A collection of manuscript material, photographs, and printed matter relating to the All-American Girls Baseball League (AAGBBL or AAGBL), a women's professional league active in the American Midwest from 1943 to 1954. The AAGBBL Collection includes materials from several sources. The greater part of the collection consists of records preserved by Dr. Harold T. Dailey (1894-1971), a South Bend, Indiana, oral surgeon who served on the South Bend Blue Sox board of directors from 1945 to 1952, and was involved with the club through 1954. From late 1947 to 1950 he also served as team president. Much of the Dailey material is retained in a set of nine loose-leaf notebooks, totaling over 1100 leaves. Volumes 1 through 8 comprise a kind of documentary history of the league, chronologically organized. The league's earliest seasons, from 1943 to 1946, and its final seasons, 1953 and 1954, are covered somewhat cursorily compared to the years of Dailey's closest involvement with the South Bend team; records for 1950 and 1951, for example, occupy two volumes apiece. The final notebook, volume 9, consists mostly of minutes of AAGBBL Board of Directors meetings, which Dailey often attended. The eight chronological notebooks contain many different kinds of records. There is much related to the game on the field, including rosters, player and team statistics, boxscores and linescores, game accounts, and so on. Sometimes this information is clipped from printed sources like newspapers and yearbooks and fixed into the notebooks. In other cases it is transcribed in typescript onto the heavy manila stock that Dailey generally employed (perhaps to provide a more durable platform for pasted materials). Other kinds of team and league records are almost always transcribed, from original texts that may survive in no other form. These include, but are not limited to: rules and regulations; bulletins and press releases; committee minutes and reports; correspondence (usually, but not always, involving Dailey); and finally and perhaps most significantly, business and financial records of many kinds. A good percentage of these records relate specifically to the South Bend club, though many pertain to other clubs and to the league as a whole. The purpose of the notebooks' compilation is not immediately apparent, though an undated letter transcribed in volume 1 (20r) indicates that Dailey once entertained the idea of writing a league history. Also uncertain is the precise manner of the records' transcription (and for that matter, the transcriptions' accuracy and completeness). Included among the records, sometimes in manuscript but more often in typescript, are bits of commentary by Dailey, usually rather acerbic. (One also encounters frequent pencilled annotations in the pages' margins; these were made by Merrie Fidler in the course of researching the first serious study of the league, an MA thesis completed at the University of Massachusetts in 1976). Notable among the materials taped or glued into the notebooks are 259 different black and white photographic prints relating to the AAGBBL and its players, of various sizes. The majority are individual portraits, but there are also group and team portraits, a few game action shots, and assorted other images. The photos are most prevalent in volume 2, for 1947-49. An inventory of the photographs in the Dailey notebooks is included in the collection's cover file. Associated with the notebooks is a collection of loose original manuscript material of Dailey's, all of it relating to the AAGBBL. Much of this is incoming correspondence from ca. 1948-49.

A second set of papers within the collection, much smaller than Dailey's, came from D. C. "Chet" Grant (1892-1985), who managed the AAGBBL's South Bend Blue Sox (1946-47) and Kenosha Comets (1948). Most of this material relates to Grant's time in South Bend.

Among the other materials in the collection are two sets of completed player questionnaires. The first, dating from ca. 1944-45, is a group of original AAGBBL forms filled out by 76 different players, providing personal information for league publicity purposes. The second, dating from 1997, is a group of 185 questionnaires completed by former AAGBBL players at the request of the National Baseball Library in Cooperstown, New York (which graciously provided photocopies of the originals). Also in the collection are various kinds of league-related printed matter, including scorecards, team yearbooks, league rulebooks, and clipped newspaper and magazine articles. Finally, there are upwards of 75 loose photographic prints (in addition to the 259 photographs tipped in to the Dailey notebooks).