BASEBALL; Bringing Their Love Of the Game to Girls
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(Client: Kids in Sports)
There was no running, no sliding and, of course, no crying.
The Girls of Summer can’t hit, pitch or field the way they used to, but baseball is still in their blood. There could be no other reason why four women ranging in age from 68 to 81 gave up a Saturday morning and much of the afternoon to take part in a special clinic for young girls from the Los Angeles area.
For Maybelle Blair, Shirley Burkovich, Katie Horstman and Thelma ”Tiby” Eisen — proud alumni of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which inspired the 1992 movie ”A League Of Their Own” — it was a labor of love.
”Anything’s worth my Saturday afternoon when it comes to these kids,” said Blair, a pitcher with the 1948 Peoria Redwings. ”It does my heart good.”
Sponsored and run by Kids In Sports, a nonprofit organization that provides after-school sports programs for nearly 10,000 children ages 5 to 17 in the Los Angeles area, the event seemed to be a hit with young and old alike.
Blair, Burkovich and Horstman drove two hours together from Palm Springs, while Eisen had a relatively short drive from Pacific Palisades. The four spent the better part of three hours instructing the girls on the finer points of pitching, catching, hitting and base running before sitting down to sign some autographs.
The gloomy June weather — gray skies and occasional drizzle — kept the turnout at about 80, far fewer than the 240 girls expected. But those who came left with much more than a free cap and T-shirt.
Crystal Acuna, 12, had not been aware that women played professional baseball, and she still had not seen the movie, but it’s now on her to-do list.
If she needs to borrow a DVD, she can always get one from Kelly Birdsall or Amanda Fry, 11-year-old cousins who attended last year’s special screening of the movie at Sony Studios and have their own copies.
”My twin, Heather, she watches it like every day,” said Teri Fry, Amanda’s mother and a sports club vice president and coach. ”I actually use that phrase, ‘There’s no crying in baseball,’ with my team. There’s a couple of girls who are really shy, but when I say that it kind of gets them out of that crying mode.”
As pioneers, the A.A.G.P.B.L. players can be an inspiration to girls and young women, but it took ”A League of Their Own” — the Penny Marshall film starring Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Rosie O’Donnell and Madonna — to reignite interest in a league that existed from 1943-54.
”When the movie came out, that’s what brought us to the attention of the public,” said Burkovich, who played with the Springfield Sallies, Chicago Colleens and Rockford Peaches from 1949-51. ”Because unless you were a baseball fan — unless you lived in the Midwest in the ’40s — nobody knew of our league.”
Burkovich said the movie got a lot of things right, including the short skirts, the long bus rides and the camaraderie among the players. But she said there were some differences between what occurred in real life and what was depicted on the screen.
”It depends on who you talk to in the league,” she said. ”I feel the movie was probably 80 to 90 percent accurate. There was some Hollywood in there — drunken managers, kids on the bus, poisoning chaperones — but in movies I think you have to do that. Penny Marshall had a problem: the ballplayers couldn’t act and the actors couldn’t play ball.”
”A League Of Their Own” was inspired by a documentary of the same name by Kelly Candaele, a Kids In Sports board member, whose mother and aunt were members of the original A.A.G.P.B.L.
Follow the link to view the article as it appeared in www.nytimes.com