My inner Marla Hooch steps to the plate, long after a plot twist nobody saw coming

Published December 4, 2022

They throw a round ball at you and give you a round bat, then tell you to try to hit the ball with it, squarely. You give yourself a deadline after 30 years — much longer, really — and find that hitting it can be even more difficult than that. So here I am, filing this under better late than never. And now that the first cliché is behind me, and maybe the second, let’s go.

I’d hoped to finish this in time for Women in Baseball Week, the last week of July, but life happened, so that didn’t (happen). Luckily for me, I still tell myself there’s no clock in baseball and, new pitch clock be damned, much of this story’s beauty is its timelessness. It begins with echoes from the World War II era that rang out in 1992 and continue to ripple out 30 years later. There’s no need for a news peg or time peg, I’ve decided, and anyway, I’ve blown that by a country mile (click your cliché counter!).

This story wouldn’t exist without the 1992 film “A League of Their Own,” but I wouldn’t say it starts there. For sure, it helps you to understand my story if you’ve seen the movie, but if you told me you hadn’t seen it, it wouldn’t stop me from telling you my story. I’d maybe refer you first to the IMDb synopsis: Two sisters join the first female professional baseball league and struggle to help it succeed amid their own growing rivalry. Then I might show you the trailer.

That was Marla Hooch getting mixed signals from the characters played by Tom Hanks and Geena Davis, but we’ll come back to her. And if you’ve ever wondered where “there’s no crying in baseball” comes from, now you know. It’s this movie.

At this point, I should warn you that my notes from July, August and everything after were a mess when I began to try to turn them into a coherent story, so in addition to “better late than never,” you are getting “best version possible under the circumstances.” That works for me, because that’s who I try to be every day in my late innings: the best version possible under the circumstances. We’ll talk about that and how the younger me was all about that, against obstacles I couldn’t put a name to, but first let’s circle back to Marla Hooch.

There I was, minding my own business in late June, when I stumbled upon a story at The Athletic, the website that employs me to edit stories. I did not know this particular one was coming, and I perked up because of the subject matter and because it was written by a superb storyteller, one of my favorites, a gentleman co-worker named Daniel Brown. The title drew me in: ‘A League of Their Own’ turns 30: Catching up with mighty Marla Hooch.

As I read it, I realized I would write this story. My story. But I didn’t know how much of her story to tell (especially after it had been told so well) and how much of mine I wanted to reveal. I also worried that even in trying to show that I’m a fangirl who nonetheless knows the difference between Marla Hooch and Megan Cavanagh, who portrayed her in the movie, I might inadvertently give both of them short shrift. I didn’t want either of them to be mere props in this story. So the draft sat in WordPress while I re-watched the movie, re-read Dan’s article and began to scribble things as they occurred to me. It took longer than I imagined. Remnants of my July strategy remained as I worked into December to finish this in 2022.

Contrary to what you may have heard, and to the movie’s most-quoted line, there is crying in baseball, as the movie and this tale of mine attest. Reading Dan’s story about Megan Cavanagh reminded me of just how untrue that Tom Hanks line is for me. There is crying in and after baseball.

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My inner editor: ‘You’ve barely said hello yet, Carly’

For too much of my first draft, I was stalling, feeling extra vulnerable about the plot twist I allude to in the title of this story. In a way that I could not overcome at the time, the safest way to tell this story was to make it a story about telling you the story. My thinking was that if I eased into it that way, eventually I would simply be telling you the story. But after putting it aside for a few days, I saw how much I was stalling, and I blew it up and started over.

Somehow, I am still stalling.

Most of us who have been fortunate enough to have a good editor work on our stories have heard, “All of this can be cut. These first few hundred words are nothing more than you clearing your throat. You don’t really say hello until way down here.” So, even allowing for the fact that this is my story on my website and that I always intended to tell it the way I wanted to tell it, I tried to put myself in the role of editor after the first eight hours of writing. After several rewrites, I’m still breaking a lot of rules, but at least I’m saying hello sooner. And it’s still my story the way I wanted to tell it.

