A League of Their Own (Columbia Pictures, Parkway Productions, 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, July 13) my husband Charles and I watched director Penny Marshall’s 1992 film A League of Their Own, about the All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). The league really existed; it was founded during America’s involvement in World War II at a time when the head honchos running major-league baseball worried that fans would lose interest in baseball with so many male players going off to war and being replaced either by teenagers or over-the-hill older guys. The real one was started by chewing-gum magnate and Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley (fictionalized for the movie as chocolate maker “Walter Harvey” and played by Garry Marshall, director Penny Marshall’s older brother) in 1943 and consisted of four teams: the Rockford Peaches, Racine Belles, South Bend Blue Sox, and Kenosha Comets. Originally the teams played a combination of baseball and softball, using the larger softball and requiring all pitchers to throw underhanded, and also playing on a smaller field than a regulation baseball diamond – though Marshall and her writers (Kelly Candaele and Kim Wilson, documentary filmmakers whose PBS film about the league inspired Marshall to make the film and who got credit for the original story; and Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz, two male writers from Marshall’s TV show Laverne and Shirley whom she hired to do the script after she couldn’t get a woman writer to do so) ignored that and shot the film with the actresses playing on normal baseball fields and using regular baseballs. In the film, Walter Harvey sends scout Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz) to Oregon to scout Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis), who’s working at a dairy and plays amateur baseball with the dairy’s women’s team. There’s a charming bit in which Ernie refers to Dottie’s job as “plucking cows,” revealing he knows nothing about agriculture. Dottie refuses to sign up for the league unless they also take her younger sister, pitcher Kit Keller (Lori Petty). Ernie, who’s seen Kit bat and strike out, is not impressed, but he’s willing to take Kit if Dottie agrees to join.

As part of the promotion for launching the women’s league, Harvey and his P.R. man, Ira Lowenstein (David Strathairn, 13 years before he got his 15 minutes of fame playing Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck), decide to hire male managers who were former baseball players and would bring out fans on their own appeal. For the Rockford Peaches, the team both Dottie and Kit end up on, the manager is Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), a star in major league baseball until he became an alcoholic and literally drank himself out of his career. Dugan promises Harvey he’ll quit drinking if he gets the job, but of course he doesn’t, and when he shows up for his first day on the job the first thing he does is take a long piss right in front of the women. The women are so flustered they take out their watches and time his urination. When the team starts playing, Dugan is so disinterested in it that Dottie has to take over and give the umpires the Peaches’ starting lineup. Dugan is also such an asshole that when Dottie shows him one of his old baseball cards and asks him to sign it for her husband Bob (Bill Pullman), who’s off fighting in the war in Italy, Dugan nastily tears it up. When I did my moviemagg review of the film Elvis, in which Tom Hanks played Col. Tom Parker, I wrote it was the most unsympathetic role Hanks had ever played – his stock in trade as an actor has always been lovability – but Jerry Dugan is pretty damned close. Penny Marshall had previously directed Tom Hanks in his film Big, the role that broke him out of the TV ghetto and established him as a feature-film star, so she had no trouble getting him for this role as well. Among the other players are former dance-hall girl Mae Mordabito (Madonna, who also sang a song over the closing credits, “This Used to Be My Playground”); Doris Murphy (Rosie O’Donnell); Helen Haley (Anne Ramsey); the aggressively homely Marla Hooch (Megan Cavanaugh), whom Dottie has to persuade Ernie to sign because she may be unattractive but she can hit; Betty “Spaghetti” Horn (Tracy Reiner, Penny Marshall’s real-life daughter); Shirley Baker (Ann Cusack), who at first doesn’t know she made the teams because she can’t read (Mae, Madonna’s character, teaches her to read with a soft-core porn book); and Evelyn Gardner (Bitty Schramm), who’s having child-care issues with her husband that force her to take their son Stillwell (Justin Scheller) along with the team on its road trips.

