Erin Carlson: No Crying in Baseball

Erin Carlson: No Crying in Baseball

By Scott Bolohan

I’ve interviewed Hall of Famers, World Series winners, and All-Stars, but this was the first time my fiance has been excited about an interview I’ve done ever.

But for a lot of the general American population, A League of Their Own speaks more to them than any ballplayer. Transcending the game and appealing to a broad audience, the movie has evolved into a classic. Erin Carlson’s new book, No Crying in Baseball, takes a fascinating look behind the scenes at a movie that was in no way guaranteed to become the lasting success it is, still the highest-grossing baseball movie of all time.

With amazing stories of the stars in small towns, to the pranks of Tom Hanks, it gives the beloved movie a well-deserved deep dive and helps explain why it resonates so much still. It was, after all, even important enough to get my fiance to play her one year of softball, dreaming of being a Rockford Peach.

We had a lovely conversation with Carlson, whose book brings the movie alive and even adds to it on further viewings.

What was your relationship with the film before you started working on the book?

I’m an elder millennial and I grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago. My father was an incredibly gifted baseball player. His name is Jerome but his nickname from childhood onward is Babe after Babe Ruth. He was a natural athlete. He did not pass any of this on to me. I can hit, but I can’t field. I run away from the ball. You know that girl in gym class hiding under the bleachers? That’s me. I love sports, but I was more artistically inclined.

I was 11 years old when I saw the movie. This was the era when everyone just saw the same movie. There weren’t the distractions, the attention economy, the streaming options, or TikTok. So my friends and I in middle school went to see A League of Their Own. And I loved it. My sporty friends connected to the baseball elements. I personally connected to the humor of it. You saw these women ballplayers being funny, opinionated, mouthy, annoying, and really, really good at what they were doing. All of the things that girls my age, were not. It felt novel and original. It’s a refreshing girl movie because you have The Sandlot which came a few years after, and you had Stand by Me, films about boy camaraderie and friendship. But this felt like a rare miracle to have this really, really funny movie about female friendship. That’s what I responded to.

What made you think you could do a book on the film?

It was a really hard movie to make. Imagine making a movie like this, which was so epic, with no special effects, no AI, none of that stuff in 1991. It’s made in blisteringly hot conditions in the Midwest and they were doing this for four months or so. A lot of the actresses’ doubles were filming the baseball vignettes and action shots and they didn’t know how everything would be pieced together. So they were like, ‘Is this movie going straight to video?’ Penny Marshall, the director, was such a fabulous editor and she had a thread in her head that only she could see. When the cast finally saw the movie, they’re like, ‘Oh, this is a real movie,’ but they thought it would just sort of disappear. But it was a sleeper hit. At one point it knocked Batman Returns off the top of box office. The movie just took on a life of its own.

One of the Rockford Peaches, she played Alice Gasper, her name is Renee Coleman, she hated the movie when it came out because she was reminded of just how hard it was to make it and she had different memories of it. She was the one who had that bruise on her leg. That was a real bruise from sliding into the base. And she took 15 years to get feeling back in her thigh. They actually had to add makeup to tone down the bruise on camera. So she did not love the movie. But for Halloween 1992, she dressed up like a witch. She was in her Culver City apartment in LA handing out candy and there was a knock at the door and there was a gaggle of little girls dressed as Rockford Peaches. And Renee was so overcome. She was like, ‘Should I should I tell them I was Alice Gasper?’ And she didn’t and she regrets it.

It was so interesting reading about the making of this movie because it almost seems like a movie that always existed. But there was a lot at stake for this movie for many people.

If there were no stakes in the making of this movie, there would no there would not be a book. Making movies is always more dramatic behind the scenes. Penny had an uphill battle getting this movie made. She grew up in the Bronx and she was a self-described tomboy. She just loved sports, playing with the boys and getting dirty. She could outrun the boys. She dreamed of becoming an Olympic track runner, but her mother discouraged her from that. She was like, ‘You can’t run faster than the boys.’ In other words, who’s going to marry you? So Penny went on to become a really successful actress on the hit 1970s sitcom Laverne and Shirley. That required her to be very slapstick, very physical, and an extremely inventive and funny comedy performer. When that series ended, she didn’t know what to do. She knew that she couldn’t transition successfully from TV to movies. She knew her limits. So she decided to direct as a way to keep her career going. It turned out she was a really talented director. She made Big with Tom Hanks and she was the first female director to hit $100 million at the box office. She turned Tom into a huge star. After that, she made Awakenings with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, just a dramatic tear-jerker, and that won a bunch of Oscar nominations. It established her as a critically acclaimed director.

