Inductions Evelyn Wawryshyn [Litwin/Moroz] (November 11, 1924 – February 3, 2022) was a Canadian second base who played from 1946 through 1951 in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
[1] Wawryshyn played second base, taking the field for four different teams of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in a span of six years.
[2] The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was a circuit that began to operate in the early 1940s in cities located on or near Lake Michigan.
The main promoter was Philip K. Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, who worried about the viability of Major League Baseball players during World War II decided to establish an alternate attraction.
These differences varied from the beginning of the league in 1943, progressively extending the length of the base paths and pitching distance and decreasing the size of the ball until the final season of play in 1954.
She also was a member of the Provincial Senior Ladies' Championship basketball team in Flin Flon in 1946, but in reality her real passion was baseball.
She entered the league in 1946 with the Kenosha Comets, playing for them part of the season before joining the Muskegon Lassies (1946–47), Springfield Sallies (1948) and Fort Wayne Daisies (1949–51).
[1] In her rookie season, Wawryshyn appeared in a combined 73 games between Kenosha and Muskegon, hitting .217 and driving in 18 runs while scoring 29 times.
The Sallies finished as the worst team in the league, however, getting roughed up as a last-place expansion club with a 41–84 record, ending 35 and a half games behind the Racine Belles in the Western Division, and had no All-Stars in their roster.
Her highlights include being the top scorer on the Senior Women's hockey team of Winnipeg that won both Western and Eastern Canadian finals in 1950.
[1][5] Wawryshyn and another 63 girls who represented Canada in the AAGPBL form part of the permanent display at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum at Cooperstown, New York, inaugurated in 1988, which is dedicated to the entire league rather than any individual player.