‘There’s No Crying in Baseball!’: ‘A League of Their Own’ Turns 30

When A League of Their Own hit theaters on July 1, 1992, it was up against a crowded slate of blockbusters, including Batman Returns , Lethal Weapon 3 , Patriot Games , and Universal Soldier , that were expected to linger around multiplexes all summer. But when Labor Day rolled around two months later, all those other movies had faded away, and A League of Their Own was still packing in crowds on its way toward a $107.5 million domestic gross.

Love for the Penny Marshall-directed film about the World War II-era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, staring Geena Davis , Lori Petty, Tom Hanks , Madonna , and Rosie O'Donnell, has only grown in the three decades that followed thanks to VHS rentals, DVD sales, and endless replays on cable television. It's a rare movie that appeals to people across all age groups and demographics, and it revived interest in the half-forgotten AAGPBL.

In honor of A League of Their Own 's 30th anniversary, we spoke with screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel — who also wrote City Slickers , Splash , Parenthood , Spies Like Us , Multiplicity , and Mr. Saturday Night , among others — about the creation of the movie. Here, they dive into the genesis of the famous "There's no crying in baseball" scene, why the film nearly stared Debra Winger and Jim Belushi instead of Davis and Hanks, why it would never get a green light today, and more.

I know you guys are both baseball fans, but how much did you know about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League prior to starting work on the League of Their Own screenplay?

Babaloo Mandel: He's a baseball maven. I said, "You know anything about this?" He said, "No."

Ganz: It was a complete mystery to me. But Penny Marshall got in touch with us. We had known Penny forever. She had assumed that if it's about baseball, I'd be aware of it. But I said no, and then she asked the key question: "Do you think there's a movie in it?" That's when we started to do the thing we hate the most: research.

Can you walk us through that process? City Slickers , we never left the office.

Mandel: We made one phone call.

Ganz: Then we took the rest of the afternoon off [ laughs ]. But with A League of Their Own , we really wanted to get it right. Even though the movie's not a documentary at all, it's our own characters and story, we really wanted to be faithful to the history of it. So we read old Life magazines and all kinds of stuff like that. And there was one young lady who was in the League for a minute, and then she went to college and she did a master's thesis. It was like a thousand pages, and we read it.

Many of the women were also still alive at the time.

You clearly got the history right, since it's pretty accurate, but how did you go about creating the story?

Are there any ideas you batted around that didn't ultimately make it onto the screen?

Mandel: We shot some of the stuff, but it just tainted the movie. It was predictable. We wanted to take the high road.

Ganz: It felt like, "Well, you've got Tom Hanks and you've got Geena Davis, so you should do something with that." But it looked obligatory. And as Babaloo said, it was a waste of time.

Mandel: Her husband is fighting a war! No. No. Don't do it. The thought makes me want to start drinking.

Were you thinking about what actors might play these characters as you were writing them?

Mandel: In fact, we thought Jimmy Dugan would be an older guy. We were thinking Paul Newman or somebody. But then Tom read it or Penny called Tom. I'm not sure completely how it happened, but we loved the idea. There's a moment in the movie where Gary Marshall, playing Mr. Harvey, says to Tom, "You're a young man. You should still be playing." We wrote that specifically for Tom, since he was about 35 when we shot that. And as far as the ladies were concerned, casting was contingent on whether they were athletic, and whether they could play ball. It was impossible to preconceive anything in that regard.

I'm sure you weren't thinking about Madonna when you wrote "All the Way" Mae.

It's a pretty amazing casting move. She was one of the most famous people on the planet at that point, and she has a relatively small role.

Ganz: She also became very tight with Rosie, which really helped the movie. We wrote them as buddies and they actually became buddies.

I've always reads that Debra Winger was originally going to play Dottie.

Mandel: But the hand of God has affected our career numerous times…

Ganz: We were sitting in our office and Geena Davis called us. She was wondering if we could do work on Speechless . We said, "Boy, we'd love to help you, but we're really busy." She said something like, "Yeah, you're doing that Penny Marshall movie. I read it. It's terrific. The only problem is the only part I'd be interested in doing has already been cast." We said, "Hold that thought…" And then we talked to Penny and she told us about Debra's objections to certain things in the movie. We said, "If you're interested, I could get in touch with Geena Davis and we could bring her out for an audition." All of them had to come out to USC and try out for Rod Dedeaux, who was the USC baseball coach emeritus. And she cast Geena.

