A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Kamenshek played outfield for a local softball league, and at the age of 17 she was spotted by a scout from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. After tryouts at Wrigley Field in Chicago, she joined the Rockford Peaches as an outfielder when the league began in 1943, but was soon playing first base. She and short stop Snooky Harrell formed the league’s best double-play combination.Considered one of the best athletes of her time, southpaw Kamenshek was recruited by a men’s team from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She believed the team only wanted her for publicity and turned down the offer. Former New York Yankee Wally Pipp said she was the most accomplished player he had ever seen among men or women.
In 1958, Kamenshek received a degree in physical therapy from Marquette University in Milwaukee. She returned to Ohio to serve as a physical therapist in Hamilton County and later moved to Los Angeles to perform the same work at the Los Angeles Crippled Children’s Services Department. In 1964, she was promoted to supervisor of physical and occupational therapy for Los Angeles County Children’s Services, and later to chief of therapy services, the position she held when she retired in 1980.
Dorothy “Kammie” Kamenshek (December 21, 1925 – May 17, 2010) was an American All-American Girls Professional Baseball League player. She batted and threw left-handed.After her retirement, Kamenshek was honored by Los Angeles County with the Outstanding Management Award (1980). She is part of the AAGPBL permanent display, opened in 1988 at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum at Cooperstown, New York.
Kamenshek played in the AAGPBL for 10 seasons, and was selected as an All-Star all seven times the league established such a team. In 1946 she was the league’s top batter with an average of .316 (a single point ahead of Audrey Wagner), and won the distinction again in 1947 with an average of .306. She struck out only 81 times in 3,736 at-bat appearances.
The 1992 film A League of Their Own introduced a new generation to the history of women’s baseball. Geena Davis played Dottie Hinson, the best ballplayer in the league, a character loosely based on Kamenshek.In the off‑seasons, Kamenshek studied physical education and health education at the University of Cincinnati. In 1951, back injuries reduced her playing time, and after the 1952 season she retired from the game with a career average of .292.
Kamenshek died on May 17, 2010, at the age of 84. She was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Cathedral City, California. Her spouse and fellow Hall of Fame member, Margaret Wenzell, was buried next to her in 2014.
However, if you can opt for the things that are hard-to-achieve, you can make a significant difference. But you have to ensure that you shouldn’t stop.
Well, if you can dig out a bit, you will witness that all the successful people have never opted for the easy way. They always opted for a suitable style that requires both time and effort. And after doing everything with utmost dedication, they went to the position, which we desire all the time.So, don’t search for natural ways all the time, and instead of that, try to take the appropriate route to reach your destination. One day, you will see that you have achieved all the good things in life.
Who said theres no crying in baseball?
This line is spoken by Jimmy Dugan, played by Tom Hanks, in the film A League of Their Own, directed by Penny Marshall (1992). In A League of Their Own, the best baseball movie ever (take that, Field of Dreams), Tom Hanks is brash, loud, and can pee for about seven minutes straight.
We have a notion that to keep distance from the hard things. We always try for the things which are easy to execute. And most of the times, we deter ourselves, if we find something hard. However, we don’t acknowledge the fact that doing hard things is something that makes someone great.If you don’t take risks in your life, you can never achieve the desired success in your life. Well, it is a prevalent fact that if everyone is doing something, it is an easy thing. And if there is something that not everyone is trying, it is a hard thing to do.
A lot of people try to achieve the tough things in life. But, once they start working on it, they realize that it is a tough thing to achieve. And during that time, they left the work in the middle of nowhere.
There is, of course, crying in baseball. But the way Tom Hanks — as former slugger Jimmy Dugan — delivers his iconic line is pretty unforgettable, and very repeatable. Do a quick Google search for T-shirts with “There’s no crying in baseball” and you’ll find quite a large selection of options.But the movie “A League of Their Own” isn’t just about that one line. It’s a damn fine movie, from the story to the dialogue and everything else. Continuing our series of ranking the best quotes from baseball movies, here are the best 19 quotes from “A League of Their Own.”
What does league of their own mean?
: better than anyone else at doing something. When it comes to cooking, he’s in a league of his own.
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Famous quotes from A League of Their Own (1992 film), featuring short audio clips and sound effects in wav or mp3 format which can be used as ringtones. Actors: Tom Hanks (Jimmy Dugan), Geena Davis (“Dottie” Hinson), Madonna (“All the Way” Mae Mordabito), Lori Petty (Kit Keller), Rosie O’Donnell (Doris Murphy), Jon Lovitz (Ernie Capadino) In A League of Their Own, the best baseball movie ever (take that, Field of Dreams), Tom Hanks is brash, loud, and can pee for about seven minutes straight.
