Bosse Field and the League of Their Own

Bosse Field opened in nineteen fifteen, making it one of the oldest professional baseball stadiums still in use in the United States. It sits in a residential neighborhood on the north side of Evansville, a brick-and-concrete structure that has watched more than a hundred years of American life cycle past its outfield fences. High school games, minor league seasons, amateur tournaments, the ballpark has held all of them.

Its most cinematic chapter came in nineteen ninety-one, when Hollywood arrived in Evansville to film 'A League of Their Own,' Penny Marshall's account of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which had operated during the Second World War while the men were overseas. Bosse Field stood in for the fictional Rockford Peaches' home stadium, and for a summer, the old ballpark was dressed in period details, period advertisements on the outfield walls, nineteen forties automobiles in the parking lot, extras in wool uniforms on a diamond that had seen all of it before in real life. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was not fiction.

It ran from nineteen forty-three to nineteen fifty-four in Midwestern cities such as Rockford, South Bend, and Fort Wayne, though Evansville was not one of its home cities. The women who played in it were genuine athletes who competed with skill and competed hard, and the league drew real audiences at a time when the men's game had left for the war. What the film captured, and what the old ballpark still holds, is something harder to name: the sense that this place has been the stage for things that mattered to people, over and over, for a very long time.