That's crazy. I cannot picture anyone else playing that role.

I've read that Jim Belushi was in talks to be Jimmy Dugan. That I have an easier time imagining. You could have slipped him right into that uniform and it probably would have worked. Splash . Penny had worked with him on Big . We love him. He's great. We all agreed it was a tremendous idea and that we should re-write the part for him, but Columbia was hesitant.

Mandel: [Tom had] had a couple of unsuccessful movies. You know Hollywood…

Right. He had just gone through the Bonfire of the Vanities disaster. Big and Awakenings . It's always good when there's a giant on your side.

I cannot tell you how much I love the Jon Lovitz character. It's a rare thing in a movie where every single line a character says is funny, but you pulled it off with him.

Ganz: Not romantically. He was just crashing with her. She said to us, "Write a part for Jon so he'll move out." And so we did. He always had that vibe like he was from the Forties anyway.

Mandel: He was like a Warner Bros. stock character.

I read he had a bigger part originally. Is that true?

A lot was cut from the movie, it sounds like.

Ganz: Penny likes to shoot.

Cutting it down must have been hard.

Ganz: We almost lost that scene at the train station between Marla and her father.

I'm so glad that stayed. What's amazing is that we've just met Marla at that point, and she still almost brings you to tears.

Did Jon improvise any of his lines? I'm thinking about when he snapped at the cow, "Will you shut up?"

How about, "Keep these wild animals away from me! Haven't you ever heard of a leash?"

Can you talk about how much Penny brought to this movie?

Ganz: It's Penny's movie, all our ego aside. We wrote every word and I still consider it her movie.

Mandel: Yes. It's her movie.

Ganz: Every girl had an idea and a life and an intention in every scene. Penny gave them that. They were living in those parts, and Penny gave it life. It's hard to imagine anyone could have brought as much to that movie as Penny.

I think of the scene where Betty finds out her husband is dead. I've seen it 100 times and it still gives me chills.

Mandel: The atmosphere.

Ganz: The scene you're talking about, by the way, that's Penny's daughter [Tracy Reiner] playing Betty. And what was so enjoyable for us is that the movie has so many comic scenes, or "antic moments" as I say, and they didn't hurt a scene like [Betty finding out about her husband]. That's a deft directorial touch. The antic scenes aren't stealing from that kind of scene, and that kind of scene isn't stealing from the comedy.

Switching gears, the League was obviously segregated. You dealt with that by having a Black women on the sidelines throw a ball in. It's a brief moment, but an important one. Can you talk about coming up with that?

Mandel: Doing that would have been bullshit. It's not what happened.

Ganz: We really pondered this. We thought, "Should it come up as a story point? Should someone say, 'Am I allowed to scout colored girls?’" That's the term they would have used back then. The whole thing was just a bone in our throat the whole time.

Mandel: We wanted to be impactful, but subtle.

Ganz: And we didn't want to be dishonest. So that's what we came up with. We felt really good about it since we were able to acknowledge it. It's not a soapbox, but it's there.

The most famous scene, the one you see in all the clip packages, is "There's no crying in baseball." Do you remember coming up with that line?

It's become one of the most iconic moments in movie history.

Mandel: We knew it had something, because they used to send us the VHS dailies of the movie. And then when we saw it, we went, "Oh, my God."

Did you guys always know that the movie would climax in that World Series moment where Kit is running to home plate and Dottie's there trying to stop her?

I've heard lots of debate on this, so I want to ask the guys that wrote it: Did Kit knock the ball out or did Dottie drop it on purpose?

When you first saw the final cut, did you feel like it was going to be a hit?

Mandel: It also wasn't clear immediately. There was the editing process and a lot of cutting. Bookends had to be re-shot.

Ganz: It had to be cut in half. As he said, we wrote a front piece of older Dottie leaving for Cooperstown. The feeling was the end piece, the epilogue [at Cooperstown] was too much of a surprise to the audience. They were going, "Why are we here now?" And Penny just loved the epilogue. We felt it was giving the ladies their due, but we decided that it needed a prologue to support it… But this movie really grew in the editing process and the audience-testing process.

