《红粉联盟》里的女球员已经九十多岁，女孩子打棒球的时代终于来了

More than seventy years ago, a group of women played professional baseball in cities across the American Midwest, and people called them "the Girls of Summer."

They played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which started in 1943, ran for twelve seasons, and folded in 1954.

The league was founded during the Second World War, when many male players had gone off to fight.

But after the war ended and the men came back, interest in women's baseball slowly faded.

TV became more and more common, and fans preferred to stay home.

After the league folded, these players were quickly forgotten.

Many put their gloves and uniforms away in the attic and got on with ordinary life.

Ninety-four-year-old former player Mary Moore says that when you told people you'd played ball, they all assumed it was softball, so eventually she just stopped bringing it up.

Things changed in 1992.

That year the movie "A League of Their Own" came out, and America got to know these players all over again.

In 1988, the Baseball Hall of Fame held an exhibit for them; director Penny Marshall saw it and decided to turn their story into a film.

Since then the former players have appeared at all kinds of events, gaining a fame — and even income — they never had while playing.

This summer, seven former players came to an old ballpark in Rockford, Illinois, once the home of the Rockford Peaches.

They sat near home plate in their old teams' pink, light green and light blue jerseys.

Hundreds of girls playing in a national youth tournament sat on the infield, cheered for them, and lined up for autographs.

Ninety-one-year-old Gloria Rogers even threw out the ceremonial first pitch.

The same weekend, the city was also hosting Women's Baseball World Cup qualifiers, with six countries including Australia, Brazil and South Korea.

Nearby, the national girls' baseball tournament was almost twice last year's size.

The tournament's organizer, Justine Siegal, was the first woman to coach a men's professional baseball team.

She told nine hundred girls that coaches once tried to stop her from playing baseball, but that they would go further than she had.

Then she turned to the former players and said: we stand on your shoulders.

Why has women's baseball developed more slowly than other women's sports?

One reason is that for many years, girls were steered toward softball instead of baseball.

Now things are changing.

This spring, a woman at Brown University became the first female athlete to pitch in an NCAA Division I game.

Last month, a new professional women's baseball league began its first season, with four teams and sixty-eight players.

But the league got off to a rocky start: it averaged fewer than two thousand tickets per game, and an investor sued the league's chief.

Now, of the league's 639 former players, only twenty-two remain, most of them in their nineties.

One group is raising money in Rockford to build a permanent women's baseball center.

They say: we can't just keep having reunions — we need a home.

Do you think a single movie can change the fate of a sport?