We think people can cry whenever they want, whether it’s at a baseball game, at a basketball game, or because that Madonna song that plays through the credits is just so emotional.
He’s the coach of an all-ladies’ baseball team, the Rockford Peaches, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to go easy on them. When he yells at Evelyn (Bitty Schram) for making a bad throw, she starts weeping, which prompts him to get even louder, ultimately shouting, “There’s no crying in baseball!”
As a little side note, obviously other jobs paid higher than manufacturing. However, a lot of the women’s teams were set up in cities that had a higher number of industrial workers due to the war effort. So that’s why I’m comparing their salaries to those the average pay of the workers who’d be paying to see them play.
As a quick side note it’s worth pointing out that acronym changed multiple times throughout the league’s lifetime. First it was the All-American Girls Baseball League, or the AAGBBL. Then people didn’t like baseball being in the name since they had underhand pitching more like softball. So it was changed to the AAGPBL, or the All-American Girls Professional Ball League. Then it’d be renamed again back to the AAGBBL, or the All-American Girls Baseball League. Then it was shortened to the American Girls Baseball League, or the AGBL, which it kept until the league’s end in 1954.In Wrigley’s mind, that’d help the fact that the stadiums were lying dormant for half of the time—when the team was away. You see, with an increased number of men and women being called on to help with the war effort in big industrial cities, that’d mean anytime the teams were out of town they’d be without well-deserved entertainment as a break from their work.
Back in the movie, after the stage is set for the story we see text on screen that says it’s Willamette Valley, Oregon in the year 1943. It’s here that we’re introduced to the two women who are the stars of the film, Dottie Hinson and her sister Kit Keller. Dottie is played by Geena Davis while Kit is portrayed by Lori Petty.Another character we see in the film is Ira Lowenstein, who’s played by David Strathairn. According to the movie, Ira is vital to taking Walter Harvey’s idea and implementing the logistics of it.
Oh, and Walter Harvey never owned the Chicago Cubs like the movie implies because Walter Harvey never existed. But it was the Cubs real owner, chewing gum king Philip K. Wrigley, who came up with the idea for the professional woman’s league.
Although, quite honestly, we can’t really say the character of Jimmy Dugan was meant to be Jimmie Foxx or Hack Wilson. Tom Hanks’ character had plenty of inspiration from these two great baseball players who had amazing success in their careers only to see it all slip away through the bottle. And there was a very healthy dose of Hollywood’s creative freedom thrown in there as well.That’s true. Joe enlisted in February of 1943, although he mostly played baseball in the service. Why baseball in the military instead of helping directly with the war effort? Well, the best answer to that probably comes from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself.
Regardless, the point here is that while the movie implies the woman’s league was started as a replacement to men’s professional baseball, they actually were both playing at the same time. In fact, if you look at some of the old box scores in newspapers you’ll find men’s baseball box scores right alongside the reports of the women’s games.
While Jimmy Dugan is a made up person, just like there were some real people who went into Geena Davis’ character, there were some very real baseball players that went into the character we saw Tom Hanks playing on screen.
Is Dottie Hinson real?
The 1992 film A League of Their Own introduced a new generation to the history of women’s baseball. Geena Davis played Dottie Hinson, the best ballplayer in the league, a character loosely based on Kamenshek.
Although Ernie is also a fictional character—the filmmakers actually created that character specifically with John Lovitz in mind—the salary is pretty close. Women in the AAGPBL would earn a range from $45 to $85 a week.Up until Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire snapped it in 1998, Hack also held the record for most HRs in the National League (NL) with 56. That was also in 1930, meaning it was a record he held for almost 70 years.
Toward the end of the movie, the two main characters, the sisters Dottie Hinson and Kit Keller, meet each other in the championship. As it turns out, it’s Kit who gets the better of her older sister and her team, the Racine Belles, win the championship.
The movie doesn’t mention this, of course, as the story doesn’t make it much past the first season but as the AAGPBL played the rules drifted more and more away from softball toward baseball. For example, after five years of play, in 1948 the league switched from being all underhand to allowing overhand pitches from a distance of 50 feet, or a little over 15 meters.
