YMMV / A League of Their Own

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The question that defines the film's climax, and is often asked alongside other gems like "what was in that suitcase?" and "can men and women really be just friends": Did Dottie drop the ball on purpose, and in doing so, let Kit win? Only two people knew the answer for sure, and one of them (director Penny Marshall) took the secret to her grave. Geena Davis, for her part, has made clear that she has every intention of doing the same thing. (Lori Petty, though she acknowledges that she doesn't know for certain, is pretty confident that Kit won fair and square.)
  • Dottie tells Marla, the best hitter on the team, to bunt in an attempt to run a squeeze play to bring the runner on third in. Jimmy finally notices and, without even knowing Marla's name but knowing that she IS the best hitter, thinks it's a foolish play. He and Dottie get into an argument about whether Marla should bunt or swing away. Did Dottie intentionally call the wrong play in order to get Jimmy to take more control over the coaching, or did she really think that the bunt was the best move with the infield out deep?
• Base-Breaking Character: Kit. Some people see her as a Passionate Sports Girl and sympathethic unfavorite who overcame being Overshadowed by Awesome, others see her as a whiny, bratty, hostile Ungrateful Bastard who didn't earn her place on the league and treated her sister with contempt even when Dottie did everything she could to make her happy.
• Ending Fatigue: The epilogue is both a CMOH and a Tear Jerker, but it does come off as Padding, especially since it's pretty lengthy.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Helen is only tenth in the credits and doesn't have that many notable scenes, but gets a lot of appreciation for her moment of kindness toward Shirley during the tryouts and for having a couple of pretty funny lines.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Kit scores the winning run in the championship by knocking over Dottie who was blocking home plate. 22 years after this movie, MLB instituted the controversial Posey Rule which prevents catchers from blocking the plate unless they possess the ball. However, Dottie had the ball long before Kit was even near the plate (heck, the relay was caught by the cutoff as Kit was rounding third, ignoring the coach's pleas to stop at third).
  • Jimmy's frustration over not being able to join the army is a bit harder to watch after seeing what happened with Tom Hanks in World War II.
  • In-Universe. When Betty first meets Jimmy she asks him to sign her husband‘s baseball card, and in his drunken state he rips it up. Being as her husband is killed in combat during the season, and the news is delivered by Jimmy, the loss of such a precious memento was probably even more painful for her.
• He Really Can Act: Since Tom Hanks has since gone on to be the contemporary idea of a Hollywood actor, it's easy to forget that he got his start in wacky comedies like Big and Splash. This was the first movie where he got to show off his dramatic chops; originally, the producers wanted someone older (and thus more realistic as a failed ballplayer) for the part of Jimmy, but Hanks was eager to break out of his comic typecasting and lobbied hard for the part, even gaining a considerable amount of weight to seem more like an out-of-shape athlete. His efforts proved that he could do dramas too, and his next run of films—including Philadelphia and Forrest Gump—only cemented that legacy.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During the farm scene, Ernie asks Dottie and Kit if milking the cows hurts them, responding it’d "bruise the hell" out of him. Two years later, Jon Lovitz would have a part in the sequel to City Slickers where he tries to milk a bull.
  • Bitty Schram playing the meek, Shrinking Violet Evelyn is this considering her well known role as the cunning, tough-as-nails Sharona Fleming on Monk.
• Hollywood Homely: Marla, who looks quite cute once she gets a makeover. Kit also, though she's the only person who seems to think this; the general opinion is that while not as beautiful as Dottie, she's still quite pretty. Even the newsreel makes a point of this.
  Newsreel: And then there's [Dottie's] kid sister, Kit, who's as single as they come! Enough concentrated oomph for a whole carload of Hollywood starlets.
• Memetic Mutation
  • "THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!" ^note Jimmy vents his annoyance over Evelyn's mistake at her, to the point that he makes her burst out in tears. He then proceeds to yell at her for crying to begin with, dropping this line.
  • Jimmy's "The 'hard' is what makes it great" speech has since become a popular motivational slogan for sports teams as well as a motto for anyone following their dreams.
  • "It's the lump three feet above your ass." ^note Part of Jimmy's venting involves telling her to 'use her head' and drops this line.
• One-Scene Wonder: When a foul ball goes into the segregated black section of a stadium, the woman who tosses it back hurls a mean throw that hurts Ellen Sue's hand despite being thrown 300 feet, from the outfield, and impresses Dottie, but alas, the movie takes place four years before Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball's color barrier - and ten years before the Negro Leagues, inspired by the AAGPBL, added female players.
• Reality Subtext: Jimmy Dugan was based on real-life future hall-of-famer Jimmie Foxx, who challenged Babe Ruth's home run record by becoming the youngest to reach 500 home runs—a record that stood for over 60 years—until alcoholism^note allegedly; others claimed he had chronic sinus issues derailed his career. The real Foxx was still playing in 1942, but did coach in the AAGPBL in 1952, leading the Fort Wayne Daisies to the playoffs that year, but losing in the first round to the Rockford Peaches. He only managed the women's game for one season.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Sharona Fleming learns there's no crying in baseball.
  • Noah Vosen tries to get Tom Hanks to get his act together.
  • One of the Racine players is Téa Leoni.
  • Marla Hooch became the mother of a boy genius.
  • Kit became Tank Girl.
  • In the opposite direction, Stillwell apparently grew up to become Francis Buxton.
• She Really Can Act: Madonna. Despite having numerous starring roles this supporting role, which she nailed, is arguably her most memorable and unique role.
• Strawman Has a Point: The smarmy Mr. Harvey's plan to fire women from the teams and various industries once men start coming back from the war to resume their old jobs has definite misogynistic undertones, but he does make a valid point that it would be ungrateful and shortsighted to leave those returning soldiers unemployed after everything they went through.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: It's kind of disappointing that there aren't any ramifications for Jimmy tearing up Betty's husband's baseball card, given that him making up for that could have helped his Character Development, especially given how he later has to be the Bearer of Bad News when her husband dies.
• Values Dissonance: Kit's Unnecessary Roughness during the final play of the World Series was fairly normal at the time, but modern baseball has had things like the Buster Posey rule introduced to try to keep players safer. In modern times, Kit would've been called out for the deliberate collision even though Dottie lost her grip on the ball.
• The Woobie:
  • Betty. Her first major scene has Jimmy tear up her husband's prized baseball card when she asks for an autograph, and her last major scene has her find out that her husband has been killed in action.
  • Evelyn is a Shrinking Violet who gets yelled at until she cries after making a mistake during a game. She also has a husband who is implied to be either a deadbeat or a Domestic Abuser and a son who constantly embarrasses her by being a Bratty Half-Pint.

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