Mandel: This wasn't City Slickers where you showed it to the audience and…

Ganz: They all go, "Oh my God." Parenthood and Splash were like that too. They loved those immediately. This took work to get there. I think of all our movies, this one has had the longest legs. I wouldn't have guessed that.

Mandel: At the premiere, there were three studio executives not from our studio. They said, "The League didn't work, why should this movie?" I just went, "Oh God."

It's become just this cultural touchstone. Kids today still watch it and really love it.

Mandel: I've seen grown adults show up at my door in the costume.

Let's talk about a few more of your movies before we wrap. Spies Like Us is really an overlooked masterpiece.

I was just going to ask you about that scene! Did you write it like that, just them saying "doctor" over and over and over?

Ganz: This was SNL people. This was the big leagues as far as we were concerned. We have a couple of nice movies, and Splash was a big deal, we always had to cast unknowns in our movies. Michael Keaton and Tom Hanks or John Candy were TV people back then. We were never at the top of the tree, and suddenly it was John Landis and Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. We went, "Holy shit, we're in show business."

Multiplicity , where Michael Keaton replicates himself to disastrous effect, also deserves far more attention. A lot of people don't know it, but it's great.

Mandel: The timing was off. Dolly the [cloned] sheep didn't happen until just a bit later.

Ganz: Also the technology, if you watch it, isn't as slick as it would be today. But Michael is so great. And [director] Harold [Ramis] is one of the all-time best.

Mr. Saturday Night , about the ups and downs of a comedian played by Billy Crystal, is another favorite of mine. It also wasn't a big hit, yet it came to Broadway earlier this year, still starring Billy Crystal and David Paymer — and it really, really works.

It's clear the project is very close to Billy's heart.

Adding songs into it was a really inspired choice. Night Shift , about a morgue attendant], so we had already studied up and learned a little about that genre at that point.

You always hear people say that Hollywood has stopped making mid-budget movies aimed at adults. Those were the kind of movies you two created for years, often to huge financial success and acclaim. Do you think that's a fair assessment of what's happening?

Mandel: Can't you see us sitting at home here?

Ganz: Look, we're not bitter or angry. In this case, we tend to be glass-half-full guys. We go, "Wasn't it great that we came of age in the movie business when they wanted to make exactly what we wanted to write?" Shouldn't we be happy about that rather than a little sad now that we're in our seventies, there isn't a big market for what we do?

There is a market for it, though. The studios just gave up.

Do you think A League of Their Own would get the green light today?

Ganz: The short answer is no. The glib answer is no. And I think that probably about true about most of our best movies.

Mandel: Brian Grazer once said they wouldn't make Parenthood today.

Ganz: He's the producer of Parenthood !

The Amazon TV version of A League of Their Own is coming. Are you happy that's happening? Laughs. ] I mean, anyone can make a living. God bless them.

Mandel: My daughter works on the show as a costume designer.

Ganz: Look, we've done one sequel in our entire career. That's City Slickers . And the reason we don't do more is we put our characters where we want them to be.

Mandel: The story is over. It's done.

Ganz: It's the reason that we are not more active in television. When we were in television originally as young fellas, television was all standalone episodes. If you did a sitcom, it was 24 standalone episodes. They weren't like today. And so when we went to movies, we wanted them to be standalone movies also. We will take our characters to where we want them to stop. So I'm not particularly excited about seeing another version or a continuation or anything like that.

I feel like I could teach a college course on the work of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.

— Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) October 15, 2020

Did you see that Seth Rogen tweet about you guys? He said he could teach a college course about your movies.

Ganz: Superbad is one of my favorite comedies in recent years. It was funny and it was sincere at the same time. That's kind of rare. I find that a lot of the comedy movies, when they get into sincerity, it looks obligatory. It's like somebody told them, "You really need to have a sincere scene here to make it more appealing," but that the writers are kind of doing it with a gun to their heads. But this actually felt like the comedy and the sincerity of it were very comfortable with it. And so I was very flattered by what he wrote.