There is Crying in Baseball

In A League of Their Own, the fictionalized story of the World War II All-American Girls Professional League, Tom Hanks delivers one of the most memorable lines in the history of baseball movies.

Playing the foul-mouthed, alcoholic Jimmy Dugan, the manager of the Rockford Peaches, he, at one point, verbally abuses Evelyn, his right fielder, who gets so upset that she starts crying.  Dugan reacts, “Are you crying?  Are you crying?  There’s no crying.  There’s no crying in baseball.”

This past Father’s Day, my daughter Amy and son-in-law Dean gave me a jersey that read, “Actually, there is a lot of crying in baseball.” Pictured with the altered line from A League of Their Own was the Pittsburgh Pirates logo.  The Pirate on the logo has a tear falling from his eye. 

During my ball-playing years in Pittsburgh, I wore lots of jerseys, but mostly when I gave up baseball in the late 1950s and started playing softball.  In my Pittsburgh softball days, I played for a variety of teams sponsored by beer joints with ethnic names, like the Lithuanian Kalka’s, the Polish Kotula’s, and the Italian Tambellini’s, but the most memorable jersey was the one I wore, however briefly, for a sponsor from a beer joint that  had an upscale name but was hardly upscale.

After our South Side Black Sheep won the championship of the city-wide Honus Wagner League, Moe, the squat, bull-dog faced owner of the Club Cafe, thought he could cash in on our success and popularity by sponsoring our team.  

A few games into the season Moe thought he’d make even more money by holding a raffle at one of our softball games.  When we refused to sell tickets, he dropped his sponsorship and took back our uniforms.  No doubt my Club Cafe jersey ended up being used by Moe as a bar rag. 

I still have a few softball jerseys tucked away in a drawer, including the last one that I wore for a team that played in local and regional leagues in southern Illinois.  It was my wife Anita’s favorite jersey because it had PETERSON lettered on the back.  She actually wore the jersey and softball pants for Halloween when she was teaching grade school, and the uniform never looked better.

My most prized jerseys are the ones that I received for running in the Pittsburgh Marathon.  I have 10 Pittsburgh Marathon jerseys beginning with the jersey from my first run in 2010 at the age of 71.  My favorite Pittsburgh Marathon jersey was my last one in 2019.  It has a circular design featuring all the neighborhoods that I ran through, many of which had fields where I played baseball and softball, including the working-class South Side, where I grew up.

I don’t remember ever crying in baseball, though a few bad hops hit me in the part of my anatomy that brought tears to my eyes.  And I also have to admit that I tear up at the ending of Field of Dreams when Ray Kinsella asks his ghostly father for a game of catch.  When Anita walks into our living room and I’m crying, she shakes her head and mutters, “Field of Dreams.”

As for my Pirates. They’ve given me plenty of reasons and seasons to cry, including 20 losing seasons in a row, but given a choice of crying or laughing, I’d rather laugh at my bumbling boys of summer than cry over their losing ways.  Watching my Pirates, over the years, has been the stuff of tragedy, but I’d rather believe I’ve been watching a comedy of errors.

         That comedy reached a new level of folly when the 2025 version of the Pirates lost eight straight games just before the All-Star break.  Those losses dropped the franchise record down to 10, 877 wins and 10, 877 losses, and only a win in the last game before the All-Star break prevented the Pirates franchise from falling below .500.   Our Pirates will have to wait at least a few more games to reach that dubious moment in their history, but I’m confident, as a long-time Pirates fan, that the comedy will likely continue.