Perhaps one of the reasons why so many think she was the basis for the character of Dottie Hinson was because the real Dottie Kamenshek was considered by many to have been the best player in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League—the AAGPBL.
Also the distance between bases wasn’t quite what we see in Major League Baseball. It’s 90 feet in MLB, or about 27 meters, but in the AAGPBL it was 65 feet, or almost 20 meters.That’s true. While the women may have gotten a relatively decent salary, it was still the 1940s and the men in charge of the league decided they should be objectified.But still, it’s quite interesting that Branch Rickey was involved in both Jackie Robinson’s entry into the Majors as well as the formation of the AAGPBL.I’m speaking, of course, of Tom Hanks’ character, Jimmy Dugan. In the movie, Jimmy is portrayed as a former star-turned-drunk who ends up managing the Rockford Peaches after the league’s founder, Walter Harvey, asks him to be a face for the league.That’s not too bad of a salary. By comparison, according to a paper by William Whittaker at the Congressional Research Service, the average manufacturing job in 1943 paid about 88 cents an hour. Couple that with other documentation that estimates manufacturing jobs worked an average of 44.2 hours per week, that’d come out to just less than $40 per week.We already learned Dottie and Kit weren’t real people so obviously none of the specific scenes we saw in the film were real, but the movie is correct in showing that it was the Racine Belles who won the very first championship for the AAGPBL after the inaugural 1943 season. Another Dorothy “Dottie” Green often gets credited with being the major inspiration for Dottie Hinson, but that’s not really the case. It can get so confusing with so many people named Dottie, but Dottie Green was Dottie Kamenshek’s teammate and while she shared some things in common with Dottie Hinson, she wasn’t the best player in the league like her teammate, Dottie Kamenshek. She’s still worth mentioning, though, because she was the catcher on the Rockford Peaches, like Dottie Hinson. The real Dottie had a career batting average around .300, something that most sports historians equate to hitting about .400 in Major League Baseball. If you’re a fan of baseball, you’ll know how rare of a feat that is.
While the distances may have been more in line with softball, it wasn’t straight up softball. For example, in softball you can’t steal bases but in the AAGPBL you could.
Remember when we were chatting about the women having to work longer than 44 hours a week? As if playing 120 games in the span of four months wasn’t enough, after an exhausting day on the field the women were expected to attend Helena Rubinstein’s charm school in the evenings. Well, that is, those evenings that they weren’t needed on the field for one of their many day/night doubleheaders.
Like Geena Davis’ character, Dottie Kamenshek started her career in the AAGPBL on the Rockford Peaches team out of Rockford, Illinois. That was, like the movie indicates, in 1943 when the league began. Although she wasn’t a catcher like Geena Davis’ character was. The real Dottie started in the outfield but soon moved over to first base.The primary source of inspiration for the character of Jimmy Dugan was another Jimmie—this one spelled with an “ie” instead of a “y”, though. That’s Jimmie Foxx.
Oh, and while we’re on the topic of the name of the league there’s something else that’s worth pointing out. In the movie we see most of the women throwing overhand like you’d see baseball players do. After all, it’s a baseball league and they’re playing baseball not softball, right?Perhaps it’s time to take back my “not too bad” comment from earlier. Sure, that was about the pay, but even a semi-decent salary for playing ball doesn’t make up for the stereotypical objectification the women had to endure.
Who said 90% of baseball is half mental?
Yogi Berra’s Yogi Berra’s famous quotes: ‘Baseball is 90 per cent mental. The other half is physical’ – The Globe and Mail.
For example, the girls didn’t use a baseball like we see in the movie. It was a softball with a 12 inch circumference, or about 30.5 centimeters. And the pitchers didn’t throw overhand like we saw in the movie. They threw underhand like they did when they played softball. The pitcher’s mound also wasn’t 60 feet and six inches like it was in Major League Baseball at the time (and still today), but rather about 40 feet away from home plate.They didn’t play the Rockford Peaches. Actually, the real Rockford Peaches had the very worst record in the league during both the first half and the second half of the season, so as you can probably guess they didn’t make it to the championship. Other women who inspired parts of the character of Dottie Hinson were Mary “Bonnie” Baker, who many believed to have had a similar personality to what we saw Geena Davis’ character have in the film. Or there was Lavonne “Pepper” Paire-Davis who was another star in the AAGPBL, and also a catcher like Dottie Hinson. Although Pepper also played some shortstop, which we didn’t see Geena Davis’ character do. Perhaps one of the reasons why history hasn’t remembered Jimmie Foxx as well as it has Lou Gehrig or Joe DiMaggio is because toward the end of Jimmie’s career he started to decline due to what many historians believe was an increasingly pronounced drinking problem.On the other side of that record, the batter with the most strikeouts in Major League Baseball was Mark Reynolds in 2009 with 223 strikeouts in just 578 at-bats.
