In a sentence: Two sisters join a women's baseball league that springs up to compensate for the young men off fighting World War 2.
Baseball is a distraction.
All sports and games are distractions, but baseball is particularly well-suited to the task. For one, it's complicated. This is easy to forget if you grew up watching it. I played softball with a man from Trinidad a few years ago, who had never played before, and it wasn't until I tried to explain the rules, exceptions, and edge cases around baserunning to him that I realized just how strange and unguessable so much of it is. Baseball requires focus and physical precision, but cannot be brute forced like some other sports. It has neither the simplicity of soccer or the intuitiveness of basketball. It is not fully a game of strength or finesse. It is incredibly contrived and can only be played in ideal conditions.
Never is baseball's role as distraction more obvious than in times of turmoil. Its long history, its day-in, day-out nature, it's constant
thereness, make it like a friend who talks you down, takes you out somewhere to forget your troubles. Who does this lonely nation turn its eyes to, but Joe DiMaggio?
It's in times of crisis that things like this can be the most valuable. During World War 2, baseball continued, but some of its greatest players were gone. There was a void, a need for something fun, energetic, and fresh. And that something was the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. A league filled with women. Women left at home while the fate of the world was being decided, women cutting back or contributing in other ways, women trying to get through the day like everyone else who stayed behind. Some of them living in constant fear that any day a man with a letter and a flag would cut their life in half.
If you've seen this film you're probably wondering what on earth I'm talking about, because none of the above conveys what
A League of Their Own feels like. It is not full of dread and despair, but of hope and humor. It, like the game it depicts, walks right up to those fears and sits right next to it, and then monopolizes the conversation. But the fear is always there, interrupting us between innings.
Dottie and Kit work on a farm. They play amateur baseball. Dottie is the older of the two, and married. Her husband is overseas. Kit is younger. She is single. She is hungry, antsy, dissatisfied. And, eventually, resentful, when a talent scout for the new women's league recruits her sister but not her. Dottie can take it or leave it, but Kit wants it desperately, and gets to come along for the ride. And this act of kindness, like so many acts of kindness, builds resentment rather than thankfulness.
Fans of any subgenre of film come to know its conventions well, and our eyes glaze over when they end up on rails, like with the obligatory romantic subplots, or the standard tribulations, or team infighting, or a hundred other clichés.
A League of Their Own never does this. Every scene has something interesting, something funny, some little treat of expression or dialogue. The jokes are alternatingly silly and witty, and the performances are top notch. Absolutely nothing is wasted. In a lesser version of itself, the scout who discovers the girls (Jon Lovitz) would just be some guy, just some mouthpiece barking out the Call to Action to get things moving. Instead, he's oozing with personality.
This comparison might surprise people, but the vibe I get here is similar to Soderbergh's
Ocean's 11 remake. There's a feeling of mastery, a feeling that this was
easy for the people involved. Everyone feels overqualified. The role of Jimmy Dugan, former player and now manager in this startup league, is a significant one, but you don't need
Tom freakin' Hanks to make it work. And when you cast Tom freakin' Hanks anyway, you elevate the character. As good as "there's no crying in baseball!" is, there's no way that becomes the most quoted line in the history of baseball movies without him. Rosie O'Donnell and Madonna in secondary roles? Ann Cusack with, like, three lines? Tea Leoni as a glorified
extra?
There was a restaurant near where I live a few years ago that served elevated comfort food. You know the kind: perfect chicken pot pies that cost $20. That's what this felt like. Penny Marshall is a Michelin-level chef crafting the Platonic ideal of a fast food cheeseburger.
Good for what it is. It would be weird and unnatural, given the premise, to make the game action especially fast or violent. And part of the point of all this is that we experience sports relatively: if you're up in the bottom of the 9th, it doesn't matter that you're playing Little League. All sports, all games, are the drawing of arbitrary lines to try to measure something undefinable. Little compartments cordoned off from the rest of the world, trying to capture an ineffable
something as purely as we can.
All sports have that in their nature, but baseball doubles down on it. It adds to it the fleeting promise of summer, the jubilation of the solstice and the immediate melancholy of the coming equinox.
Please, just one more game. Just one more inning. Just one more at bat before it gets dark. And there was a time where even the highest heights of the game reflected this. Wrigley Field, where the tryouts in this film were shot, was the last Major League park to add lights...in 1988. They played nothing but day games for
74 years. Every game full of grownups racing the setting sun to the last inning, like kids playing in the street.
And that was even more true of this league, something everybody knew couldn't last, just a bridge before things could get back to the way they were. And Jimmy says this to Dottie; after her husband is discharged, she readies to leave, and he tells her something she already knows:
this chance isn't going to come again. If you don't take it you'll regret it forever. If you don't play ball in the summer you'll rue it in the fall. The AAGPBL was, within this summer sport, a little summer of its own, an ephemeral league based around an ephemeral game, a day in the sun to distract us from the winter of the war.
Trick question: Kit is traded midseason and they play each other, so one of them is bound to win. But our entry point is the Peaches; we don't really know the girls on Kit's new team, and "they," meaning the team we've been following, do not win. Kit gets the game-winning hit, bowling over her sister Dottie, who drops the ball. And to the film's credit, there is no contrived ambiguity about whether she meant to, though some people insist she did.
To my mind, she lost fair and square. The way we know this is because Kit finally hits the high pitch, the one she couldn't hit and couldn't lay off. Of course we
expect that she'll finally grow up, listen to her sister, stop being so stubborn, and wait for a better pitch. Instead, her stubbornness pays off. It has to, because that's who she is: Dottie is the smart one, the strategic one, the one who can take or leave the game and approach it dispassionately. Kit gets by on sheer determination, and this is reflected in her triumph. It's a validation of their differences, rather than a capitulation or a compromise. It is a very surprising and interesting choice, and one of several indicators of this film's thoughtfulness.
There are a few things about this film that I keep thinking about.
The first is struggle between the game and the backdrop of reality. I have a tendency to overthink things, so when I have a strong emotional reaction to anything, I think about why. And one of the reasons I love baseball is that it short circuits this. It takes over my mind. I'll go into a game worried sick about something and, while I'm playing, completely forget it. This is so rare and valuable and lovely to me that it's always a shock when it comes rushing back into my mind. In the way someone might use a substance to forget or distract themselves, baseball is a drug that quiets my mind, a mix of strategy and translation into physical movement that fills both hemispheres to the brim and allows me to live in the moment. But it's only a reprieve. When I was younger I thought the scene where one of the players learns of her husband's death in the war was dissonant, but now that I'm older I appreciate its necessity.
The other is the gulf between the sisters. Dottie's easy talent and grace contrasted with Kit's high-effort frustration. The two types of players: the natural, and the grinder. Preternatural feel against sheer will. The ballerina and the break dancer. And this extends to everything: Dottie is the prettier one, the content one, the one who needs the game less than the game needs her. Kit has nothing else, and needs nothing more.
At the highest heights of baseball, you mostly find people who are both: insane natural talents and winners of a genetic lottery who nonetheless work as if they had no natural advantages at all. That's where you find excellence at the highest level. But below that level, in the minors, or in Little League, or in the AAGPBL, you have a mix of genius and grit. It's a level low enough that not everyone is gifted, and not everyone is going all out, a melting pot that contains the most diverse set of experiences with the game. Where wildly different people can come together in the same place, in that little box of baseball, roped off from the rest of reality.
Why is there no crying in baseball? Because there'll be plenty of that when the game ends.
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