The Villain of Your Own Story

On A League of Their Own and looking back in anger

I consider myself preternaturally wired to root for the underdog. I grew up in Queens, a borough that went all but forgotten until people (read: real estate developers) decided Astoria was “cool.” I went to an overpopulated high school where even teachers could not be relied on to remember who you are. Basically, I’ve never had any kind of desire to align myself with the winning team. This is why I am a Mets fan.

For this reason (and really this reason alone¹), I’ve always had a soft spot for sports movies. And dance movies, too, which are an adjacent genre. Basically, the movies (mostly) follow a well-tread formula: The scrappy loser who, through a lot of hard work and a little luck, wins the big game/match/tournament, gets the guy/girl of their dreams, and learns a little something about themselves along the way. The win is all but guaranteed; it’s often more of a question as to when and how they’ll emerge victorious than if. The villain is typically more symbol than person, of racism, capitalism, and in some cases, Communism.

So, this is why, when you watch A League of Their Own², it comes as an absolute gut punch when The Rockford Peaches, the ragtag group of girl ballplayers you’ve followed for two hours and have since come to have great affection for³, (spoiler alert) do not clinch that World Series win. “We’re gonna win. We’re gonna win,” reformed coach Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) mutters a few innings into that final game. How wrong he is.

A League of Their Own is told through the eyes of Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis), an all-star catcher who reflects upon her glory days in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (A.A.G.P.B.L). Dottie is the kind of girl who has the world at her fingertips. She’s a natural born leader with athletic star power, the kind of person her teammates want to hate upon meeting but can’t. She acts as makeshift coach when Jimmy’s too drunk to do it and is adored by both him and her husband (Bill Pullman). (It’s notable that this is probably the only time in the 90s someone picked Bill Pullman over Tom Hanks, and honestly, it’s well-deserved.) 

But things don’t come so easy for Dottie’s kid sister, Kit (Lori Petty), whose immaturity is practically spelled out right there in her name. No matter what she does, Kit is confined to Dottie’s shadow. She’s a talented pitcher, sure, but she lacks Dottie’s confidence and ease, prone to childish outbursts. Her Achilles heel is a relatable one; she simply has no chill.

In the film’s most climactic moment — and one of its best scenes — the sisters finally come to verbal blows; baseball is everything for Kit, whereas Dottie (lying) chalks it up to a fun pastime until her husband returns from war. Dottie takes credit for getting Kit into the league; Kit wants to know what she’s still doing there.

When we first meet Dottie at the beginning of the film, she’s well into her retiree years and having doubts about attending the A.A.G.P.B.L.’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, serving as a reunion for the athletes and a framing device for the film. (In a brilliant move, the movie also dubs Geena Davis’s voice over that of the older actress playing her, which should be done more often, instead of resorting to heavy prosthetics, or increasingly, CGI.) Dottie once again downplays, this time to her daughter, what playing professionally meant to her. Her daughter encourages her to go and so she does, taking us with her down memory lane. The film is a sudsy nostalgia-fest, every moment practically crackling on-screen with wonderful, layered, comedic performances from an all-star ensemble cast that includes Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell at the peak of their powers.

We’re led to believe that what Dottie is nostalgic for is this thrilling time in her life, and I’m sure she is. But what she’s really nostalgic for is her lost relationship with her sister.

When Kit is traded to the rival team Racine Belles, she tells Dottie she’ll see her in the World Series. And after a brief respite from the team when Bob shows up, injured from World War II, it’s time for the sisters to go head-to-head. The series is now tied 3-3, which leads me to believe that the movie is telling us that, actually, Kit is pretty good at baseball. Would the Belles have been able to make it so far otherwise?

