‘A League of Their Own’ loads all the bases
Melanie Field, Abbi Jacobson and D’Arcy Carden can friggin’ rake.
Baseball fans, myself included, can be pretty wasteful when it comes to baseball. I was the sort of kid to put up the Christmas tinsel in November and then only bring it down in late February, wanting, needing the strange communion to just continue. Alternately, I now find myself wishing there was baseball in January; long before going — as I have most recently — five days without firing up a highlight. In January, I will question the sense if any of winding back all that YouTube time by six or seven months, to retroactively watch all the action I missed for passing out with my phone in hand. You wish the whirr of fastballs would interrupt the air in January, the clean smack of a muscular at-bat, because there’s so little baseball everyplace else: in the movies, in music, in books.
When I brought up The Art of Fielding to an Englishwoman a few months ago, consequently overjoyed to find she had herself read Mr. Harbaugh’s cult classic, she recoiled in a manner so charming it made me a little embarrassed to be a boy. A homie who pines for a life abroad possibly more than I do, for a life by the sea, a job in a bohemian restaurant, and weekends in galleries, also shares my man-crush on Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some: a movie so adamantly about preparation, that takes so long to step up to the plate, that when someone finally does it’s like watching an asteroid steal bases around the sun. Just the other week I shot my blood pressure up, forwarding the trailer for this A League of Their Own remake to everyone I hoped would care — because so few people feel the odd, nostalgic tingles of baseball, and even fewer people know how to capture them.
I did, you know, a lot of apologising. I’m sorry but you’re going to have to see this. I know it’s 3AM but this is important. I promise it won’t even matter that you have no relationship whatsoever with baseball. When I send Coco-Pop snippets of the game’s pageantry in motion — Joey Votto doing the griddy with a young fan, or Mookie Betts playing catch with another — he threatens to locate actual baseballs and stuff them down my throat. Non-believers deride the very idea of sacrificing three plus hours of their day; but that’s exactly the amount of downtime you need to watch a superstar athlete step down from the clouds that fans build, so we can all wait together for a little magic to happen.
The apology I made, rashly, for Prime Video’s remake of A League of Their Own revolved around my hunch that it would probably be a little cute. It would get lost romanticising the more unfortunate elements of its time period (it didn’t). It would ever so slightly sanitise or tokenise what it’s like to be in a same-sex relationship (it didn’t). Or maybe it wouldn’t quite nail all the waiting — in January, or at the top, middle or bottom of an inning in April, or while a baseball sails maybe, possibly, hopefully out of the park. As someone who watched writer and director Abbi Jacobson crush every last episode of Broad City, which helped leave me hopelessly, permanently in love with New York, I’m a little embarrassed at how little faith I had — and that was despite slobbering over the trailer for a solid week and a half, and waiting, like I do for baseball in January.
An interview in the Times promised good things. Jacobson and co-creator Will Graham wanted to tell a more realistic story than that of a universally adored Tom Hanks movie (and there are plenty others) about a locker room full of women. What such a place would look like in a world at war, and how unjust it would be towards black, queer and lesbian women. So A League of Their Own goes ahead and proves its self-awareness, early in its maiden season, and is indeed ‘cute’. There are chance though seemingly ordained encounters on picturesque American avenues, the jazz so thick and the bubblegum so sweet you could almost plaster it all into a nation’s merciless divide. Without reaching for too many familiar notes, A League of Their Own parts itself in two and tells stories that only really interlink in the name of baseball. The one follows a white catcher, Ms. Carson Shaw, on a steady trajectory of self-discovery — as someone who can lead a team and love a person besides her husband. The other hangs uncertainly on the flighty shoulder of a black pitcher named Maxine, whose early, radiant confidence disguises tons of self-doubt: in her fastball and in her sexuality.
Appropriately, Carson and Maxine pursue divergent paths — but because they come together for games of catch, and because the script’s so carefully balanced, you never crave one narrative over the other. The field is always calling, and either story features plenty of women who don’t know if they belong on the plate, on the mound, in the job, in the moment. It’s both joyous and tragic to watch them claim what little spotlight is available to them, albeit in little league parks, whilst trying to camouflage inward revelations right there in the glow. The show’s colour grade is so rich, the palette so bouncy, that when the era’s distrust and segregation surfaces, it has the effect of one sobering up at 4 AM on a crowded dance-floor. There are no accidents in this version of A League of Their Own, and there’s no chutzpah without a hint of lemon.
In one scene, Maxine tries to apply for a job at a factory, in order to then try out for its recreational team. A pair of women perform a nonsense by withholding application papers and a pen, without bothering much to hide them. The sequence is a little frivolous but this show knows it; because a savage photograph frames the racism against the backdrop of a dazzling American flag.
Probably no one sticks around as long as us baseball cats, not without a hankering for a ball game in spring. I was a little disappointed by the editorial decision to turbo-charge the show’s in-game pitching, because I know what all the assholes in all the comment threads will say. But I hope the baseball fans — the soppy, old-fashioned ones that love gameday hot dogs and Sinatra and the Cubs — will acknowledge and acknowledge loudly all the waiting A League of Their Own is willing to do. For all its kick-ass women to thwack that thing outta there; for a society can work even just a little bit the way baseball does.