Who said the hard is what makes it great?
Tom Hanks In a memorable scene from A League of Their Own, Tom Hanks is pleading with Geena Davis’ character not to leave the team, and when she protests, “It just got too hard” he responds, tersely, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”
However, the recognition by the National Baseball Hall of Fame was done with the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Players Association, so that’s why they used the acronym AAGPBL and that’s the one that’s become well known for the league today.Of course, we’d also have to take into account the hours. The women in the AAGPBL had to work much longer than 44 hours a week. A little more on that later. And with travel, the league certainly was more a way of life than a job you’d get to go home to at the end of the day.
For Geena Davis’ character of Dottie Hinson, most historians agree the real person she’s based on the most was a woman named Dorothy Kamenshek. As was common for the 1940s, anyone named Dorothy often went by the nickname “Dottie”, and Dorothy Kamenshek was no different.
Still, although he was willing to go to battle and successfully passed all of the training to become a pilot, the war ended before Ted Williams saw action. He did, though, stay in the reserves for the Marines and served as a pilot in the Korean War. But that’s getting ahead of our story.Although she also played for more than one year. Dottie Green played until 1947 when a knee injury forced her to stop playing. But she stayed involved with the team as a sort of team chaperone up until the AAGPBL was disbanded. Since Geena Davis’ character of Dottie Hinson was the catcher on the Rockford Peaches and a sort of team captain like Dottie Green was after her injury, maybe that’s why people see the comparisons.As to the players themselves, I know you agree with me that the individual players who are active military or naval age should go, without question, into the services. Even if the actual quality to the teams is lowered by the greater use of older players, this will not dampen the popularity of the sport. Of course, if an individual has some particular aptitude in a trade or profession, he ought to serve the Government. That, however, is a matter which I know you can handle with complete justice.
Speaking of the league being a way of life, back in the movie, this is perhaps most obvious after the moment where the women are broken up into teams. It’s then that David Strathairn’s version of Ira Lowenstein mentions the uniforms. A model gets up on the dug out to strut the short skirts the women will have to wear.One of those years he did something very few people have done in Major League Baseball’s history, hit for a triple crown. That’s where you lead the league in batting average, HRs and RBIs in the same year. Jimmie did that in 1933 when he hit .365 with 48 HRs and 163 RBIs.In truth, the league was actually originally called the All-American Girls Softball League. But in the first season in 1943 it was renamed to the All-American Girls Baseball League. Despite this name change, most of the women came from softball but Wrigley and the league founders did want it to be more like baseball. So the result was more of a hybrid of softball and baseball.Joe Sewell’s average of around 63 at-bats per strike out was just barely better than Dottie’s average of 46 at-bats per strike out, and both Joe and Dottie were infinitely more difficult to strike out than many of the players in the Major Leagues today.
Willamette Valley is a real place in Oregon; if you remember that’s the destination from the classic 1970s computer game called Oregon Trail as well as the recent reincarnation board game of the same name.Note: This transcript is automatically generated. There will be mistakes, so please don’t use them for quotes. It is provided for reference use to find things better in the audio. So as we can see, baseball was considered an important method of getting people’s minds off of the war. A war that was everywhere else in life except, they hoped, on the ball field. So that’s why baseball both inside the military and outside of service was considered so important. But back to that strike out total, striking out 81 times over ten year is much more impressive now and you get a sense for just how good she was. Oh, and those 81 strike outs came in a total of 3,736 at bats.
Thank you for yours of January fourteenth. As you will, of course, realize the final decision about the baseball season must rest with you and the Baseball club owners – so what I am going to say is solely a personal and not an official point of view.
If you’re not a sports fan, just for some context here the toughest batter in the history of Major League Baseball—the men’s league that still exists today—to strike out was Joe Sewell. He played in the 1920s with the Cleveland Indians and New York Yankees and over the span of 14 years he had 7,132 at-bats and struck out only 114 times. Regardless though, the overall difference here between history and Hollywood’s portrayal is that Dottie Hinson wasn’t a real person. She was a fictitious character made up from a range of inspirational women in the AAGPBL. Although, as we learned, the women were required to carry around that beauty kit as if it were part of their uniform…their scantily clad uniform…so maybe the article isn’t too far off and it’s just that everything was sexist back then.