Before we go any further, there’s no getting around this (and many of you already know why I can relate to this): Marla Hooch’s appearance in “A League of Their Own” is largely there as awkward comedic fodder for a number of scenes. In the first, the character played by Jon Lovitz says, after seeing her up close, “You know Gen. Omar Bradley? Well, there’s too strong a resemblance.” Dan’s story touches on that.

All these years later, Cavanagh struggles with well-meaning fans who don’t know quite how to talk about her performance.

“I get, ‘You look like that girl who played that part. I hope I’m not offending you.’ Or I get, ‘Oh, my God, you’re so much prettier in real life! What did they do to you?’” she said with a laugh. “All kinds of stuff like that. It’s really hilarious.

“I say, well, I believe they call it acting. I did put spit in my hair and I tried to be my most homely self. I was laughing all the way to the bank.”

The unattractive-woman-as-punchline trope is overcooked, but I know what world I live in. Still, it’s easy to imagine how much worse things might have been if someone other than Penny Marshall had directed. For the most part, the movie doesn’t treat women as anything but who they are, even if the world of that movie is another story. Thank you, Penny Marshall.

In this excerpt from The Ringer, Katie Baker is on the same page with me, I think.
ewatchingRewatching A League of Their Own recently, I was struck not only by how realistic the characters felt, but also by the nature of the relationships between them. Yes, there’s plenty of caricature and archetyping going on, from "All-The-Way Mae" and her flying bosoms to the prim chaperone whom she poisons, in an inspiring act of leadership, so that she and the girls can sneak out to booze and dance. But just about every character (aside from that chaperone, perhaps) is written with generosity and nuance. Even would-be tropes, like the homely girl getting a makeover and a whole lotta liquor, ring true: That’s exactly how a well-meaning group of women would descend upon someone like Marla Hooch.

She was not the character played by Madonna, not the one played by Geena Davis, the catcher who “plays like Gehrig and looks like Garbo.” She was not like the others who survived charm school mostly without mishap: “Every girl in this league is going to be a lady. Gracefully and grandly.”

But can they hit? Marla Hooch could.

Cavanagh read the script, as Dan’s story relates, and wanted so much to be Marla. She knew there was a Marla inside her, and let’s just say she wasn’t the only one who knew that decades ago. We’ll come back to that, too, but right now, this is a good chance to remind you to enjoy behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the movie.

As for Davis, I love what her Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has become. As I consider that in 1992 there was room for this movie to be made, I think about how much the world has traditionally struggled with accurately balancing gender representation.

Representation? Penny Marshall included a scene that touched on a whole other aspect that made it clear she understood that this was a movie that wasn’t going to tell everyone’s story.


People got curious, though, and wondered about the woman who threw the ball in that scene. Some say they found her, though she is not in the credits. This BuzzFeed piece touches on what the filmmakers knew, as I alluded to above.

​“It did bother us that in order to be historically accurate [about the AAGPBL], we could not have a diverse cast,” Lowell Ganz, one of the film’s screenwriters, told BuzzFeed News in an email. “We came upon that scene as a way to make the point.

“A lot of people have commented on it over the years, and I’m very glad we included it in the film.”

Thirty years ago, as Geena Davis writes in her 2022 memoir, “Dying of Politeness,” the movie was released in a world whose context might explain some of the ha-ha-ha, girls playing baseball tone surrounding it. “This might seem hard to believe these days,” she writes in the chapter about the movie, “but … the backlash against the women’s movement was in full swing, and most people avoided using any term related to ‘feminism.'” She notes that the back of the original VHS case featured part of a review by Joel Siegel that suggested the movie was primarily about a man (the Hanks character), with a funny cameo by another man (the Lovitz character), and oh yeah, there are also these women, including Davis.

