A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN IS A FICTIONALIZED RETELLING of the formation of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which, as the name implies, was a professional baseball league for women.¹ It’s one of the three best baseball movies that have ever been made,² and so I would like to talk about it for a bit. However, the stuff that gets discussed in this chapter will not make any sense to anyone who does not have a strong familiarity with the movie’s plot, so let’s run through that first.

In A League of Their Own, we follow Dottie Hinson and Kit Keller, sisters from Oregon who get the call-up to try out for the AAGPBL. Dottie is tall and fearless and heroic and a baseball genius (she plays catcher), and so of course she’s the one everyone fawns over. Kit is short and kind of a whiner and very ordinary (at least she is when measured up against Dottie, anyway), and so of course she’s underappreciated (she plays pitcher). They end up both making the league, and also they both make the same team (the Rockford Peaches).

The Peaches are coached by Jimmy Dugan, a former professional player and current alcoholic. He mostly ignores the team at first, but then he realizes his team is very good and decides he doesn’t want to ignore them anymore. Separate of Dottie and Kit, the other main players on the team are:

• Mae Mordabito: She plays center field. She’s the lead-off batter. She’s very good. Were there no Dottie, she’d probably be the leader of the team.

• Doris Murphy: She plays third base. She’s loud and obnoxious, but in the most charming way possible. She’s the movie’s comic relief.

• Marla Hooch: She plays second base. She’s the best hitter on the team, and likely the best hitter in the entire league. The running gag with her is that she’s unattractive.

• Ellen Sue Gotlander: She plays shortstop and pitcher.

• Betty “Spaghetti” Horn: She plays left field and relief pitcher.

• Evelyn Gardner: She plays right field. (She’s the one in that “There’s no crying in baseball!” clip that everyone knows.) She seems nice enough, but she screws up things a bunch.

Nearing the end of a game that could send the Peaches to the playoffs, Kit begins to struggle as pitcher. Jimmy and Dottie meet with her at the mound. She asks to finish the game, but Dottie, after a moment of hesitation, says that Jimmy should replace her. Jimmy does, and the Peaches win the game. Dottie and Kit get into a big fight in the locker room, and Kit (basically) tells Dottie that being her sister sucks because no matter what she does she knows that she’ll never be able to keep pace with Dottie.

Dottie, very hurt by what Kit says, asks to be traded from the team. The team decides to trade Kit instead. This (duh) sends Kit into a rage, which she ends by saying she can’t wait to play Rockford in the World Series. And guess what? It fucking happens, is what.

Rockford and Kit’s new team, the Racine Belles, meet in the World Series. Only here’s the thing: Shortly after Kit is traded, Dottie’s husband comes home from the war. Dottie cuts out on the team before the World Series starts, opting instead to go back home. She misses the first six games of the series, then returns for game seven. And here’s a big thing, and what sets up the movie’s biggest moment: Kit is the starting pitcher for that game.

Rockford and Racine play to a standstill to the ninth inning, but then Kit gives up two hits in a row, putting two base runners on with Dottie coming up to bat. She pitches it, and Dottie crushes a line drive at her head, scoring two runs. Kit has a mini-breakdown between the top of the ninth and the bottom of the ninth, but ultimately gets a chance to redeem herself. She comes up to bat with her team down one, a runner on base, and a chance to either lose the game, tie the game, or win the game. Dottie calls time, then tells her pitcher to throw high fastballs because it’s the one pitch that Kit can’t hit and also can’t lay off of. The pitcher does so, and Kit gets two quick strikes. Kit and Dottie share a look before the third pitch, and it’s another high fastball, but this time Kit blasts it into the outfield.

The runner scores and as Kit is rounding second, her third-base coach signals for her to stop. Kit, fully possessed, ignores the call, and speeds around the corner toward home. Dottie realizes what’s happening, and so she catches the ball from Doris and braces for impact. Kit crashes into Dottie like a goddamn F-150 crashing into the side of a building, and both players go tumbling through the air. To everyone’s surprise, Dottie—who, again, is bigger and stronger and more everything than Kit—loses her grip on the ball as she hits the ground. Kit touches home plate, scores, Racine wins, and the stadium goes 100 percent bonkers. Kit gets carried off the field as the Peaches slink into their locker room, heartbroken and miserable.