Was Jimmy Dugan a real person?
Tom Hanks’ character Jimmy Dugan was also created by film writers. However, he was inspired by a real-life baseball player named Jimmie Foxx, who, like Hanks’ character, dealt with alcoholism in his life.
So Dottie Hinson’s sister in the movie, Kit, isn’t based on any one real person named Kit Keller—there was no Kit Keller in the league—but she’s the filmmaker’s way of showing us what it must’ve been like for some of the sister combos in the league.It’s probably not much of a surprise, then, to learn that the same is true for pretty much all of the characters we see in the movie. While there were many sister combos in the real AAGPBL, Dottie Kamenshek wasn’t one of the women who had a sister playing in the league.
What makes it hard is what makes it great?
Tom Hanks, as Coach Jimmy Dugan says, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.” The hard is what makes it great. Cached
Another former professional baseball player that went into the character of Jimmy Dugan was Hack Wilson. Well, his real name was Lewis, but “Hack” was his nickname.What the movie doesn’t mention, though, is that there was another man who was behind the forming of the AAGPBL. That was another name that might sound familiar if you’re a fan of Major League Baseball: Branch Rickey.
As you can probably guess, if the characters themselves aren’t real, most of the storyline of the film also isn’t real. In fact, one of the other women who some think inspired Geena Davis’ character in part was a woman named Doris Sams. Sadly, Doris has since passed, but she did get the chance to watch A League of Their Own. Her succinct interpretation was that the movie was about 30 percent truth, leaving the remaining 70 percent as being made up by the filmmakers.
The movie begins as many films do, with a moment before a flash back. This one is by a woman named Dottie Hinson, who’s played by Lynn Cartwright, as she arrives at a baseball field to see a bunch of women wearing white AAGPBL shirts. As she watches, the movie shifts to the flash back by way of news footage.Or there was another article that referred to the league as nothing more than a glamor softball league—if you remember when the league started it resembled softball quite a bit more than what we saw in the movie.
While obviously the scenario with the fictional characters is, well, fictional, we can assume this must’ve happened around 1988 because that’s when the permanent “Women in Baseball” exhibit we saw at the end of the movie opened at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York to honor the women in the AAGPBL. In history, the real person who’d probably be the closest fit to Ira Lowenstein was a man named Ken Sells. Ken worked for Philip Wrigley at the time as an Assistant General Manager for the Chicago Cubs. So Wrigley tasked Ken with helping build the league and he was named the President of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going. There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before.
What was Jimmy Dugan's famous quote?
Jimmy Dugan : This is chickenshit, Dottie, if you want to go back to Oregon and make a hundred babies, great, I’m in no position to tell anyone how to live. But sneaking out like this, quitting, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Baseball is what gets inside you. It’s what lights you up, you can’t deny that.
Here is another way of looking at it—if 300 teams use 5,000 or 6,000 players, these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20,000,000 of the fellow citizens—and that in my judgment is thoroughly worthwhile.
Is A League of Their Own Based on a true story?
One of the best women’s sports movies (and now series) is based on the real women’s baseball team, the Rockford Peaches. The Rockford Peaches represented Rockford, Illinois, and were a founding team of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which existed from 1943 until 1954.
Branch Rickey was the General Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and he was the man who pushed to have Jackie Robinson break the color barrier in the Major Leagues. You can learn more about that story in an earlier episode of the Based on a True Story podcast when we compared history with the movie 42. Harrison Ford was the actor who played Branch Rickey in the movie simply named 42 after Jackie Robinson’s number. A few years later, in 1954, the ball itself changed from a 12 inch softball to a 9 inch baseball as well as stretching out the base paths to 85 feet apart, or almost 26 meters. Of course, 1954 would end up being the final year of the AAGPBL, but hopefully you can start to get a sense for how the league started very similar to softball and started to shift more toward baseball. To give you an idea of how good the real Dottie was, she struck out 81 times. That might not sound too great considering in the movie Dottie Hinson was only in the league for one year. But the real Dottie Kamenshek played in the league for ten years, and took part in every one of the seven All-Star games the league played. As you can probably guess, seven All-Star games in ten years means the league didn’t have one every year Dottie played.
