A League of Their Own and the History Behind the Story

In 1943, Philip K. Wrigley, the chewing gum magnate and owner of the Chicago Cubs, had a problem. With male players being drafted for World War II, major league rosters were thinning and minor league teams were folding across the country. Wrigley's solution was to create a women's professional baseball league, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, to keep fans coming to ballparks while the men were overseas.

The AAGPBL operated from 1943 to 1954, employed more than 600 women across teams in Midwestern cities, and drew respectable crowds before declining attendance and the return of men's baseball led to its dissolution. It was almost entirely forgotten until 1988, when the league's players were honored with a permanent exhibit at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Four years later, Penny Marshall's film A League of Their Own turned the AAGPBL into a cultural phenomenon.

The movie was a hit, grossing $107 million domestically and becoming one of the most popular sports films ever made. It was also, by the real players' own assessment, about 30 percent accurate. Former player Doris Sams put it plainly: "30 percent truth and 70 percent Hollywood." What the film got right was the broad strokes. The league existed, the women were talented, and the cultural tension between femininity and athletic competition was real. What it left out was more complicated.

Charm School

The AAGPBL's femininity requirements were not exaggerated in the film. They were, if anything, understated. Wrigley wanted his players to be unmistakably feminine, partly to distinguish the league from softball and partly to reassure audiences that the women on the field were still proper ladies.

The league required players to wear one-piece dress uniforms with short, flared skirts that offered little protection from sliding injuries. They attended mandatory charm school during spring training, run by Helena Rubinstein's beauty salon, where they received instruction on posture, makeup, grooming, and etiquette. The league's official rules of conduct required players to always appear in feminine attire when not actively playing or practicing. They could be fined for wearing pants in public, with escalating penalties from $5 to suspension. The South Bend Blue Sox dropped Josephine "JoJo" D'Angelo after the 1944 season because she got a short haircut. The league required lipstick at all times during games.

The film shows charm school and plays it for comedy. In reality, the rules were enforced seriously and reflected the deep anxiety of the era about women occupying spaces that had been reserved for men.

The Women Behind the Characters

Most of the characters in the film were fictional composites. Geena Davis's Dottie Hinson was loosely inspired by Dorothy "Dottie" Kamenshek, one of the greatest players in league history. Kamenshek played first base for the Rockford Peaches and made the all-star team seven times. Out of 3,736 at-bats, she struck out only 81 times. Former teammate Pepper Paire Davis described her as having "the whole package."

Tom Hanks's character, the drunken manager Jimmy Dugan, was inspired partly by Jimmie Foxx and partly by Hack Wilson, both Hall of Fame sluggers who battled alcoholism after their playing careers. Foxx managed the Fort Wayne Daisies for one season in 1952, leading them to a first-place finish. The screenwriters invented the line "There's no crying in baseball."

The film also compressed multiple seasons into one and changed the 1943 championship results. In reality, the Racine Belles beat the Kenosha Comets in the first championship, not the Rockford Peaches.

Who Was Left Out

The most significant omission was racial exclusion. The AAGPBL barred black women from playing through an unofficial but strictly enforced policy. The 1992 film addressed this only in a single, brief moment, a scene in which a black woman throws a ball past Dottie to another player with such force that it stings her hand, and the women share a look of mutual recognition before the scene cuts away. It lasts a few seconds.

Beginning in 1948, several Cuban players entered the league, including Isabel "Lefty" Alvarez and Isora del Castillo. Seven Cuban women played in the AAGPBL in total. But black American women were excluded for the league's entire twelve-year run.

The 2022 Amazon series of the same name addressed racial exclusion more directly, creating a storyline about a black woman barred from the AAGPBL who finds a place in other baseball structures. But the original film, the one that defined the AAGPBL in public memory, treated racial exclusion as a footnote.

The film also did not address the significant queer history of the league. Many AAGPBL players were closeted lesbians, and the league's strict femininity requirements were widely understood, at least in part, as a means of keeping players from being perceived as gay. Former player Maybelle Blair came out publicly at the age of 95 during a Tribeca Festival panel for the Amazon series in June 2022. Dorothy Kamenshek lived for decades with her partner, Margaret Wenzell, also a former AAGPBL player, though they were described publicly as close friends for most of their lives.

A League of Their Own gave the AAGPBL a permanent place in American culture. It also, as many of the surviving players noted, told a version of the story that was more comfortable than the reality.