Originally published March 29 2008
   Back in the day, people called them "tomboys." Even more than 50 years later, it's easy to see the athlete in Helen Filarski Steffes and Mary Moore. Both women played for several seasons in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, the subject of the 1992 movie, "A League of Their Own." They spoke Saturday afternoon to a mixed generation audience crowded into a Westland Public Library meeting room.
   "This was the best thing that ever happened to me," said Steffes, a former Rockford Peach, one of the teams featured in the movie.
    Most of the girls, she said, started out the same way, recruited by scouts who traveled the country in search of top-notch players for the new league. Chewing gum king Philip Wrigley formed the league after men's professional baseball teams lost players to World War II. A recruiter found a dejected Steffes and her teammates sitting on the bench after losing a softball championship in Detroit.
   "A man came into the dugout and asked whether we wanted to play professional baseball," Steffes recalled. "We all signed up."   
   Still, she had a big hurdle to overcome. In 1943, Steffes was 20 years old and still needed permission from her mother, who had great fear of her daughter going to the big city of Chicago. A year later, Steffes signed her own name on the dotted line, and headed off to try-outs at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Stepping out onto a major league field, she said, was a scary experience. Still, baseball had been part of her life since childhood.

Fighting to play
    A self-described "tom-boy," Steffes said she always had boy friends, but never many girl friends. Once nearly expelled from Catholic school for playing baseball with the boys (two priests overseeing the team protested the loss of their "best player" stepped in), she ended up fighting in court to play on a boys' Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) baseball team. While she was not allowed there, she was told she could form a league of her own, and founded the first girls' CYO ball team in Detroit.
    Steffes continued to play even after high school, going straight after work to the first of up to four games she would play in one evening. Her life-long love of the game must have showed in her AAGPBL try-out performance. At the end, as did the women in "A League of Their Own," everyone ran up to posted lists to find their names and teams.
    "And there I was," the former Helen Filarski said, "on Rockford."
    She played two seasons with the Peaches, split a season in Kenosha and Peoria before moving to the South Bend Blue Sox, where she spent her last three years.

Late in the game
    Moore, who played for Springfield and Battle Creek, came to the league later, starting the same year Steffes left, in 1950. But like Steffes, she spent her childhood playing baseball with the boys in her Lincoln Park neighborhood.
    "We had to clear the field with a sickle and a scythe," she said, adding because she made good tips on her paper route, she would purchase equipment for the team. "If they wanted to play ball, they had to come to me."
    A high school teacher put Moore in touch with another former student and baseball player, who got her into a practice facility in Detroit. The father of one of the girls there scouted for the AAGPBL. While she had played wherever a team needed her, others told her to choose a sport. She settled on second base, only to find her new team in South Bend, Indiana already had the best second base player in the league.
    Moore ended up on a traveling team, to build up her skills and promote the league around the country. In just three months, they played more than 90 games in 21 states and Canada. She saw more of the world than she ever dreamed, including time at Coney Island and a performance at Radio City Music Hall.
    "We played in Yankee Stadium and met Casey Stengel, Phil Rizutto, Joe DiMaggio and Whitey Ford," Moore said.
    The exciting trip also came with the same kind of strict rules common to the league. The girls always wore skirts in public, no jeans or shorts. Even when their bus stopped at a diner or a rest stop in the middle of the night, no girl got off without having changed into her skirt. And heaven help the girl who got out of bed after curfew.
    "One girl went out after bedcheck, just down the hall to a vending machine or something...she was fined a week's salary," Moore recalled.
    Traveling players got $25 a week, plus $21 tax-free for meals, as well as their rooms, travel costs and uniforms. At the height of the league, some of the best players earned as much as $100-$150 a week, big money considering Moore's off-season job at Michigan Bell paid just $49 a week.

Life after the league
    While Steffes left the league at her boyfriend's insistence - it was marriage or baseball, no matter how much money she was making - Moore's departure involved injuries, on and off the field. In January of 1951, she lost parts of several fingers in a press-punch accident at an auto parts manufacturing plant.
    "I went to spring training that year," she said, "but the league didn't want to be liable. They sent me home at the beginning of the season."
    A few months later, after losing players to injury, the league called her back, and she played until badly twisting her ankle just two weeks before the season ended. Having seen her new physical limits, Moore never signed the contract she was offered in 1952. Within just a few years, she was playing amateur ball again, in Wyandotte. Moore still plays today, on a team in Northville.
    The league folded two years later, after struggling to keep teams as men's major league baseball made a comeback. With the end of the war and gas rationing, people felt more free to travel for entertainment, rather than walking to watch their hometown girls' teams play on local fields, Steffes said. Attendance dwindled from an all-time high of one million in 1949, and teams started falling away. From 1943 to 1954, more than 600 women played for the AAGPBL.
    Many of them have passed, Steffes said. Those who remain get together for reunions every year and are occasionally joined by "A League of Their Own" director Penny Marshall and cast members. This year's soiree is a cruise, taking off from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Moore always brings a video camera; she's the group's oral historian and has captured more than 100 stories that she believes will eventually be preserved at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
    Steffes cheers from the stands now, for a granddaughter who is "on heck of a pitcher." Moore, who has thrown out a first pitch at Comerica Park, plans to watch this year's Detroit Tigers home opener from the comfort of her living room "where it's warm and dry."

Learn more about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League.

Advice for young women who want to play ball:
Mary - Practice, practice, practice and dedication.
Helen - Don't ever think you're too good. You may be, but let other people tell you that.

On whether there's crying in baseball:
Helen - There has been a lot of crying in baseball.

On "A League of Their Own":
Mary - We were in Cooperstown 11 days to make the last five minutes at the end of the movie for the reunion game. We weren't SAG members, so they had to hire older actresses. We did have to show some of them how to play ball.
Helen - Especially Madonna.

story & photos by Joni Hubred-Golden