Evelyn assures her teammates that Stillwell will be well-behaved, but of course he’s anything but: on their first road trip with him, he gets in the face of the bus driver so the driver literally can’t see where he’s going, and the driver’s response is to stop the bus in the middle of the road and bails out on them. Jerry takes the wheel, which is worrisome enough given that he’s still drinking, and for the rest of the movie we don’t see who’s driving the bus. There are some charming little vignettes along the way, including the preposterous etiquette and posture classes led by the team’s chaperone, Miss Cuthburt (Pauline Brailsford) – of whom Jerry jokes, “Didn’t I see you in The Wizard of Oz?” – which the women players are forced to undergo before the season starts so their off-the-field behavior will be properly “ladylike.” They’re also forced to play in super-short skirts about 20 years before the mini-skirt was invented, for the delectation of males in the audiences. The players are instructed never to drink, smoke, or date men – though men are of course hitting on them all the time – and there’s one sequence in which some of the players sneak out to a roadhouse to relax. Marla is cruised by the roadhouse’s manager, Nelson (Alan Wilder), and decides to bail on the team to marry him. And there’s a great scene early in the movie in which one of the men in the crowd starts mincing in his sexist impression of what a woman ballplayer would be like – and Dottie deliberately throws a baseball at him, then says, “It slipped.” Harvey is about to close down the league because its games aren’t well attended, until Ira arranges with a Life photographer to attend a game. He takes a photo of Dottie doing a sensational dive at home plate to tag a runner out, that photo makes the Life cover, and the publicity starts drawing big crowds to the games. The attendance persuades Harvey to keep the league going even though he’s confident the war will end soon (it actually went on another two years) and therefore male ballplayers will be returning and they won’t need women’s teams to keep interest in the sport going. (In fact the league survived until 1954, and as it evolved the rules became less like softball and more like baseball.)

There’s also a fascinating scene in which the team receives a notice from the War Department that the husband of one of the members has been killed in combat. For bureaucratic reasons the Western Union carrier won’t deliver the message immediately, leaving every married woman on the squad heartstruck and asking, “Is it my husband?” Dottie is convinced it’s her husband Bob, who stopped writing her three weeks before after he’d regularly written every week,but it turns out to be Betty’s after Jerry grabs the telegram from the delivery man’s hand and opens it himself. Ultimately the rivalry between Dottie and Kit gets so extreme that Dottie demands to be traded to another team – but they end up trading Kit instead. There’s a reference to the fact that the Rockford Peaches are doing so well they’re going to make the playoffs – which both Charles and an imdb.com “Goofs” contributor red-flagged as a mistake; since there are only four teams in the league, how can any of them not make the playoffs? (Major League Baseball didn’t start doing division playoffs until 1969, and didn’t start the two-tiered playoff system between the regular season and the World Series until 1994.) Unfortunately, just as the World Series between the Rockford Peaches and the Racine Belles (the team Kit got traded to) is about to start, Dottie’s husband Bob (ya remember Bob?) shows up, wounded and limping but still alive. The two decide to drive out from the Midwest to Oregon immediately (in the middle of the war, with gas rationing still very much in place? I don’t think so!) even though that means Dottie can’t play in the World Series, but she thinks better of it and returns for the seventh and last game. By now anyone who’s seen even one sports movie in their life is sure what’s going to happen – Dottie is going to score the big game-winning home run and the Peaches will win the series – but instead [spoiler alert!] Racine gets a runner on scoring position in the bottom of the ninth and Kit, who’s pitching the game for them and is also Racine’s final batter and base runner, knocks the ball out of Dottie’s hand and thereby keeps her from tagging her out at home, so Racine wins.

The film is framed by sequences taking place in 1987 (with a whole different set of actors playing the principals) on the eve of the All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in which the survivors meet up with each other. By then Evelyn is dead but her son Stillwell (Mark Holton, looking surprisingly credible as a middle-aged adult version of Justin Scheller) is still alive and attends the reunion. The film ends with the former players still active and playing baseball for fun on the hallowed diamond at Cooperstown. A League of Their Own makes some back-handed comments about sexism and shows a scene in which a woman lecturer is talking about how it’s the bounden duty of all the women who got war jobs to give them up once the war ends and the men return, and another social commentator narrates a newsreel saying that all these professional women are emasculating men. (There was a lot of this nonsense in the immediate post-war years; Ferdinand Lundberg, a progressive on economic issues who coined the phrase “America’s Sixty Families” to describe what later writers and activists called “the power elite” and ultimately “the 1 percent,” co-wrote a fiercely sexist book called Modern Woman: The Lost Sex in 1947.) What’s good about this movie is the mostly flawless re-creation of the atmosphere (though there are a few glitches, like the band in the roadhouse playing the Benny Goodman/Lionel Hampton hit “Flying Home” with far more musicians audible on the soundtrack than we see on screen) and the riveting performances of Geena Davis and Lori Petty as the feuding sisters. Davis is so good and authoritative in the role that it’s a surprise that she was only the third choice. Penny Marshall originally cast Demi Moore, but she got pregnant just before shooting started. Then she offered the part to Debra Winger, who bailed when she learned that Madonna was also going to be in the movie. Also, in order to get parts in the film the women had to try out their baseball skills to prove they could play the game to Marshall’s satisfaction before she’d let them read for the roles. A League of Their Own holds up quite well as a sports movie and a women’s solidarity film, though the reason I was watching it – to write a review for Fanfare of the new release of Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack music – proved to be disappointing. This is what I call a “functional” film score rather than an “expansive” one, making its points economically and adding to the film’s appeal but without being very interesting listening on its own.