirts and caps, weren’t just decoration on a wartime morale campaign. They were competitors—fierce, strategic, and deeply skilled. They captured four league championships (1945, 1948, 1949, and 1950), and produced some of the finest players in the league: Dottie Kamenshek, the slick-fielding first baseman whose prowess earned praise from MLB legends; pitcher Lois Florreich, who set league strikeout records; and Dorothy “Dottie” Schroeder, the only player to compete in all twelve seasons of the league.
They practiced hard. They played harder. And yet, for all their athleticism, they were also expected to attend charm school, wear lipstick, and uphold a public image that reinforced femininity even as they redefined it. It was the paradox of the league—girls had to play like men but look like pin-ups. Still, they made it work. They didn’t just fill a gap left by the war—they changed the game.
When the AAGPBL folded in 1954, so too began Beyer Stadium’s slow decline. With no professional team to call it home, the stadium fell into disrepair. Bleachers rusted. Weeds crept over the infield. For a time, it seemed like the history written there would erode into memory. But the story didn’t end with the Peaches.
In the 1970s, as the women’s movement gained national momentum and Title IX began reshaping the landscape of sports in America, a new team rose from the same soil: the Rockford Starfires. A women’s semi-pro fastpitch softball team, the Starfires weren’t a nostalgia act—they were a new generation asserting their place in the game. While they didn’t have the national reach or glamour of the AAGPBL, they played with the same intensity, the same hunger.
The Starfires used Beyer not as a museum, but as a proving ground. They practiced, hosted tournaments, and became a staple of local women’s athletics. In many ways, they fulfilled what the Peaches had started: a sustained vision of women’s sports as something legitimate, competitive, and enduring. They were the connective tissue between the golden age of the Peaches and the growing normalization of women in organized sports.
The stadium itself became symbolic of that evolution. After years of neglect, local efforts to preserve and restore Beyer gained traction in the 1990s, largely fueled by the renewed interest brought by A League of Their Own. That film may have fictionalized elements of the Peaches' story, but it brought their legacy roaring back to public consciousness. The women whose achievements had been relegated to footnotes were suddenly in the spotlight again. Many of them—now in their 70s and 80s—were invited to throw out first pitches, speak to crowds, and see statues erected in their honor.
Today, Beyer has been partially restored, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Friends of Beyer Stadium and others who refused to let it vanish. The infield is playable. The dugouts have been rebuilt. There's a commemorative arch, a statue of a Peaches player sliding into home, and markers where fans can learn about both the Peaches and the Starfires.
But what matters more than the bricks or plaques is the continuity. From the crack of a bat in 1943 to the rhythm of fastpitch in 1975, from the whisper of cleats on concrete to the cheer of a hometown crowd, Beyer has always been a place where women claimed space—on the field, in the community, in history.
Baseball history is often told through the lens of Fenway, Wrigley, and Yankee Stadium. But Beyer deserves its place in that pantheon—not because it was big, but because it mattered. It is a monument to the quiet resilience of women who played because they could, because they had to, even when the world wasn’t watching.
And now, if you walk the field in the right kind of light, you might still see them—Peaches and Starfires alike—running the bases in tandem, passing the torch from glove to glove, never letting it fall.