“There’s no crying in baseball!”

More than three decades after Tom Hanks delivered one of the most recognizable lines in sports-movie history, A League of Their Own remains far more than a beloved baseball comedy. Penny Marshall’s 1992 film helped introduce millions of viewers to a chapter of American sports history that had largely disappeared from popular memory: the women who played professional baseball during the 1940s and 1950s.

This September, that history feels remarkably contemporary.

MoviesToHistory.com is proud to feature A League of Their Own as our Featured Film Blog of the Month for September 2026, as a new generation of women takes the field and begins writing another chapter in the history of professional baseball.

On August 1, 2026, the Women’s Pro Baseball League (WPBL) launched its historic inaugural season, marking the return of a professional women’s baseball league in the United States for the first time in roughly 70 years. The league’s four inaugural teams—the Boston Hunters, Los Angeles Queens, New York Heights, and San Francisco Firebells—are playing their debut season at Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois, with a regular season extending through mid-September before two weeks of postseason play.

Co-founded by Justine Siegal, a pioneer who became the first woman to coach a men’s professional baseball team, and Keith Stein, the WPBL arrives at a moment when women’s sports are experiencing extraordinary cultural visibility. Its inaugural player pool includes names already familiar to baseball fans, including Kelsie Whitmore, the league’s first overall draft pick, and Mo’ne Davis, whose performance in the 2014 Little League World Series made her one of the most recognizable young baseball players in America.

Their opportunity to play professional baseball also creates a powerful historical connection to the women whose story inspired A League of Their Own.

From 1943 until 1954, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) provided women with an unprecedented opportunity to play professional ball. Created during World War II, when military service threatened the stability of Major League Baseball, the league eventually placed hundreds of women on diamonds across the Midwest. They played before paying crowds, traveled demanding schedules, competed fiercely—and did so while navigating rigid expectations about how female athletes were supposed to look and behave.

Those contradictions are central to A League of Their Own.

Directed by Penny Marshall and released by Columbia Pictures on July 1, 1992, the film presents a fictionalized version of the AAGPBL through sisters Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) and Kit Keller (Lori Petty), who join the Rockford Peaches and find themselves competing not only against opposing teams but eventually against each other. Tom Hanks stars as their hard-drinking manager Jimmy Dugan, alongside an ensemble that includes Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, Jon Lovitz, David Strathairn, Garry Marshall, and Bill Pullman.

The characters may largely be fictional, but the world surrounding them was very real.

Marshall herself reportedly knew little about the AAGPBL until encountering the 1987 documentary A League of Their Own, created by Kelly Candaele and Kim Wilson. Fascinated by a history she had never been taught, Marshall contacted the filmmakers, whose work ultimately helped inspire the story developed into the screenplay by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.

That journey—from overlooked history, to documentary, to Hollywood movie, to cultural memory—is precisely why A League of Their Own belongs at MoviesToHistory.

The film became a critical and commercial success, earning more than $132 million worldwide, but its greatest legacy may be what happened after audiences left theaters. Women who had once played professional baseball—and whose accomplishments had received comparatively little attention for decades—became part of the national conversation again. In 2012, the Library of Congress selected A League of Their Own for preservation in the National Film Registry, recognizing the film as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Even its closing moments emphasize memory. As Madonna’s haunting “This Used to Be My Playground” accompanies the film’s final reflection on the women and the league they built, A League of Their Own transforms from a sports comedy into something closer to an act of historical remembrance.

But in 2026, the story no longer belongs exclusively to the past.

The women of the AAGPBL famously competed in skirted uniforms while simultaneously being expected to satisfy carefully constructed standards of femininity. Today’s WPBL players take the field in conventional baseball uniforms, use metal bats, and compete under the rules of modern baseball. The circumstances are different. The athletes are different. The culture surrounding women’s sports has changed dramatically.

Yet one question connects 1943, 1992, and 2026:

Who gets to play America’s game?

For decades, A League of Their Own asked audiences to remember a generation of women who proved that baseball was never exclusively a man’s sport. Now, as the Boston Hunters, Los Angeles Queens, New York Heights, and San Francisco Firebells take the field, audiences have an opportunity to watch women build professional baseball history rather than rediscover it decades later.

Throughout September, MoviesToHistory.com will return to Penny Marshall’s classic to separate reel history from real history. We’ll examine the true story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, explore the women who inspired the fictional Rockford Peaches, investigate what Hollywood changed, consider the gender expectations imposed on professional female athletes during the 1940s, and examine how the film helped rescue the AAGPBL from the margins of American popular memory.

Most importantly, we’ll connect that history to what is happening on baseball diamonds today. Because A League of Their Own was once a movie about remembering what women had accomplished.

In 2026, it has become a reminder that the story is still being written.

⚾ Watch the Official Trailer for A League of Their Own (1992)

Before we step onto the field and begin separating Hollywood mythology from baseball history, revisit the film that introduced generations of moviegoers to the women of the AAGPBL.

Watch the Official Trailer for A League of Their Own below, then join MoviesToHistory.com throughout September as we explore the extraordinary true history behind Penny Marshall’s film—and what the arrival of the Women’s Pro Baseball League means for the next chapter of women in America’s national pastime.

Play ball.

A League of Their Own is available now with a subscription to Netflix…