Cru Jones Society

Every Wednesday between now and the end of baseball season the Cru Jones Society brings you a new baseball movie examined for both overall entertainment value and treatment of our favorite game. To suggest a film, email us at staff [at] crujonessociety.com. Otherwise, pour yourself an $8 beer, crack some shells, and let’s play ball.

Date Released: July 1, 1992
Box Office Total: $107,533,928
Team Featured: Rockford Peaches

“Ballplayers? I haven’t got ballplayers, I’ve got girls! Girls are what you sleep with after the game not what you coach during the game!” – Jimmy Dugan, manager, Rockford Peaches

“Old Man Harvey, he just offered me a job coaching in Wichita… I turned him down…I already got a team.” - Also Jimmy Dugan, manager, Rockford Peaches

Such is the balance of A League of Their Own… One moment obnoxious, blatantly chauvinistic, and ultimately hilarious, the next moment saccharine sweet, painfully emotional, and completely cringe-inducing. As we kick off our new weekly feature, we figured we’d start with one we’d already covered in some detail here at CJS already. Got a problem with that? Are you crying?

There’s no crying. There’s no crying in baseball (movie reviews)!

Rogers Hornsby is our webmaster and he called me a talking pile of pig shit. And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me write this article. And did I cry? No! NO! And you know why? Because there’s no crying in baseball (movie reviews)! There’s no crying in baseball! There’s no crying!

Plot Synopsis

America is in the thick of World War II and Roosevelt has threatened to shut down baseball. Candy bar king Walter Harvey concocts a plan to save baseball by recruiting girls from all across the country to play in a brand new league centered in the heart of America’s population centers – Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin; Rockford, Illinois; and South Bend, Indiana. Nice plan, Walter. Nothing like sticking a bunch of chicks in America’s dairyland to keep interest in baseball alive!

Acerbic scout Jon Lovitz scours the country looking for talent and has a woeful lack of screentime, but finds Dottie Hinson, the girl version of, I dunno, Lou Gehrig, in Bumfuck, Oregon as one of his top recruits. Dottie’s kid sister Kit begs him for a shot and earns one despite the annoyances of a nearby cow. The girls travel to Chicago, teams are chosen, and the league forms.

Walter Harvey chooses Jimmy Dugan – Tom Hanks playing a somehow even drunker and more belligerent version of Jimmie Foxx – to manage the Peaches, and he reluctantly accepts hating the entire dog and pony show at first, but he reluctantly rekindles his love of baseball and coaches the girls to the World Series. How you can have the gumption to call the championship game a “World Series” in a league of four teams still escapes me, but whatever.

 

Meanwhile, the fear of receiving one of those death telegrams notifying a player that her husband has been sniped by some evil Kraut weighs heavy on everyone’s mind as the girls bond throughout the season and we explore their many standard archetypes. There’s the tramp played by Madonna, the butch one played by Rosie O’Donnell, the beauty queen played by some hot blond, and the uptight goody two shoes played by some chick who looks remarkably like my first middle school girlfriend among others.

The overarching narrative examines the struggle of Kit and Dottie as Kit is the resentful and defiant little sister while Dottie is the happily married woman marking time until her husband comes back from war, assuming he’s not either dead or running out of missiles and getting bailed out by drunk Randy Quaid while trying to blow up that giant spaceship that’s now hovered above Area 51.

The movie ends (or perhaps should have ended) with a climactic showdown between Kit and Dottie at home plate on the final play of the World Series. We flash forward approximately 50 years to find the girls inducted into the Hall of Fame where Dottie and Kit have a tearful reunion and the other girls sing that ridiculous song to close the movie and give all the men in the audience one last chance to cringe because we truly have no idea how women relate to each other.

Treatment of Baseball/Quality of Baseball Scenes:

A League of Their Own seems to take special care in respecting the game to the best of its abilities. In the scene where Jimmy discovers that his love of baseball supersedes his raging apathy and self-loathing, he has the following argument with Dottie (paraphrased of course):

Jimmy: Hey, what are you, stupid? You’re gonna squeeze bunt with our best hitter?
Dottie: The infield’s back, the squeeze’ll work.
Jimmy: Stop thinking with your tits, you want a big inning here.

That’s a little touch of baseball strategy that goes a long way with baseball dorks like me. And while his berating of Evelyn for missing the cutoff man when the team is up by two runs leads to the movie’s most iconic line, I defy anyone who’s played organized baseball for any length of time to claim that a coach hasn’t crawled completely up their nose like that for a miscue. The girls seem competent enough at the game, the chick who played Alice got a real raspberry sliding into third in the scene where Jimmy takes a picture of her disgusting hip, and the game is filled with reasonably exciting action.

On the minus side, some things just miss the mark. Many of the baseball scenes are filmed extremely tight preventing the viewer from seeing the players make a real play. For instance, in the final game, “All the Way” Mae makes a spectacular running catch to record the first out of the 9^th inning, but all we see is her crash into the wall. We don’t see the pursuit, we don’t see the actual catch, all we see is the aftermath. Madonna could never make that catch, and only showing us the tail end of the play alerts the audience to that. Other little things bug me as well: When Ellen Sue pitches, she looks like she’s throwing about 35 mph; balls go off the bat incorrectly as “homeruns” would in reality be 50 foot pop outs in foul territory, Mae catches a ball in her hat which is illegal… those kinds of things.

But really, that’s picking nits. By and large, the baseball in this movie is taken seriously, fun to watch, and about as good as you can expect from a bunch of Hollywood actresses.

Annoying Romantic B-Story/Stifling Spouse?

The inclusion of this category is in honor of Major League, which is an excellent movie if you fast forward through every scene Rene Russo is in. Major League II falls into the same trap as Vaughn has to choose between the gold-digging blond tramp and the youth organizer who also played Connie Conehead. Honestly: Who fucking cares about any of this shit? We’re here to watch the goddamn Indians win something for once, we don’t give a crap if any of these assholes find love. All future movies will be judged against the Major League standard.

This is a special case though. This is a movie about women and their relationships, so the standard is a bit different. With that said, this movie does a shockingly good job of putting the romantic stuff in the background giving way to the progression of the season and the escalating tension between Dottie and Kit. Marla Hooch gets married mid-season and the event gets about 10 seconds in the middle of a montage. The scene with Betty Spaghetti receiving the telegram of death is wildly uncomfortable (in an artistically good way), and the reunion of Bob and Dottie feels earned and heartfelt. Since ultimately this movie is about relationships, the relationship elements don’t feel contrived, they feel wholly organic and necessary to the plot. Nicely done.

Final Thoughts

I’ve seen A League of Their Own more times than I can realistically count. It’s inherently re-watchable because for every cringer the movie (i.e. that goddamn song they sing in the locker room that I now can’t get out of my head), there are at least two to three big laughs or good baseball scenes. The crux of the character development centers around Dottie and Kit’s relationship, but the major plot driver is watching the chicks play baseball. Tom Hanks and Jon Lovitz deliver lines worth the price of admission alone (“Y’know… If I had your job, I’d kill myself. Stay here, I’ll see if I can dig up a pistol.”). And above all else, I feel like Penny Marshall respects the game and makes a movie that, despite a few minor missteps, does so. This movie succeeds both as a comedy and as a baseball flick, which makes it a worthy addition to your summer viewing rotation.

Ruling from the Scorer: 2-run triple down the right field line

edagger@crujonessociety.com