The cast of the new ‘A League of Their Own’ doesn’t care if you don’t think women should play baseball
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It’s fine not to like the new “A League of Their Own” series, says the cast. But only if it’s for the right reasons.
The cast of the Prime Video show, which premiered Friday, knows how many people already have nasty ideas about the women baseball players who made up the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II. It comes with the territory: women in a role typically held by men. The actors just want you to actually watch their series first.
“Probably the only people who are going to stay mad are the people who would write online about an all-female ‘Ghostbusters’ and how Ghostbusters can only be men,” Molly Ephraim, who plays Rockford Peaches center fielder Maybelle, told the Daily News.
That’s not to say that “A League of Their Own” is above criticism, but, while fictional, the story is real. The AAGPBL was real. The women were real. They hit home runs and struck each other out and bruised their thighs sliding across home plate. They were all white, because the league was segregated, but Black women, like the show’s Maxine Chapman (Chanté Adams), played baseball too.
“You’re seeing it in schools: the fear of what if we teach our kids about nonbinary people, what if we teach our kids that trans people exist, what if we teach our kids it’s OK to be gay. As if that has the effect that these people think that it has,” Ephraim, 36, said.
“I’m proud to be a part of the show because these people always existed. It’s not like they read a book that suddenly turned them gay. That’s not how these things happen. They’ve always existed, those storylines were always there. They just weren’t put on screen.”
“A League of Their Own” gets to put them on screen, the women who played and the women who were shut out. The gay women and the straight women and everything in between.
“They exist. Period,” Saidah Arrika Ekulona, who plays Toni Chapman, Maxine’s mom and a Black businesswoman, told The News.
“These people existed then. They exist now. You’re welcome.”
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