Why the ‘A League of Their Own’ TV show continues to resonate with fans — and why the Rockford Peaches remain timeless
Roughly 90 miles west of Chicago, Beyer Stadium’s brick ticket booth stands eight decades later as a physical reminder to the history embodied at the baseball field.
The Rockford Peaches and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League still resonate within baseball and pop culture. Penny Marshall’s 1992 film “A League of Their Own” starring Geena Davis, Lori Petty and Tom Hanks remains the highest-grossing baseball movie after bringing in nearly $133 million worldwide.
Thirty years later, a TV show by co-creators Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson debuted with the same name on Amazon Prime that more deeply delved into the league and women during the 1940s, with the Peaches again serving as a primary backdrop. This iteration, however, centered on race, gender and sexuality within its storytelling.
“Every story — every movie, book, history book or anything — has a level of completeness,” historian Kat Williams told the Tribune. “But every story needs to be mined and what they’ve done is mine what was one of the worst kept secrets of the league and bring it into a 21st century consciousness, and it was absolutely crucial they did that because no one had done that before.
“They went below the surface and they were able to find a lot of truths that people didn’t want out there.”
“A League of Their Own” and its eight-episode season that aired in August 2022 developed a devoted fandom. In the six months since Amazon’s cancellation after initially renewing it for four final episodes last March, fans’ love of the show fueled a tireless effort to get it picked up for a second season by another streaming service.
Those involved with the show sensed they were creating something special, forged out of a unique, magical connection from which weeks of baseball training for the actors helped serve as the foundation. Melanie Field, who played the Peaches’ slugging third baseman Jo De Luca, noted that with most shows, the cast doesn’t meet until the first table read. But with “League,” hours upon hours of tough training on the diamond in the lead-up to production played a huge role in establishing cast chemistry.
“When it came out and that was affirmed to us by the fan base, that was a real cool moment for everybody to realize, OK, this thing that we felt in our hearts every day we went to work, we felt like there’s a reason we’re doing this and this
