Plot summary

Grandmother Dottie Hinson has just stepped onto Liberty Field in Cooperstown. She is there, somewhat reluctantly, to attend the unveiling of the new exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame that celebrates the first professional women's baseball league,for what she was a catcher. The league was created in 1943 by businessman Walter Harvey, solely in light of the threat to the MLB with many men being away at war. Dottie and her younger sister Kit Keller, from a farming community in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, were among the 64 players cobbled together from all over North America to form the four teams representing Midwestern cities in that first year. Her coach was ex-MLB player Jimmy Dugan, whose drinking cut short his playing career, which led to problems with her as she, the one with skill, needed to take over many of his responsibilities for the team in his inability and his unbelief in the league. Beyond Jimmy, Dottie's reluctance in attending the reunion is in part due to a combination of problems of the league, which treated the players more as eye candy than athletes, her relationship with Kit, a pitcher who always felt caught in her older sister's shadow and whom she has not seen in a while, and the way Dottie ended her tenure with the league at the end of the first year.—Huggo