The women in the AAGPBL played baseball rules, but most of the women came from softball leagues. So the movie is inaccurate to depict the women throwing overhand in 1943 when the league was formed.In the movie, one of the characters we haven’t talked about yet was someone who didn’t really have to be subjected to the objectification the women on the field did. That’s because he was in the dugout and, well, he was a “he”.
At the very end of the movie, older versions of Dottie Hinson and Kit Keller meet up at the same reunion we saw in the beginning of the movie. Except this time instead of being at a baseball field, they’re inside Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame. We see Ira Lowenstein cutting the ribbon to a new room in the Hall of Fame dedicated to the women who played in the AAGPBL.He wrote this letter to Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Kennesaw Mountain is not a place—well, it is, it’s a mountain in Georgia, but it’s also the name of the very first Commissioner of Major League Baseball. The Commissioner was named after the mountain.
Instead the Racine Belles beat the Kenosha Comets in three straight games to win the best-of-five championship series. For their efforts, each of the women on the Racine Belles got a $228 bonus. That’s about $3,200 today.
Back in the movie, we’re again hit with the sexism at play in the 1940s when not only does Tom Hanks’ character as the team manager think the women aren’t “real” ballplayers, but it’s evident that many of the men in the stands don’t think they are, either.While Geena Davis’ character in the movie might’ve gotten some of the on-field talents from Dottie Kamenshek, there were some other women who inspired other aspects of the woman on the big screen.
World War II is in full swing, and many of the professional baseball players have been called on to help with the war effort. As a result, there is no professional baseball being played and, according to the movie, it’s a candy man by the name of Walter Harvey who is trying to find a way to keep baseball going.
Like both Jimmie Foxx and the fictional Jimmy Dugan, Hack Wilson’s career spiraled down into a drinking habit. His 1930 year was amazing, but it seemed to have gone to his head. In 1931, Hack Wilson reported to the team about 20 pounds, or about 9 kilograms, overweight. It was the beginning of the end for his career that’d ultimately only last a few more years.However, Jimmie Foxx played baseball from 1924 to 1945 so there’s no way he could’ve been managing the first year for the AAGPBL in 1943. While we don’t really learn much about Tom Hanks’ characters stats, the implication in the film is that he was a great player.
Is Kit Keller a real person?
We already learned Dottie and Kit weren’t real people so obviously none of the specific scenes we saw in the film were real, but the movie is correct in showing that it was the Racine Belles who won the very first championship for the AAGPBL after the inaugural 1943 season.
And a little more relevant to our story today, Jimmie Foxx did spend one year managing one of the teams in the AAGPBL. Although that happened in 1952, not in 1943 like we see in the movie. And Jimmie Foxx didn’t manage the Rockford Peaches like Tom Hanks’ character of Jimmy Dugan. Instead, Jimmie Foxx managed the Fort Wayne Daisies. Although, Jimmie’s experience seemed to help as he managed the team to the playoffs where they lost to the Peaches two games to one. Ultimately, Landis decided to keep Major League Baseball going. So while many pro players did indeed go off to serve in the war, professional baseball didn’t stop in the U.S. And the real Jimmie Foxx was indeed a great player. One of the best of all time. During his 20-year career, Jimmie was an All-Star for nine of those. He also was a four-time American League (AL) homerun (HR) champ, three-time AL MVP, three-time AL runs batted in (RBI) leader, three-time AL batting champ and two-time World Series champion.However, it wasn’t really to replace men’s baseball. In fact, Wrigley had the idea that when the men’s teams were playing away games, women could play games at their big league stadiums.
We all know that World War II was indeed in full swing in 1943. And it is true many of the professional baseball players were called into military service. For example, Red Sox legend Ted Williams served as a pilot in the Navy, earning a lot of admiration from fellow pilots. Although it’s also worth pointing out that not all pro ball players put their lives at risk quite like Ted did. Many pro ball players opted to join a military baseball team, instead offering entertainment for the servicemen instead of going into battle themselves.
As I mentioned briefly earlier, the real person who the fictional Walter Harvey is based on was none other than Philip K. Wrigley. If that last name sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve probably had Wrigley chewing gum. Or maybe you’ve been to Wrigley Field—the home of the baseball team Philip Wrigley owned, the recent World Champion Chicago Cubs. At this charm school, women would be taught “proper” etiquette, manners, personal hygiene and dress code for any situation they might encounter, just to name a few things. Oh, and there’s a brief moment when John Lovitz’s character, Ernie Capadino, is recruiting Geena Davis’ character and he mentions the salaries for the girls playing ball is $75 a week.Oh, and women were required to carry around a beauty kit they were given and taught how to use, weren’t allowed to have short hair, couldn’t smoke or drink in public and had to wear lipstick at all times. Anyone caught breaking one of these league rules would be fined $5. That’s about $70 today. The second fine would go up to $10, or about $150 today. A third time would end up with you being suspended from the league.
