In 1992, director Penny Marshall reintroduced the public to an era of flourishing women’s baseball long since forgotten. Starring household names like Tom Hanks, Geena Davis and Madonna, “A League of Their Own” premiered nearly 40 years after the titular league folded.
The film grossed over $107 million domestically against a budget of $40 million, and the American Film Institute has since immortalized Hanks’ line, “There’s no crying in baseball!” as the 54th-greatest movie quote of all time.
But the fictionalized events of the movie were only echoes of the real All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — a landmark of women’s professional sports formed in a war-embroiled nation.
As men across America were drafted into World War II, Major League Baseball teams were losing names quickly, threatening the longevity of baseball as a whole. In hopes of restoring the sport to the level of popularity it had before the onset of the Great Depression, chewing-gum mogul and Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley took matters into his own hands. He rallied together a group of businessmen from across the Midwest and got to work on financing.
In 1943, the AAGPBL was born.
“That’s the tale of wartime industry in the ‘40s: women stepping up to fill roles that were previously dominated by men,” Cat Page-Vanore, registrar of the History Museum in South Bend, Indiana, said.
After hundreds of women attended tryouts across the U.S. and Canada, 75 athletes were invited to Chicago for final tryouts. Sixty women were chosen.
In its inaugural season, the league consisted of four teams from non-MLB cities scattered around Lake Michigan: the Rockford Peaches, the Racine Belles, the Kenosha Comets and the South Bend Blue Sox.
League games used components of both baseball and softball, and players, many of whom were pulled from existing softball leagues, were expected to adjust to the new rules of play.
“[The players] have to be trained in an onerous way to deal with these different changes in the ball and the mechanics of the pitching,” Page-Vanore said. “And that wound up playing into the struggles the league would have … of getting enough players who could handle the game that they were trying to put on the field.”
In addition to adapting to a whole new ballgame (so to speak), these players were fighting more than just the opposing team. They were fighting preconceptions from the public.
“‘They don’t know the game. They’re playing at it as opposed to actually being serious,’ was a common refrain. Yet if you went to actually watch them, many of those people often came away with a very different perception,” Leslie Heaphy, chair of the Women in Baseball Committee at the Society for American Baseball Research, said.
The league was faced with the challenge of balancing traditional ideas of all-American femininity with the athletic prowess of its stars, and it infused whatever aspects it could — from the team names to the uniforms — with discernible feminine charm.
The iconic uniforms consisted of one-piece tunics and shorts, which made players’ legs exceptionally vulnerable to bruises when sliding.
Each player had to attend mandatory charm school, complete with hygiene and etiquette lessons, as well as makeup kits with instructions. It was imperative each player be “presentable and attractive,” as the charm school guide put it, and each woman was told to be kind to the audience. Other rules of conduct prohibited slacks or shorts during practice and “boyish bobs,” as well as fraternizing with members of other teams to maintain an air of rivalry.
The league was so committed to keeping up appearances that it failed to integrate for the entirety of its existence.
For decades, Page-Vanore has kept a binder full of AAGPBL baseball cards — a sort of visual history of the league.
“It never [escapes] me that when I flip through these pages — and we have several hundred [cards] here — every single face in here is white. And that just simply is not a reflection of the talent and athleticism of American sports,” Page-Vanore said.
Pages from Cat Page-Vanore’s binder of AAGPBL baseball cards. Image courtesy of Cat Page-Vanore.
Some players, however, were able to overcome the odds. Toni Stone, the first female player to join the Negro Leagues, replaced Hank Aaron as second baseman for the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953 before moving to the Kansas City Monarchs in 1954. Connie Morgan and Mamie Johnson soon joined the Clowns as well, and 16-year-old Doris Jackson became Stone’s understudy after writing her a letter.
As the war carried on, the league focused on expanding. With host cities offering to finance their own teams in 1944, Wrigley had room to place women’s teams in minor league stadiums while the men’s teams were away. Thus, the Milwaukee Chicks and Minneapolis Millerettes were born.
These large cities, however, proved unconducive to success for AAGPBL teams. In smaller stadiums, closer proximity to fans allowed players to be friendly with their audience, while the distance of larger stadiums led to less engagement and, in turn, less publicity.
Both new teams were picked up by smaller cities the following season.
“They could not survive in a big city media market, competing with other sports and entertainments that were dominating people’s attention,” Page-Vanore said.
Other teams, in contrast, were flourishing. In 1944, Wrigley sold the AAGPBL to his advertising executive Arthur Meyerhoff, and it was under Meyerhoff’s ownership that the league reached its peak. He implemented a League Board of Directors that governed each franchise in each original city, so every team would have a say in the rules and regulations of the sport.
There was no longer any doubt that this was a league that took the sport very seriously; even charm school was soon discontinued.
The league not only provided hundreds of young women the opportunity for athletic achievement; it also catapulted their families to financial success. League players made anywhere from $40 to $85 a week, sometimes reaching $100 at a time when the average weekly salary for manufacturing jobs in the U.S. in 1945 was around $45.
Attendance was increasing and, even after the war ended in 1945, showed no signs of slowing down. On Independence Day of 1946, a South Bend game saw an estimated 10,000 attendees. In 1948, the league peaked in attendance, with nearly one million total paid fans.
By this time, the AAGPBL had grown to 10 teams. But as it reached its zenith, the league began to flounder. Following its 1950 season, each team elected to buy itself from Meyerhoff and operate independently. There was no longer any centralized control of publicity, player procurement or talent equalization.
And, of course, the world was advancing technologically.
“You see the advent of television broadcasts … becoming a popular present factor in the home … changing the way that baseball consumers consume their baseball,” Page-Vanore said. “Some of the teams started to not be able to make payroll because they are not getting enough attendance. They’re not getting enough concession money. They’re just not getting enough financial support.”
With less attendance and overall revenue, team owners entered financial deficits and the league diminished in size.
By the time the AAGPBL disbanded in 1954, only five teams remained.
For many of its former players, the league provided a professional and financial springboard for subsequent careers. Thirty-five percent of its players earned bachelor’s degrees, as opposed to 8.2% of women of that generation overall. Five former players went on to become doctors, and two became dentists — notably male-dominated career fields.
But life moved on, and so did the American public. There has not yet been another professional women’s baseball league that has achieved the same success.
“It has always been seen as a men’s game … the fact that it has been referred to as America’s national pastime tells you something about America and how it views men and women’s roles,” Heaphy said. “There’s no need for women’s baseball in some people’s minds, right? Just have them go play softball.”
Around the 1980s, as the players were entering middle age, forgotten stories began to resurface.
“Descendants of players, or people who knew former players, would find out about it from their relatives and start looking into it and doing research,” Page-Vanore said. “Enough of that momentum builds up that … it kind of rolled the ladies into the attention of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and I think that’s where things really started to take off.”
The league was recognized by the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988, and with the release of the 1992 film “A League of Their Own,” former players for the AAGPBL were again rocketed to stardom. In 2022, Amazon aired a TV series under the same name, telling the stories of fictional marginalized players excluded from the original film.
“[T]hese were just ordinary people — our neighbors, our family members — who directly touched people’s lives,” Page-Vanore said. “[T]he really cool aspect of it being a Midwestern league is that their direct, personal fingerprints are still all over people’s lives to this day, and in our communities.”
