A League of Their Own

Yesterday, the Tribune ran a story on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that actually noted one of the inaccuracies in the movie, “A League of Their Own”: The movie has the league playing baseball its inaugural season of 1943 when in fact it was fast-pitch softball.

Still, the AAGPL was pretty interesting, with as many as ten teams (1948) and attendance over 900,000 (also ’48, the information here coming from the AAGPL website).  That’s not bad, considering most of the teams played in small Midwestern cities like Ft. Wayne, Kenosha and Racine.  The league even tried to establish youth and minor league teams to ensure the flow of talent.

So, why did the AAGPL fold after the 1954 season, by which time the pitchers had switched to throwing baseballs overhand?  There are a bunch of possible reasons, including poor management; the impact of television on attendance; and the difficulty of developing players in a pre-Title IX world.  But I’d also look at a few other factors as well.

Today, the Chicago Bandits play in a four-team league.  What, four softball teams in a nation of some 300 million human beings?  What’s going on here?  It probably all boils down to interest.  Men and women may have different notions of what it means to be a fan, or it may just be a factor of deep pockets (hello, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey).  If women’s professional athletics is important as a stand-alone entity, people have to start standing up.  Otherwise, it’s sparse crowds and teams going belly-up.           

Or maybe the movie title says it all.  A league of their own is like the Negro Leagues, and that wasn’t quite the same as the big show.