A League of Their Own

The movie director Penny Marshall died this week.  For me as well as my daughter, Marshall’s best-known work is “A League of Their Own,” which was released in 1992.

Clare has probably watched the movie often enough to have memorized entire passages of dialogue, as she has with “Mean Girls.”  Tom Hanks’ line of “There’s no crying in baseball” resonated with my fifth grader when she played on a baseball team that didn’t want her.

She got called a “Bitch” and was forced to platoon at second base with a boy who had a prosthetic leg; the coach thought he was doing the right thing when he awarded her a game ball for being such a good sport about not getting to play all the time.  I’m still amazed Clare didn’t quit on the spot and look for a soccer team to join.  But she did make me check into softball, a game where girls are welcomed.

Inclusion is the intended message of “A League of Their Own.”  Women athletes playing the national pastime—what fifth grade girl wouldn’t be impressed?  Of course, you could make a counterargument that the movie advocates a Negro-Leagues approach to professional baseball, with one league for men and the other for women.  Let’s split the difference and say Marshall wanted to show what women could do given the opportunity.

Now there’s a message that still resonates.