She found out about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League by watching a documentary that aired on PBS in 1987 that was made by one of the player’s sons, and she connected with these players. The documentary showed their reunion, and they were funny and sassy and talked about pranking their chaperones and everything that they do in the movie. So Penny was like, ‘I want to make that movie, I identify with these women, I want to pay tribute to them. There’s something there.’ Nobody in Hollywood wanted to make this movie, but they wanted to work with Penny. So Columbia Pictures was like, ‘Okay, come over, work with us, and work with us. We’ll even let you make the girls baseball movie.’ There was some festering doubt about how a movie like this would do because the league ended in 1954. Nobody knew about it. Why would anyone go see a movie about a league that only lasted 11 years? So they wondered what the market was. But Penny had a magic touch. She knew where the comedy was and where the heart was. It was a risk, and it paid off and everybody was very, very happy. The ticket sales kept spiking and spiking and spiking. The movie did around $130 million worldwide.

It’s still the highest-grossing baseball movie of all time.

Thirty-one years later. I think there’s a reason why it did well. First of all, girls, as we’ve seen from Barbie, girls and women drive the box office. It’s not just an anomaly. It’s an actual thing. And that’s what happens when you make a really, really good original film, that’s not a piece of IP and not a superhero. People are thirsting for original stories. It had a really funny script by Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz and it had really great performances from Geena Davis and Tom Hanks. Hanks was incredible in this and it’s funny that he wanted to disappear in the movie. He was coming off five flops and was inching his way back to the big screen. He didn’t want to be the leading man. He wanted to play somebody who’s not Tom Hanks. So he was very attracted to the idea of playing the character of Jimmy Dugan, who has this trajectory from Major League Baseball has-been. He’s grouchy, a slob, sexist, crude, shrewd, all of it. He evolves throughout the movie in such a great way that he’s almost the leading man of this movie. His character is inspired by Dottie’s example, who is the best ballplayer in the league. She steps up and coaches a team when he’s totally checked out. He finds his purpose and a calling in managing this women’s baseball team that he completely hated himself for doing in the beginning.

It sounds like he was also one of the few people who enjoyed the filming of the movie.

Hanks says this was the best time he’s ever had making a movie. One of the many surprises that I learned was that he is a massive baseball fan, particularly the Cleveland Guardians. He became a fan through doing three years of summer stock Shakespeare in the area. He would do plays at night and then go to games during the day in the ’70s. When he became super famous, when reporters would try to delve into his personal life, he would always deflect by bringing the subject back to baseball. One of the reporters had such a great quote, and I’m paraphrasing here, but he was like, ‘You know what, every night before I go to bed, before I knock off, I dream about being a baseball player for Cleveland, and I’d play center field. That’s where the grace is.’ That quote gives me chills just paraphrasing it. So doing this movie gave him a chance to fulfill his dream. While he wasn’t a ballplayer, he got to play the manager, and he got to play a lot of baseball because there was a lot of hurry up and wait. Hanks would show up for scenes that he wasn’t in. He just loved being on the set. I think he was learning about directing from shadowing Penny. She was a super successful director and he wanted to direct so to give him something to do, she let him direct the C camera, which shot scoreboard footage. He was a good-natured troublemaker. He had an anonymous gossip column. This is my favorite thing I learned from the book. It was called Peach Phuzz. It arrived on Xerox paper every Friday, and it had whimsical, wry observations about who was canoodling with who. Nobody knew who was doing it. Toward the end of the filming, it was discovered that it was him.

How was the production greeted by the people of Evansville, Indiana where they did much of the filming?

Growing up in the far west suburbs of Chicago, there was a similar vibe. If Madonna was dropped in my town, it would have been the same. I feel like so much of the glamour and mystery of celebrity is no longer because everyone’s always capturing things on video and celebrities are all on social media. It was very rare in that era, to see a celebrity as famous as Madonna. She was the most famous woman in the world at the time? Yeah, yeah. Even if you hated her, and people did you still wanted to see her? She had that aura around her and so much controversy. She was the Taylor Swift of her time, just so much more controversial.

When the production went to Evansville, there was such an electric vibe in the city. The crew was mostly from LA and New York. It was a culture shock for them. One of the makeup artists went to the grocery store and there was a whole aisle devoted to corn dogs. And he started laughing because he didn’t know what a corn dog was. But they found the town so welcoming. Everywhere there were signs like, ‘A League of Their Own, please come in.’ And everyone was very excited. They would drive past Tom Hanks’ house. Gina, they left her alone for the most part. She thought because she was so tall.

Madonna was heavily sequestered. She lived in a rural ranch home outside of the city of Evansville. She didn’t really want to mix with the people in town because she was a target. She had a stalker in the area. He was a deranged man who was threatening to kill her. So the police took him to a mental hospital and then he was released after she left town. But people were happy they were there. However, a few months later, after production wrapped, she gave an interview to Kurt Loder from MTV. And she went off on Evansville. There was no MTV hookup there, which is terrifying for a pop star to stay ahead of trends. She was sad that she didn’t get to go to Paris Fashion Week. She was working on her Sex book and her Erotica album and she felt like the movie was just slowing her down. So she told Loader that Evansville felt like Prague.