She goes on to say that when she had an idea for a sequel to “A League of Their Own,” she found out that the writers of the original, Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, were already working on a sequel where the Hanks character was recruited to coach in the Negro Leagues. “So, a sequel to a movie about women, where the only character to reappear would be the male coach. To me it was unimaginable that the idea would even come up.”

I’ll bet there are some who are reading this who can imagine it quite well even in 2022.

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Stepping up to bat, choking up

This story of mine didn’t always know what kind of story it wanted to be, and in keeping with the theme, that was fine. It fit a life story we are getting closer to talking about here.

There are so many cry points for me in “A League of Their Own,” even without those that underscore what I keep talking around but not about. Heartbreak lurks everywhere. It’s not the only Hanks movie where a telegram from the War Department delivers the worst news imaginable, but it does so when we’re not expecting it, unlike in “Saving Private Ryan.” Then there’s Shirley Baker, who can’t read and is unable to check the rosters to see if she’s had a successful tryout and made it onto one of the teams. My heart always ached for her. What had her life been like to that point? What will it be like later? Madonna’s character teaching her how to read with a steamy novel is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

But there is also so much joy, especially as claimed by the women who refuse to let how men see them derail them from doing what they love. Early in the movie and in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League’s first season, a mocking fan cries out, “Hey look, I might break a nail!” Near the end of the movie, Lori Petty’s character is signing autographs for young girls and encourages them with, “OK, you guys be good. Get dirty!” We never see her, or any of the other ballplayers, fretting over a broken fingernail.

Set during World War II, filmed during the early ’90s, the movie is a product of two time periods decades apart that are different than the world we inhabit decades later. There are through lines of universal truths as well as cringe-worthy moments that surely jump out at anyone who was not alive or of a moviegoing age during either period. For those of us of a certain age, we see that 2022 bears more resemblance to 1992 than 1992 bore to the early ’40s, but we still see people clinging to sexism and misogyny in ways that remain punchlines.

There is so much to embrace about how things have changed. Friends of mine have daughters playing baseball, sometimes traveling across the country for tournaments. On the way back, stops have included visits to see where the Rockford Peaches played home games. I love that they have grown up in a world where that is more the norm than it was when I was their age.

Speaking of: I guess this is as good a place as any for my story to make an entrance.

In my youth, I loved baseball. No one told me I couldn’t play. I played. I got dirty. My mom washed a lot of dirt out of uniforms. Orioles. Eagles. Teams that didn’t have nicknames, only sponsor names. But as is the case for most people, I didn’t get to play baseball for as long as I would have liked.

Instead, I got to write about it. A lot. I got to cover championship programs and events, such as LSU baseball and the Men’s College World Series. I got to spend a lot of time around baseball teams that paid student managers to wash the uniforms. On occasion, I got to cover a Major League Baseball game or write a story about one of the players. I won an award for a story I wrote about one of the best playoff games in MLB history. It was fun, exciting, but not like being on the field and playing the game. Now I edit stories for The Athletic and its more than 1 million subscribers, including MLB gamers and columns and stories about the All-Star Game, the playoffs and the World Series. That’s not bad for a relative nobody who missed out on so much of what should have been her life.

I got to experience things that were represented in the movie that as a child I never envisioned I would do. I went to Cooperstown, N.Y., and saw the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum as well as Doubleday Field. I went to Wrigley Field. I got to live in Oregon, where the beginning of the movie was set (if not where it was filmed). I got to watch and write about the Colorado Silver Bullets, a women’s baseball team, and was thrilled to learn that at least one member, Julie Croteau, is somewhere in the movie.

Years later, I got to watch as events called to mind the Frank Sinatra song “There Used to Be a Ballpark” as longtime venues were torn down. In the same year that the New York Yankees played their last game at a Yankee Stadium that no longer exists, I covered LSU’s final game at the stadium in the photo above. I got to write about the team that gave LSU its sixth national championship, which is not acknowledged on the Intimidator sign in the photo above because it hadn’t happened yet. The team going through fall practice in the photo is the one that won that sixth championship the following summer.

