Dottie Collins, star pitcher during the 1940s for women's professional baseball; at 84

Dottie Collins, pictured here in the 1940s, played a major role in preserving the history of women's professional baseball. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

Dottie Collins, who was a star pitcher in women's professional baseball in the 1940s and later played a major role in preserving the history of the women's game, died Tuesday in Fort Wayne, Ind. She was 84.

The cause was a stroke, said her son-in-law, Michael Tyler.

Pitching for six seasons in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, created in 1943 to provide home front entertainment while many major leaguers were off to war, Mrs. Collins dazzled opposing batters.

She pitched underhand, sidearm and overhand; she threw curveballs, fastballs, and changeups; and in the summer of 1948, she pitched until she was four months pregnant. She won more than 20 games in each of her first four seasons. She threw 17 shutouts and had a league-leading 293 strikeouts in 1945 for the Fort Wayne Daisies, when the women's game resembled fast-pitch softball.

But Mrs. Collins's greatest contribution to women's baseball may have come when its ball clubs had long been forgotten.

The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., had been considering an exhibition on women and baseball during the mid-1980s, but, as Ted Spencer, its chief curator, recalled in an interview, it had little material to display until Mrs. Collins approached him.

"When I connected with Dottie, the ball started to roll," Spencer said. "If it wasn't for her, I don't know where it would have gone."

In 1987, Mrs. Collins helped form an association of former players in the All-American league. She drew on her contacts to provide the Hall of Fame with memorabilia from the league, spurring creation of its Women in Baseball exhibit in 1988. Now an enlarged, permanent collection, the exhibit inspired the 1992 Hollywood movie "A League of Their Own," a reprise of women's pro baseball during World War II.

Dottie Collins was born Dorothy Wiltse in Inglewood, Calif. Her father, Daniel, a welder for an oil company, taught her to pitch. She played women's softball in Southern California, then joined the All-American league in 1944 with the Minneapolis Millerettes.

The Millerettes relocated to Fort Wayne, as the Daisies, in 1945, and Mrs. Collins became a pitching mainstay for them. She had a career record of 117-76 and an earned run average of 1.83.

Some four decades after she retired, Mrs. Collins reflected on major league ballplayers and said she was none too impressed in light of her feats. "I pitched and won both games of a doubleheader once pitching underhand," she told Susan E. Johnson in "When Women Played Hardball."

"I think I could have pitched a doubleheader overhand, too," she said. "I don't think it would be that hard. Nowadays, the men can't do it, but hell, they can't do nothin'."

The All-American league went out of business after the 1954 season, and the images of the young women in their one-piece tuniclike dresses, skirt above the knees, playing before enthusiastic crowds in cities like Fort Wayne and South Bend, Ind.; Rockford, Ill.; and Kenosha and Racine, Wis., faded.

Mrs. Collins and her husband, Harvey, whom she married in 1946, raised a family in Fort Wayne, and like the other ballplayers of her day, she lost touch with former teammates. But the association that Mrs. Collins helped found brought those women together again. Mrs. Collins became its treasurer and an editor of its newsletter. She was also a spokeswoman for the alumnae as interest in the women grew, an outgrowth of the Cooperstown tribute and the Penny Marshall movie, which starred Geena Davis, Madonna, Tom Hanks, and Rosie O'Donnell.

Mrs. Collins leaves a daughter, Patricia Tyler of Fort Wayne; two grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2000.