There’s no crying in baseball
As a working-class kid growing up in Lincoln Park in the 1930s, Mary Moore earned enough money on her paper route to buy a bat and ball. Because good equipment was scarce during the Depression, the neighborhood boys would come to ask Mary if she’d like to join them in their games.
Moore, a self-described tomboy with three brothers, didn’t hesitate. “I loved sports, and I really loved baseball.”
Moore got to be such a good player, she was drafted to play in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League – made famous in the 1992 film, “A League of Their Own” – and, at 72, is still playing in a local softball league.
In 1991, when director Penny Marshall decided to make a movie about the girls baseball teams, “A League of Their Own,” Moore – who has remained active in the league through the years – got involved, and helped instruct actors such as Madonna and Lori Petty on how to handle a bat and a ball. She even appears in scenes at the beginning and end of the film.
“If you see someone taking a picture at the end, that’s me,” she said, smiling.
Moore credits the film with the still steady requests she gets for autographs and lectures.
“Nobody realized anything ever happened until the movie,” she said, adding that one of her league teammates never even told her own children she played until the movie debuted.
From an article by Carol Hopkins
of The Daily Oakland Press
Other articles on “League” on M-Tribe:
• Two Madges in a League of their own