So it is true that they had to wear the short skirts much like what we saw in the movie. And this also meant tearing up their legs was common because despite what we saw Madonna’s character do in the movie the real women in the league never slid head first. Instead they slid feet first meaning they’d be sliding on their bare legs.
And that brings us to where the footage is sort of not true. Although the footage in the film never comes out and says baseball stops, it does say that there’s speculation that baseball will stop for the duration of the war. Then it goes on to imply very strongly that this is the reason for candy bar king Walter Harvey decided to come up with a professional woman’s baseball league.
While history hasn’t remembered Jimmie as well, during his career he was on par with some of the other players who shared the field with him during All-Star games such as Hank Greenberg, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio.
Hack played from 1923 to 1934, so he was out of professional baseball before the AAGPBL began in 1943. Like Jimmy Dugan, the real Hack Wilson had a great career. It wasn’t as good as Jimmie Foxx’s career, but to this day Hack Wilson still holds the record for most RBIs in a single season at 191. That was in 1930.But then again, as the saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right. But we can get the sense that it’d also seem there is something to the claim we saw in the movie that the scouts were looking for pretty women to join the league. Talented, sure, but the league didn’t seem to hide that they were objectifying the women, so talent alone wasn’t enough.
Back in the movie, another one of the fictional people made up for the film is the guy who founded the AAGPBL, Walter Harvey. In the movie Walter is referred to as the chocolate king, or a candy bar mogul.
In fact, that “Women in Baseball” exhibit not only helped bring those talented women back to the forefront of the public’s eye, but it in a very Hollywood-esque way of going full circle, it was that exhibit that inspired the creation of A League of Their Own which would release just four years after the exhibit.Baseball provides a recreation which does not last over two hours or two hours and a half, and which can be got for very little cost. And, incidentally, I hope that night games can be extended because it gives an opportunity to the day shift to see a game occasionally. While we know Jimmy Dugan wasn’t real, sadly the sexism was. One newspaper article from the day after the league’s opening day, on May 31st 1943, called the league a powderpuff brand of baseball and referred to the women as fresh from the beauty parlor, or that the game is more than meets the eye, although what meets the eye is nice, too. In a memorable scene from A League of Their Own, Tom Hanks is pleading with Geena Davis’ character not to leave the team, and when she protests, “It just got too hard” he responds, tersely, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”
We might say the same thing about leading well through periods of organizational change. All leaders are faced with this challenge at some point in the careers—often at many points—but only a few do it with the kind of competence, resilience and optimism that inspires others to follow.
Lastly, remember that transition is different than change. Change is what happens externally; transition is what happens internally, the mental process people go through in adapting to the change. As with anything involving human beings, different people manage transitions differently, and at different speeds. Remember that just because some will embrace the change and get on board quickly does not mean that someone else who is fearful and resistant is being difficult. Many factors play a role, including personality type, past experiences with change, and one’s level of knowledge about and involvement in the change. Your role is to identify what kind of support each member of the team needs in order to move through his or her own transition. That’s not easy, and that’s why so many organizational change initiatives fail. Navigating the hard is what makes you great as a leader.I think a lot about how women often get asked to do thankless jobs men have already turned down or to step up in precarious situations where failure seems pretty likely. Women are sometimes only promoted when they’re needed to try to clean shit up or, more frequently, take the fall for the mess. We’re perceived as being more capable of maneuvering through crises we typically had no hand in creating. It’s a real phenomenon with a zippy title: the Glass Cliff.
One of my favorite moments in A League of Their Own comes toward the end, just before the World Series is set to begin. Dottie and her newly returned, wounded husband, Bob, are preparing to drive back home to Oregon when Jimmy confronts her about deserting the team when they need her most. Baseball gave both of them a bigger sense of purpose, and Jimmy, sobered up and acutely aware of what it feels like to lose that sense of purpose, finally offers some real coaching to his star catcher.