While Dottie is her usual cool as a cucumber self, when it’s Kit’s turn up at bat, she’s shuddering and crying in the dugout. Then, Dottie does something that I can only call the equivalent of Michael kissing Fredo on the cheek in The Godfather: She puts a metaphorical hit on her own sister, telling Helen (the replacement pitcher) Kit’s biggest weakness: “High fastballs. She can’t hit ‘em, can’t lay off ‘em.” Kit strikes out once, then twice. It’s all coming down to this moment — when Kit does the unthinkable — she hits the ball that her sister never thought that she could. It’s flying through the air and Kit’s rounding the bases, all to Dottie’s gobsmacked astonishment. It’s clear that Dottie has underestimated Kit; a few moments later, Kit tackles Dottie at home plate and when Dottie releases the ball, Kit is the hero.

In the world of sports movies, Kit is the one who wanted it the most, she is the underdog, the one who pulls through against all odds, and therefore she is the one who deserved to win.

It’s up for interpretation as to whether or not Dottie released the ball at home plate on purpose. If you ask me, I don’t think she did. I think for the first time in — well, ever — Kit got the best of her big sister.

When Dottie tells Kit later on that she’s not going to come back and play baseball because she and Bob want to start having kids, she’s walking away so Kit can finally prosper outside of her outsized shadow. “Wind Beneath My Wings” was written for another movie about female friendship (helmed by another Marshall sibling) but it easily could’ve played here, too. When Dottie sees Kit at the Baseball Hall of Fame all those years later, with approximately 15 redheaded grandchildren in tow, it’s clear that they’ve never quite bridged the gulf between them. It’s a terribly bittersweet moment. Had their dynamic been even slightly different, maybe they wouldn’t have had to stay so far apart. We’ve spent two hours watching the death knell of their relationship⁴; the pivotal moment in their lives when it went from strained to nonexistent. 

Dottie may be strolling through her past, but she isn’t doing it through rose-colored glasses. Dottie is the villain of her own story and not coincidentally, the one who most easily fits into the sports movie villain mold.

It all comes too easy to Dottie for her to have been the hero in the end. Dottie may say she doesn’t like the attention, that she doesn’t want the spotlight, but this is a lie. I think back to the beginning of the movie, when she races Kit back to the farm following that first baseball game, quick to fall into a competition she knows she can win. Or in another early moment that cements this dynamic to me, is when Dottie tells her older grandson to go easy on his younger brother during their game of basketball, before whispering to the younger sibling “Kill him.” Dottie knows all too well what can happen when an older sibling doesn’t give their younger counterpart a little bit of grace.

Some viewers might feel cheated that they don’t get to see the Rockford Peaches get their seemingly well-earned victory; it might be even harder to believe that the Racine Belles might have somehow “deserved” it more, vis a vis sports movies rules. But A League of Their Own is still all the richer for it, because in real life, the team’s narrative doesn’t matter when they're out on the field; it can all come down to timing, luck, and whether or not one catcher manages to keep her hand on the ball. Every game has an underdog and a villain; it just depends on who gets to tell the story.

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• I have to recommend Erin Carlson’s great book about the making of A League of Their Own, No Crying in Baseball, and of course, her definitive Nora Ephron tome, I’ll Have What She’s Having.

• I’m hosting another Letters & Sodas on October 23 at 7:30 p.m., once again at Greats of Craft in Long Island City - lineup tbd.

• I wrote about the 10th anniversary of BoJack Horseman for Paste.

1. I grew up in what I often call a “girl house.” The only sport that was watched is tennis and it was watched by my mom.

2. I love this movie so much and feel so moved by it that one time, exhausted at the beginning of a red eye flight from Albuquerque to New York, I put it on and was crying almost as soon as the credits began. I was emotionally overwhelmed by not what was happening onscreen in front of me, but what I knew would come. I was asleep a half hour later.

3. If you watch two hours of this movie and you *don’t* come to have affection for the women of the Rockford Peaches, then this movie is completely lost on you anyway.

4. I did not choose the Oasis reference for the subhed specifically because of the relationship between the Gallagher brothers but I do wonder now if they could relate.