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The part where we reach the plot twist

OK. It’s time for that twist my headline promises. I’ve put it off as long as I could, and if I want to tell you the rest of this story, we have to go there.

The reason no one told me decades ago that I couldn’t play baseball, besides the fact that I was good, was that the world thought I was a boy. I played the role as best I could and for as long as I could, but I was far more comfortable in a baseball uniform than I ever was in that role. As my Facebook profile once read: Just a girl, standing in front of a mirror, who used to see a boy in it and knew that was wrong.

And finally, five years ago, I came out as a transgender woman.

It didn’t occur to me in full until I began working on telling this story, but once I was out to the world as a woman, I was the most authentic version of myself since my days in a baseball uniform. In that world, I thrived. I had a strong arm, able to throw a baseball from one goal line on a football field past the back of the end zone on the other end. A scout for the Royals told me at a tryout camp that if I’d have run a better time in the 60-yard dash, he would have had to make a call to someone higher up in the organization. I hit home runs — two in one playoff game. Three in another. I still have the third home run ball.

Unlike Marla Hooch or the woman who played her in “A League of Their Own,” I never batted left-handed in a game. If I had, my ballplaying days might have lasted longer than they did (maybe only for a year or two longer, but longer). I was born with a rare corneal disorder in both eyes, but it’s much more pronounced in my left eye, creating an almost insurmountable degree of difficulty for a right-handed batter, which I was. At 13, I suddenly started missing the ball on pitch after pitch in batting practice, much to the annoyance of teammates who wanted practice to be over so they could go home. It was an awful spring and summer.

What I did after that, instinctively, was to “step in the bucket,” adjusting my approach to hitting so that my right eye could do the heavy lifting. That eye was powerful enough that even into high school, I had 20/10 vision based on the only eye tests I was ever given: having to read off a chart on the wall 10 feet away. If they had ever had me cover one eye, then the other, they would have discovered that my left eye was basically an ornament. It was there to give me a somewhat normal face (still wrong to me when I saw it in the mirror, though) but to provide almost none of the good things proper vision can, such as depth perception. How I navigated life before my diagnosis many years later remains a mystery to me. How I was able to hit a baseball well and hard and far and track down fly balls in right field, I’ll never really know. But at 14 and on into fall practice of what would have been my sophomore season in college, allowed by coaches to “just hit the ball” the way I knew how, I did well again, or at least until the pitching got better and better.

In playground ball with neighborhood friends, I messed around and hit left-handed for fun, not realizing that it should have been the way I hit all the time. My right eye, the one pulling the load for me, was the one facing the ball, and I launched rockets that way, even though my body and swing had not caught up with my new, improved batter’s vision yet. Coaches didn’t let me hit lefty in practice or in games, thinking it was merely a goof, so my prowess as a left-handed batter remained a neighborhood secret. On the day before the last cuts of fall practice with a new coach for what I was hoping would be my sophomore year with my hometown college team, with the last swing of the bat I would ever take on that field, I drove a ball more than 460 feet to straightaway center field, high over the batter’s eye. The pitcher was in Double A and working on his pitches, and he threw me a slider that I hit perfectly, high and far. “Damn, Dubois,” the coach said after watching the ball sail over the wall. “Every time I think I’m going to cut you, you do something like that.” The next day, he cut me from the team.

That term, batter’s eye? Yeah. Every time I hear it, even today …

Yeah.

There’s something different about the left-handed swing, I once wrote. It opens up into infinity … and somehow I made it sound more cosmic and elegant than I can reconstruct now. I’m not even totally sure of what I was trying to say, writing it in memoriam about a ballplayer who died too young. I think about it a lot, though, sometimes in terms of what I may have missed by not stepping across the plate into the other batter’s box in a real game.

Watch even a little bit of baseball and you might grasp some of what I was trying to say, though on a more practical competitive level. A left-handed swing, by its nature and the location of its batter’s box, puts the hitter in a better position to begin running to first base. The right-handed batter, on the other side of home plate, has to reverse the corkscrew and turn back toward the first-base line, a bit of wasted energy and motion in a world where fractions of a second matter.