And yet Philip K. Wrigley saw an opportunity to keep up morale and, more importantly, profits. If men were putting their bodies on the line overseas, why not women on the baseball diamond at home? War and sports are similar in that they both often bring out extraordinary things in ordinary people under intense pressure and/or facing almost insurmountable odds. It took a war for America to recognize women could play professional baseball, but when the war was over, and the men came back, America just as quickly forgot. It’s not that surprising. Women’s bodies have always been a battleground too, and no matter how hard we fight, there will always be some who insist we use them for housework and babies rather than ball games.Though Tom Hanks plays him as a loveable asshole, Jimmy is lost in an endless self-destructive cycle of addiction and misery. He gave his body to the game and then to alcohol. Then suddenly, his career was over and all that was left was his name and the memory of the man he used to be. His body betrayed him, and now he’s taking it out on himself. He can’t play, he can’t fight in the war. All he can do is drink. Later, after Kit learns she’s been traded to Racine, she throws a ball at Dottie, who finally snaps. “I am sick of being blamed for everything that’s bothering you. I got you into this league, goddammit! I didn’t want to be here.” If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.When Penny Marshall got the green light to direct A League of Their Own, batting cages around Los Angeles filled up with unknown starlets and famous faces alike. If you wanted to be in the movie, Penny was adamant you could really play — like, really, really play. She made Madonna work out with male ball players for three hours in New York. She auditioned Geena Davis in her backyard (after Davis’ agents expressly told her not to). Debra Winger dropped out. Penny had to cut Marisa Tomei (not coordinated enough) and Demi Moore (already too pregnant). She cast Lori Petty practically on the spot for her star athleticism. If Penny Marshall hadn’t made A League of Their Own, would the work and stories of the women of the AAGPBL ever have received more than a corner of our attention? Because it’s a movie, they both wind up on the Rockford Peaches. This only works for a while, because the same jealousy, resentments, and stubbornness boil to the surface. Dottie emerges as one of the league’s brightest stars, handpicked by general manager Ira Lowenstein to drum up press for the struggling AAGPBL. She even makes the cover of Life magazine while Kit is barely mentioned except, once again, as Dottie’s sister.There’s still a heated debate about the final play, pitting sister versus sister, of A League of Their Own’s World Series between Rockford and Racine. Fans have argued and dissected this moment as passionately as a play from a real game. Dottie has the ball in her glove ready to tag Kit as she comes charging at her at home plate. And then in an instant, their bodies collide, and the ball dramatically rolls out of Dottie’s outstretched right hand.
I love A League of Their Own for many reasons: its examination of sisterhood, Tom Hanks’ performance, the joy of watching famous women like Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell really play baseball. But mainly because it’s a movie where women take up significant space. Our hopes, our dreams, our bodies, our sacrifices are treated with respect and pride. Our work matters. Here is affirmation of it. Here, in Penny Marshall’s warm and generous movie, the lives and work of women are the main draw, not a special attraction.For Kit, the AAGPBL represents a real opportunity to prove herself on her own terms — to leave her family farm in Oregon behind and do something she really loves. That makes it even more frustrating when the league scout won’t take her unless Dottie comes too. Until the war broke out and her husband was sent overseas, all Dottie had ever planned on was being a good wife and eventually a mother. Playing professional baseball was a pipe dream at best. To her, the scout’s offer sounds a little too good to be true.
Dottie has to parse out her conflicted feelings and identities — wife, sister, friend, teammate, baseball player — as women frequently do when it feels like a choice must be made between what we want and what everyone else expects from us. She tells him it just got too hard
It may be nicknamed “America’s pastime,” but like everything else in this country, baseball is male dominated. So when America joined World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor, major league baseball soon found itself in a crisis. By 1942, nearly all of the league’s star players were either drafted or enlisted to fight overseas. Meanwhile, women were encouraged to join the war effort by taking jobs once held by men, but no one actually thought that meant baseball.“I’m in no position to tell anyone how to live. But sneaking out like this, quitting, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Baseball is what gets inside you. It’s what lights you up, you can’t deny that.”
The question hangs in the air between them for a moment. For once, neither seems sure of what to do or say. The rules of sisterhood are far more complicated than the rules of baseball.
As the older AAGPBL players meander through their memories by way of museum memorabilia, the tears start to flow (or in my case, simply increase to heaving sobs). It’s everything — sisters reuniting, acknowledging the loss of those who gave their lives to the game. But mostly it’s because it’s affirmation women’s work matters. Here is visible, tangible proof and acknowledgment of women’s contributions to a space once only reserved for men. It’s the kind of acknowledgement and affirmation women still struggle to receive whether on the field, in the director’s chair, or really, just in the world at large.
