Freddie Fitzsimmons was a baseball star when baseball was the undisputed king of American sports.

Fitzsimmons pitched for the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers from the mid-1920s until the early 1940s, which means he played with and pitched against some of history’s greatest baseball players.

Fans around the nation followed newspaper accounts of the knuckle-baller’s exploits, and perhaps nobody took a keener interest than the residents of Mishawaka.

Fitzsimmons grew up in the Princess City and played ball on area teams and served on the city’s fire department before his steady rise to “the show.”

Yet, in the 35 years since Fitzsimmons died, many Mishawaka residents have forgotten the man who was once the city’s favorite son.

Peter J. De Kever plans to rectify what he views as an injustice with his new book, “Freddie Fitzsimmons: A Baseball Life.”

De Kever, a teacher and Spell Bowl coach at Penn High School, says Fitzsimmons provided Mishawaka residents with plenty to be proud about both on and off the field.

He won more than 200 games and appeared in three World Series while pitching for John McGraw with the Giants and Leo Durocher in Brooklyn with the Dodgers.

The Giants won the 1933 World Series, even though Fitzsimmons lost his only start. De Kever says Fitzsimmons was a fierce competitor on the field and a friendly teammate and family man when outside the lines.

That dichotomy was best seen during the 1941 season when the 40-year-old Fitzsimmons won 16 games and lost two by employing two qualities veteran pitchers have in abundance — guile and guts.

Durocher used Fitzsimmons against bad teams such as the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies, De Kever says. But in the heat of the pennant race, the manager went to Fitzsimmons during an important series against the Cardinals.

“Fitz came in growling and snorting and talking trash to the Cardinal batters as they came up,” De Kever says. “This guy is 40 years old, but he is so intense and desperately wants to win and he pitches a great game.”

De Kever says that game inspired the Dodgers down the stretch. The Bums won the pennant but lost to their nemesis, the New York Yankees, in the

World Series.

“Once he got off the mound, he was the nicest man and an excellent teammate,” De Kever says. “He was also a good family man who won an award as national father of the year in 1940.”

De Kever also says Fitzsimmons never forgot about Mishawaka even as he became a household name as a baseball player in the city that was the capital of the sport through the 1960s.

Fitzsimmons spent offseasons in Mishawaka early in his career, and he barnstormed through the area to play exhibition games on off days during the season and after the season ended, De Kever says.

“One of the features of the baseball landscape that was different in the ’20s and ’30s is that when teams traveled and they had an extra day off, they would play exhibition games,” he says.

Players recruited other major leaguers to play in exhibition games after the season ended, and Playland Park in South Bend was the site for games where Fitzsimmons faced off against Babe Ruth.

Although Freddie Fitzsimmons never forgot his hometown, even after relocating to the West Coast, many Mishawaka residents forgot about Fitzsimmons.

De Kever received help from Fitzsimmons’ younger brother, Dick, who died in 2012.

“He helped me with some of the original research and to access to everything that the family had in terms of scrapbooks,” the author says.

One of Dick Fitzsimmons’ sons lives in Elkhart. Freddie and Helen Fitzsimmons had one daughter, who died in the 1990s. Her son currently lives in Hawaii.

“As the decades went by, he was just forgotten,” De Kever says. “Even by people in Mishawaka. Many say they never heard of Fitzsimmons, and it struck me as wrong and an injustice that a person who brought such prominence to Mishawaka could just be forgotten by people in his hometown.”

Fred Fitzsimmons