The jewel game series: A proposal for the 2024 MLB season
By Bill Felber
The AAGPBL jewel game
Most of us know about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League through the much-praised 1990s era movie, “A League of The Own.” It told the based-on-fact story of the World War II era girls league put together by Chicago businessman Phillip K. Wrigley, which began play in 1943 and continued into the mid 1950s.
The original film became so iconic that an updated version has recently debuted on Amazon Prime video.
One obvious “jewel game” opportunity is to highlight and celebrate the history of the AAGPBL by bringing attention to it via an annual jewel game.
There is an obvious time of season to play such a game. That would be late May, the anniversary of the start of the first AAGPBL season in 1943.
Sites? It ought to be one of the places where the original movies was filmed. Happily, MLB would have several to choose from. At least one is of unquestioned Major League quality, and several others either fit that mode or could be brought up to standard with relatively minor modifications.
To take the easy rout, MLB could legitimately site a AAGPBL “jewel game” at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Not only was it used as a tryout field during the runup to the actual AAGPBL, but it was the site of filming of tryouts in the movie.
Don’t like the idea of hosting a tribute to the women‘s game in a standard MLB park? Okay, how about Evansville, Indiana’s Bosse Field. Aside from Wrigley, it is the best-conditioned still-in-use field at which filming for “A League of their Own’ took place. It now hosts the Evansville Otters, an independent minor league team.
And if you really want to go Old School, take a look at League Stadium in Huntingburg, Indiana. Used as the home field of the film’s Rockford Peaches, it dates back to 1894, nearly two decades older than the oldest existing Major League park, Boston’s Fenway Park. The grandstand is small, seating only about 2,800. It’s in southern Indiana, about one hour from Evansville.
As to who should play in it, the obvious option is to rotate participants annually … although given the strong southern Wisconsin aspects of the AAGPBL’s roots (Kenosha and Racine were two of the four rounding teams), designating the Milwaukee Brewers as a permanent host team would also make sense.