Partway into the pilot of the hotly anticipated Prime Video series A League of Their Own, Max Chapman — a ringer of a pitcher — arrives at the field where tryouts for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League are under way. On that Midwestern field in the 1940s, the women are literally hitting it out of the park, sliding into home, and catching pop-up balls behind their backs with ease. There’s a sense of joy among them, some housewives, others young women just out of school, for whom ballplaying was purely avocational, something they couldn’t take seriously if there were a meal to cook, laundry to fold, dishes to wash — that is, until the major leagues were gutted during World War II. With the male players off to war, they finally got their chance.
While players like Abbi Jacobson’s Carson and D’Arcy Carden’s Greta revel in the hope of becoming among the first women to play ball professionally, Max is turned away without a shot because she’s Black. Before exiting without a tryout, she fires a ball
