《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 who played professional baseball in Midwestern cities were known as "the Girls of Summer."

Their league, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, began in 1943 and ran for twelve seasons; after it folded in 1954, they were quickly forgotten.

It wasn't until 1992 that the movie "A League of Their Own" reintroduced them to America.

Since then their story has moved many people, and some former players still appear at fan events, ball games and reunions, gaining a fame — and even income — they never had in their playing days.

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

On a sunny morning they sat near home plate in their old teams' pink, light green and light blue jerseys.

In front of them was the sport's future: hundreds of girls who play baseball sat on the infield and cheered, then crowded around afterward for autographs and photos.

Ninety-one-year-old Gloria Rogers signed with the Peaches in 1953, but was called home before she could play in a game.

This time, she threw out the ceremonial first pitch.

Eighty-nine-year-old Dolly Vanderlip Ozburn, who pitched for the Fort Wayne Daisies and the South Bend Blue Sox, is one of the youngest of the former players.

The same weekend, across town, the group stage of the Women's Baseball World Cup was under way, with six nations including Australia, Brazil and South Korea competing for spots in next year's finals; thousands watched the US play Mexico.

And about thirty kilometers away, Baseball for All, the largest girls' baseball league, was holding its national tournament, nearly twice last year's size.

The whole weekend felt like a festival of women's baseball — as if the older generation were passing the baton to the new one.

Baseball for All's founder, Justine Siegal, was the first woman to coach a men's professional baseball team.

She told nine hundred girls her story: coaches once did everything they could to stop her from playing, and later injuries cut her career short.

She said these girls would go where she and the earlier generation of players could not.

She said she had always felt she was alone, but now she knew she wasn't.

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

In recent years women's sports as a whole have been heating up; since 2024, ten new professional women's leagues have launched in the US.

But women's baseball has lagged behind, and one big reason is that for many years girls were steered toward softball.

In the past, women's pro baseball was either touring teams putting on shows, or a novelty act.

This spring, Olivia Pichardo of Brown University became the first woman to pitch in an NCAA Division I baseball game.

Last month, the new professional women's baseball league began an eight-week season with four teams and sixty-eight players, all its games played in Springfield, Illinois.

But the league's first season didn't go smoothly: it averaged fewer than two thousand tickets sold per game, and its games aired mainly on a paid streaming platform.

An investor also took the league's chief to court, saying he had mismanaged its money; the league said that wasn't true, and its chief said it still had millions of dollars in the bank and expected new investment soon.

The former players still hope that this time, professional women's baseball is here to stay.

Ninety-four-year-old Mary Moore, who played three seasons for two teams, said: I'm thrilled it's come so far, but it still needs to go further.

Looking back, she said, when you told people you'd played ball, they all assumed it was softball, so after a while you just stopped mentioning it.

In 1982, some of the former players held their first reunion; six years later, the Baseball Hall of Fame put on an exhibit in their honor.

Director Penny Marshall saw the exhibit and made up her mind to turn the story into a movie.

Today, of the league's 639 players, only twenty-two remain, almost all in their nineties; many walk with canes and need someone to help them.

An eleven-year-old girl who came with her parents from San Francisco said she wants to keep playing, and that the movie showed her girls can do what they want.

Kat Williams, co-founder of the International Women's Baseball Center, is raising money for a permanent center in Rockford, so this history can be preserved after the last of the original players is gone.

She said: we can't just keep having reunions — we need a home.

If you were building a memorial to this history, what would you most want to put inside?