That’s the movie, and I would think that the four big questions that come out of it are at least a little bit obvious:

1. Who gets the most blame for Rockford losing the World Series?

2. Did Dottie drop the ball on purpose so that Kit could finally have her big moment?

3. Did the team make the right decision in trading Kit away after she and Dottie got into that fight?

4. What’s the single funniest thing that Doris Murphy says in the movie? (This one, I will admit, is decidedly less obvious than the other three.)

Let’s answer those, but in the opposite order.

WHAT’S THE SINGLE FUNNIEST THING THAT DORIS MURPHY SAYS IN THE MOVIE?

Short of Dottie, Doris is my favorite Rockford Peach. You know the characters in a movie who, even when they’re saying something ordinary, it’s still just so funny? That’s the kind of character Doris is. The eight funniest things she says in A League of Their Own:

8th Place: On the first day of tryouts, Doris tries to psych out Dottie and Kit by throwing a baseball at them. Dottie catches it barehanded without even flinching. Doris, completely shook, says to Mae, “Jeez, let’s go practice.”

7th Place: Doris and Mae are dancing with a few men at a bar. Doris takes one of the men and flips him feet over head. Someone asks her how she did it. She says that Mae taught her, that the two worked at a strip club. “She was one of the dancers. I was a bouncer.”

6th Place: Dottie sees Marla Hooch, drunk and up on stage at the bar, singing to a man in the audience. She asks Doris what they did to her. Doris says, “Nothing. We just gave her a dress.”

5th Place: A teammate sees a picture of Doris’s boyfriend and is taken aback by how ugly he is. After a second, she tries to comfort Doris by saying that looks aren’t important. Doris, without missing a beat, says back, “That’s right. The important thing is he’s stupid, he’s out of work, and he treats me bad.”

4th Place: The league is struggling to generate fan interest and so Mae, a former dancer, suggests that maybe she can arrange it so that her breasts pop out while she’s fielding a ball. Doris asks, “You think there are men in this country who ain’t seen your bosoms?”

3rd Place: A woman named Brenda gets out during a game. As she walks past Doris to get to her dugout, Doris shouts, “You’re out, Brenda.” (This is the second-best example of her saying a regular thing in an extremely funny way.)

2nd Place: Ellen Sue throws a pitch that hits the dirt. It’s called a ball by the umpire. Doris, ever vigilant in her support of her teammates, shouts, “Ellen Sue! Ellen Sue! Ellen Sue! That looked good to me, Ellen Sue! That looked good to me.”

1st Place: The thing earlier about Doris’s boyfriend being ugly: When the teammate first sees the picture, she asks if it’s out of focus. Doris pinches her lips together a little and then says, “No. That’s how he looks.” (This is the first best example of her saying a regular thing in a funny way.)

DID THE TEAM MAKE THE RIGHT DECISION IN TRADING KIT AWAY AFTER SHE AND DOTTIE GOT INTO THAT FIGHT?

I mean, it’s easy to look at the result of the World Series and say that it was a mistake, but that’s a bad way to approach things for two reasons:

(1) Measuring decisions based solely on what ends up happening later is oftentimes the easiest way to convince yourself that a bad thing was actually good, or that a good thing was actually bad. For example, if you one day said to yourself, “You know what I’m going to do today? Rather than putting my infant daughter in her crib at bedtime in a normal way, I’m going to see if I can jump shoot her into it from across the room like a basketball,” and then you did it and it worked out fine and so you were like, “I knew it. I knew that would be a good idea.” It wasn’t a good idea. You just got lucky, is all.

(2) Dottie was, hands down and no question, the very best player in the league. She literally bats 1.000 in the movie. She also dives into a dugout to catch a foul ball. She also makes a catch while doing the splits (the photo of which ends up on the cover of Time, very likely saving the league from withering away into nothingness). There’s no way Rockford was ever going to trade her away before they traded Kit away, because there’s no way anyone was going to be able to make an argument that trading away the league MVP to keep a barely All-Star pitcher happy would make any kind of sense. Kit had to go. It was the only call to make.