Which, by the way, Prague is amazing.

It’s one of the most beautiful cities, right? But people in Evansville did not take it well. They just felt really insulted. I know a lot of people haven’t forgiven her for that. One of the producers of their Top 40 radio station had this idea that a fun promotional thing to capitalize on this outrage would be to stage an anti-Madonna sit-in. So about 300 people showed up and laid down in a parking lot and formed Madonna’s name with their bodies and then a line through it. They were chanting anti-Madonna things and the radio station had hired a helicopter to take aerial footage.

One of the best scenes of the movie is when the Black woman throws the ball back. You actually talked to the actress, DeLisa Chinn-Tyler. How did you track her down?

It was the hardest part of researching this book was finding her. I interviewed like 100 people before I did and nobody knew her name. Meanwhile, a lot of cast and crew were like, ‘Oh, my favorite scene in the movie is when the Black woman picks up that ball and throws it over Geena’s head.’ But no one knew her name. She was a background extra who was one of two Black women who came to the Evansville tryouts. Penny goes up to DeLisa Chinn-Tyler, then 32 years old and a FedEx driver in Evansville, and she goes, ‘They didn’t allow Black woman in the league.’ And DeLisa was like, ‘I know, I know.’ She just wanted to do what she loved. She was an excellent softball player, the best softball player in a Black league in Evansville, called the Evansville Express that won a bunch of tournaments in the ’70s. So she took the opportunity anyway and went to try out. Penny had a part written in for her. She said she wasn’t going to name her character, she’d be an extra, but she would give her $750 and put her name in the credits. So DeLisa showed up and they told her to give a little nod like she should be on the team. They told her she nailed it. So she was at the premiere in Evansville and during the end credits, while Madonna’s “This Used to Be My Playground” was playing, she was waiting to see her name, and it wasn’t there. So I just think that was heartbreaking. That scene resonates with so many people and it was only 30 seconds, but one of the most powerful scenes in the movie. You know they would have won with her.

We interviewed Joe Posnanski who just wrote a book about the greatest moments in baseball history. He said that the 21st greatest moment was the final play of the movie. Do you think that Dottie dropped the ball on purpose?

I absolutely love this question. So in the beginning, I thought that she did. I was just so pissed off because I was the Dottie Hinson fan, she was the superhero, the Michael Jordan of this league. You’re rooting for the Rockford Peaches—they’re our friends, we want them to win. And who’s Kitt? She’s so miserable and whiny. She didn’t deserve to win. So I thought for years that Dottie would never drop that ball. She’s too good, right? I thought that Kit wanted it more because Dottie was content with going back to Oregon and becoming a wife and mother like so many women did in that era. She loved baseball, but I don’t think she loved baseball as much as Kit. So there would have been an agenda behind that terrible decision to drop that ball on purpose. But talking to Lori Perry, I’ve come around to Kit Keller. I think Lori was amazing in it and Lori defended Kit to me and she’s like, ‘Anyone who thinks Dottie dropped that ball on purpose didn’t have to climb up mountains and do things the hard way. Any athlete can tell you that. I cut her in half.’ She persuaded me, she really did. I’m really pro-Kit Keller, and I think she won fair and square. Also, I’ve talked to a lot of athletes, including Jessica Mendoza and Abby Wambach and I asked them this question. And also I asked Kelly Candaele, the son of Helen Candaele, one of the original players, and they’re like, of course, she didn’t drop the ball on purpose. She’s an athlete and has an allegiance to the game and dropping that ball on purpose would be betraying the integrity of the game. And the integrity of the game is above your sisterly sacrifice. I feel like baseball is a game that can’t be played perfectly even by perfect players. So I think it was realistic. Where do you end up on this?

What bothers me about it is that she’s holding the ball in her bare hand. If you’re a catcher, you would always hold that ball in your glove, because it’s harder to knock out. She kind of catches it with both hands and then very dramatically, her barehand falls on the ground and the ball rolls out. It’s unusual. It’s a choice. Perhaps it’s just a dramatic shot. But again, Kit goes in really hard. And you know what? The ball does come out sometimes. I’m torn on it. I don’t think she would do it intentionally. But I also think that she had less to lose than Kit did. I would like to think that she didn’t. But there’s just enough evidence there that maybe she did. I don’t think that makes her a bad movie character. It makes her a bad baseball player. But for her character, I think it’s an interesting growth for her. So it works really well. I think you see it however you want to see it.

That ambiguity drives this debate and conversation is what great cinema is all about. It’s not clear cut, it makes you think. Like Jimmy Dugan says—it’s my favorite line, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard…is what makes it great.”

Erin Carlson‘s No Crying in Baseball is available here.

Scott Bolohan has changed his mind on the ending about eight different times since the interview.

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