For me, batting left-handed might have been life-changing.

“OK, Marla,” her dad says during her audition before formal team tryouts, “now lefty.” There was something about that scene that always got to me. Maybe now you can understand why. I do, better than ever now. There was no one to say, “OK, Carly, now lefty.” And really, they wouldn’t have known to call me Carly.

And as my hair continues to grow longer than it’s ever been, I sometimes find myself, head down, partially hiding my face behind my hair, my inner Marla Hooch remembering, and I think gentle, loving thoughts about her.

For too much of my life, I was like the Marla Hooch who later was stepping in and out of the batter’s box during the war of signals waged by her teammate and her manager. The first time I watched “A League of Their Own” after coming out, I realized more than ever how much I had suppressed. I was also reminded of the experiences I never had. Batting left-handed in a game was just one of them.

I’ve been in many locker rooms and social settings where men talk about women when they think there are none within earshot, when they think they are in the company of men only. So far the only approximate flip side of that has come while out in the world shopping for clothes, getting manicures (dang, I had to go and mention nails) and being around supportive women who will take a stand and say that trans women are women. The buoyant dynamic of women supporting women in public and in private makes up for every horrifying conversation I was privy to in the exclusive company of men.

That’s a powerful thing for a woman like me, who for most of her life has felt like the unattractive-woman-as-punchline trope come to life. I’m thrilled to be able to say that the women who interact with me have surrounded me with kindness, and they even ask me questions about fashion and hair coloring and, yes, manicures. Minus the alcohol, you might say it’s exactly how some might expect a group of well-meaning women to descend upon someone like Marla Hooch.

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It’s a scary world lately

The world is not as safe for me as it was five years ago when I came out. Part of that is because of the pandemic, but also because, fueled by ignorance and hate and a political climate of opportunity for those who wish harm on people like me, there is real danger in being openly trans in America. Even writing this story and publishing it comes with risk.

via GIPHY

Not long ago, two days after the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado, I was followed in a way that could not have been a coincidence. The license plate number and a description of the car are on record if something were to happen to me. Even writing and publishing a story like this one comes with a certain amount of risk. But I hid for decades, sometimes in the wrong places and always in the wrong clothes. Heck, even in the wrong batter’s box, I came to realize. There is only so much hiding I want to do in whatever time I have left as my authentic self.

My life is different now. Thanks to miraculous but expensive contact lenses, I can see well enough to function as an adult. Still, my left and right eyes are constantly at war with each other, something that was increasingly happening near the end of my ballplaying years. When I read, my left eye wants the words to be closer, and my right eye wants the words to be farther away. And yet, prescription glasses won’t help with that because the correction needs to be directly on the cornea. I’m lucky that now I have near geniuses who know how to do magic and find lenses that will do the job and somehow fit on my misshapen corneal cones. My vision is the best it can possibly be under the circumstances. As Mel Allen might have said: How about that? Where have we heard that before?

My life is different in other ways. Men don’t talk to me the way men did when they thought they were speaking to another man. When they hand things to me, they say things — “you gottttt itttttt?” — I didn’t hear before, and certainly not in that tone of voice. To be fair: I have lost a lot of strength since estrogen took over for testosterone in the driver’s seat, a setback for my plan to dominate in the Olympics one day. (While we’re on the subject, there’s a jar of pickles I really wish someone would come over and open for me.)

What will happen when people who didn’t know read this and find out I’m trans? I might hear more of some of the predictable reactions. “Oh, I thought you were a real woman!” Or maybe, “No wonder you know so much about sports.” Or, “Well, that explains a lot.” Men who explain things to me, start your engines. Or maybe cool them. With all women. Yeah, that.

