‘A League Of Their Own’ Is About More Than Baseball, It’s About Finding Your Team

It might seem obvious that the new baseball series A League of Their Own is about teams, but, the word ‘team’ really has several meanings in this context, says the co-creator and executive producer of the show, Will Graham.

“This story is bigger than any one person,” says Graham. “And when we talk about teams in this series, we’re talking about not just the team that you play on the field with, but the team that gets you to the field, and the team that keeps you moving forward with your dreams.”

This version of A League of Their Own evokes the spirit of the 1992 film of the same name, while widening the lens to tell the story of an entire generation of women who dreamed of playing professional baseball, both in and outside of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). The narrative follows a new ensemble of characters as they carve their paths toward the field, along the way finding their teams, and themselves.

While the original feature film was well-received, Graham says that part of the reason that he and his team wanted to spin the narrative into a series was because the focus of the movie felt too narrow.

The director of the film, Penny Marshall, agreed, says Graham. “When we talked to her, she shared that the original cut of the movie was between four and a half and five hours long, because there was so much that she wanted to include about these women.”

So, in this incarnation, most of the action takes place away from the ballpark. “Viewers really get to spend time with everyone off the field,” explains Graham. “you get to live with these characters and really understand all the facets of their lives.”

In telling the stories of the women who were a part of the All American Girls Baseball League, the series dives deep into issues of race and sexuality, topics that the film wasn’t able to address, says Graham. “Our real priority isn’t trying to send any kind of message or anything like that, we’re really just trying to authentically tell the stories of these characters and that means we have to be real about the things that are hard.”

“But,” he says with emphasis, “we didn’t let the obstacles the characters face become the whole story, because that’s just not realistic.

Of the creative team’s interaction with Marshall, who passed away in 2018, long before the series even began production, Graham says, “We were far enough along that we got to really describe to her what we were doing.”

And, he says Marshall was excited to hear that the series was going to include both the queer community and the Black community and the role women from both of those sectors played in women’s baseball.

He added, “Knowing how Penny felt about what we were doing helped us to feel good about coming back.”

Graham wants to be clear that while the series has the same moniker as the film, “we don’t really think of the show is as a reboot of the movie. As far as we’re concerned it’s a reimagining of the stories underneath the film, but having Penny’s blessing definitely made us feel like it was okay to go down the road that we were going down.”

The creative team didn’t make things easy for themselves by deciding to have a large ensemble in the series, with most of the characters in the forefront of the narrative, not just as background players.

To service all of the characters without featuring any one of them too heavily or having any of them get pushed to the back burner, Graham says that they looked to another series for guidance. “We kind of used the model of [prison drama] Orange is the New Black to figure out how to handle the breadth of the cast in a way that ultimately is satisfying.”

While the personal stories were important, the play on the field had to be authentic as well, says Graham, a task that he admits was at times technically difficult.

To accomplish what was needed, Graham says that, “we ran a series of like ten minute long game sequences with cameras in different positions to get wide coverage and then we would go in and tailor the close up coverage to get everything we needed. But the goal was always, always to keep it the baseball authentic.”

In casting the series, Graham explains, “We looked for people who had ballplaying skills, but they also had to ultimately be right for the role and handle the character work to give the show credibility. The fact is, we’re portraying these women who were incredible athletes, so most of the cast does have a lot of experience in that area. And, on top of that, everybody was put through about three weeks of extensive training before the pilot and then a couple of months of training before we started the series.”

To replicate the time-specific ballpark, the team shot the pilot in a preserved historical ballpark in Ontario, California, about an hour and 45 minutes north of Los Angeles. Once the series was in full swing, a facility in Pittsburgh became home to the featured team, the Rockford Peaches.

Even with an established concept from a high grossing movie as its foundation, there was some skepticism about whether viewers would accept the series, says Graham.

In discussing this, he first points to Marshall’s narrative, saying that she laid groundwork in the film that helps keep the series feel contemporary, explaining, “she crafted the movie in such a way, especially when the players were just hanging out with each other, so that the audience would almost forget that it was a period piece. Not that the characters sound modern or anything like that, but at its core those scenes are about people just hanging out and having a good time.”

He goes on to say that he believes that the time period of the series actually parallels modern society in that both eras were, ‘unstable in different ways.’

“This is a show that takes place during one of the darkest times in our history — in the middle of World War II. It’s about finding joy in that chaos and I think that’s very relevant to what people are going through today.”

As for the journey this season of A League of Their Own takes, Graham wants to assure viewers that while the series goes to some ‘unexpected places’ this season, before it ends on a huge note.

The main thing that Graham wants people to know is that, “this is a show for everybody.”

He expands the thought, saying, “Our hope is that people find that this show inspires you to be the person you want to be, and that maybe by watching it, what happens on screen makes things a little easier for you during a hard time that often feels difficult to wrap your mind around. This is ultimately why we made the show.”

All episodes of ‘A League of Their Own’ are streaming now on Amazon Prime.