Life is good, though. I love that this past baseball season reminded me that I was born on the day Roger Maris hit home run No. 61 and that I saw that as a sign that I was destined to break his record. I love that when a different Yankee broke Maris’ team and American League record, I was the same age as “Marla Hooch,” or at least the person who played her. I love that in re-watching “A League of Their Own,” I was reminded that not only did filmmakers find someone to play Geena Davis’ character later in life, someone with an uncanny resemblance to Davis, her character was called “Older Dottie” in the credits. I love that her teammates who show up for their big moment in Cooperstown have similar names in the credits.

I love that Older Carly is still around and finally got around to writing this. I love that I feel no guilt whatsoever about using more exclamation marks than ever before! And I love that a story on the website I work for took me back to when I first met Marla Hooch and gave me a chance to talk about a connection I felt to her for many years without telling a soul.

Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Megan Cavanagh. Thank you, Marla Hooch. Much respect and love to each of you.

So now I’ve told you my story, although I left out some parts that are special to me because, to paraphrase Tom Hanks in a different movie, those I keep for myself.

I love that writing this story reminded me that being up to bat, alone in the batter’s box, it can get so still and quiet that you become unnervingly aware of your own existence, and how much you are on your own, how the moment and everything about it can get in your head. I love that I remembered what it was like to hit that round ball with that round bat so squarely and perfectly that there is no vibration of the bat in your hand, so you wonder if some kind of magic had occurred, because you didn’t feel a thing.

I love that I let myself tell the story the way I did, sinking into it gently as if it were my last time in a swimming pool. I had figured I would tackle it more aggressively, more “correctly,” knowing that over a lifetime I had learned some writer tricks to make some of this seem better than it is, to smooth over some edges of it so my life is sad and semi-tragic in an almost artful way — a game I can play with myself to connect thematic dots as a writer, a writing exercise rather than a painful reliving of a past I’d rather do over.

In reality, I have no explanation for how the severity of my vision issues slipped through the cracks for as long as they did. The same is true of something I have in common with Geena Davis: ADHD. That’s another story for another day.

All I can say is that I would not have chosen to live through all of that. There is a whole time-travel novel in me (I think that’s a thing with many trans people!) where I get to go back and make things right, but I’m not sure I have the courage to retrace my steps enough to write that story. And what would I change if I could go back? The side of the plate I batted on, or the whole ballgame? At a certain point, you have to stop looking back and just try to be the best version of yourself with the time you have left.

Oh, and I love that in a way, I did step across into the other batter’s box, but only metaphorically, and even if not until the late innings. Here in second puberty, I consider them extra innings. Hey, let’s play two.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch it snow, which I just noticed when I finally looked up from my keyboard. It’s decidedly not July, and I’m fine with that. I also want to reminisce some more and then think about old ballparks and playgrounds that no longer exist as they did years ago, grateful for the reminder of where I’ve been and even the bittersweet reminder about some of where I never got to go.

 

Postscript: I didn’t touch on the Amazon Prime series of the same name for a couple of reasons, but mainly because it’s not a part of my story that I’d planned to tell before the series debut in August. I wanted to mention it here because I’m a supporter of the concept and of the series. It’s yet another reminder of the differences between 1992 and 2022. Here is a reaction from one of my favorite TV writers from when the series became available:

Photo of baseball and bat by Mike Flippo via Shutterstock.

Spoiler alert image by Karen Roach via Shutterstock.

Photo of baseball and glove by Erin Cadigan via Shutterstock.

Photo of transgender pride flag painted on clenched fist by Ink Drop via Shutterstock.

Other photos by Carly Dubois.

Shoutout to Patricia Gregg for pointing me in the direction of Geena Davis’ memoir.

Further reading

And the story that got me all fired up to write this one:

 

2 thoughts on “My inner Marla Hooch steps to the plate, long after a plot twist nobody saw coming”

  1. Erin Willard

    Thank you, Carly, for sharing this. If, back in the day, you hit half as well as you tell a story, you were an amazing hitter indeed.

  2. Dee Brandt

    Thank you Carly! I’m definitely going to read this twice. So much to digest. Sending love and hugs.

Comments are closed