TV Talk: ‘A League of Their Own’ plays ball in Pittsburgh

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

All eight episodes of Amazon’s Prime Video series “A League of Their Own” premiere Aug. 12 in a binge release — and while most of the series filmed in Western Pennsylvania, don’t go looking for any local landmarks in the first hour.

The show’s pilot episode, introducing the World War II-era Rockford, Ill., women’s baseball team, the Peaches, was shot in Southern California pre-pandemic. When the show, inspired by the 1992 Geena Davis-Tom Hanks film of the same name, was ordered to series, production relocated to Pittsburgh.

“The pilot takes place mostly in Chicago, and then the team gets to Rockford,” said Will Graham, co-creator of the TV series with “League” star Abbi Jacobson. “We had the privilege of going to Rockford and meeting the people there and going through their archives. The truth was, it’s not a production hub. Also, a lot of 1940s Rockford isn’t there. When you go to Pittsburgh … you walk down the street, and it’s as if you’re in a museum of the early 20th century. It’s incredible the amount of preservation that’s happened and the vitality of the city in living out that history.”

Primary “League” locations include the Peaches’ home stadium, built at the CCAC Boyce Campus’ baseball field, and the Rockford boarding house that becomes home to the players, located in Crafton.

Rockford Tool & Screw and its baseball field were filmed in Ambridge. The Peaches practice on a field near Carrie Furnace. In episode seven, the Greensburg train station plays the Rockford station. In episode six, Downtown Pittsburgh’s Benedum Center plays the Coronado Theater, which houses a secret gay and lesbian speakeasy where Rosie O’Donnell, who starred as a ballplayer in the 1992 “League” movie, is introduced as queer bartender Vi.

While the original movie depicted a team from the true-to-history All-American Girls Professional Baseball League from a feminist perspective, this “League” series expands on that to embrace the stories of Black and queer women ballplayers.

“The All American Girls Professional Baseball League that’s featured in the film did not allow Black women to try out … and the more we researched the time (period), the more we learned about the league and what an incredible opportunity that was for white women and white-passing women,” but not for Black or lesbian women, Jacobson said in a virtual interview.

Jacobson stars in the series as Carson Shaw, whose husband is off in the U.S. Army when she tries out and lands a spot playing catcher for the Rockford Peaches. Carson falls in love with worldly Peaches player Greta Gill (D’Arcy Carden, “The Good Place”) and befriends Max, a Black pitcher.

Jacobson said Max is based on three real-life women: Mamie Johnson, Connie Morgan and Toni Stone.

“I don’t think most people know about those women, and we felt like they should,” Jacobson said. “So it was very exciting to tell this (story of a) bigger range of women playing baseball.”

Jacobson said it was a “fun, kind of like puzzle” figuring out how to connect Carson and Max and their two worlds “through baseball and through queerness.”

Chanté Adams, who plays Max, is a 2016 Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama grad.

“It was great to be able to come back to my second home of Pittsburgh and work there,” Adams said. “It was a very full-circle moment because my Pittsburgh journey started 10 years ago at pre-college at CMU. So it was just really special.”

For many “League” cast members, filming marked their first trips to Western Pennsylvania.

“My dog and my husband and I drove across country to get to Pittsburgh, and I remember the night we drove into Pittsburgh, I was like, this is Pittsburgh? It’s gorgeous,” said Carden, who lived in the Strip District, dined at Apteka and walked her dog along the Allegheny River and in Frick Park. “I was very pleasantly surprised. I loved it.”

Carden may be the best-known “League” cast member from her role as friendly AI Janet on “The Good Place.” She said as that show was wrapping up in 2019-20, CMU grad and “Good Place” star Ted Danson advised Carden over coffee, “Whatever it is that you do next, make sure it’s as different from Janet as you can get.”

“Later, when this came my way,” Carden said, “it just felt like a no-brainer.”

Carden’s “League” character was inspired by real-life AAGPBL player Maybelle Blair, who came out publicly as gay during a panel for the new “League” earlier this year.

“I adore her,” said Carden, who spent a lot of time with Blair hearing stories of the AAGPBL, which Blair has said was comprised of probably two-thirds lesbian players. “The thing that really stuck out is we talked about baseball, but we also talked about the social life of these baseball players. She said it was a party. It was the most fun time in her life.”

Although Western Pennsylvania largely plays Rockford, there is a nod to Pittsburgh at the top of episode two when the series invokes the name of Homestead Grays standout Josh Gibson, although Graham said Gibson would have been included regardless of the filming location.

“Pittsburgh has an incredibly distinguished history with the Negro League teams and having the chance to celebrate that, but also because those are the teams that Max is a fan of. That’s her world. That’s where she wants to be,” Graham said. “We did have the wonderful chance to collaborate with the Josh Gibson Foundation and with his descendants who were also in the show. His (great-)grandson is a catcher in the series. He also helped us build our baseball teams in Pittsburgh. … The show has a big baseball family in addition to a crew and a cast family, and he’s a big part of it.”

Even though Pittsburgh offers period looks aplenty — “League” barely had to dress the exterior of Schwartz Market on the South Side in episode two — it was still a grueling shoot in summer and fall of 2021 with some crew members taking umbrage when Jacobson posted support for IATSE after the union voted to strike last fall over working conditions, despite some “League” crewmembers working 17-hour days.

“It was definitely a challenging shoot,” Jacobson acknowledged. “Covid sent the show into a different state. That’s sort of why we got moved to Pittsburgh. We all loved Pittsburgh. But I think we were all like, ‘Whoa, we’re going right now? And we’re having to hire a whole new crew and everything?’ Covid created a lot of things in the country, in the world. So there’s a labor shortage, national steel and lumber crisis, and we’re building a stadium. And it rains quite a bit in Pittsburgh. We didn’t know that. Our crew was absolutely incredible. It was a perfect storm of these big factors that were outside our control. That created some obstacles in the production. I learned a lot shooting there, but I’m not really sure how to change the national crises.”

The first season of “League” ends with the conclusion of the Peaches’ season, but suggests many of the players will reconvene for another season of baseball that could be chronicled in another season of this series. Graham said he, Jacobson and executive producer Desta Tedros Reff began talking about season two stories a few weeks ago, though “League” has yet to be renewed.

“The hard thing with this show isn’t figuring out what to do; it’s that there is so much that we want to do and the canvas of the show is so big,” Graham said. “We have enough story not just for season two, but seasons three, four and five.”

Would “League” return to Western Pennsylvania to film again?

“Our hope is to always be shooting some of the show in Pittsburgh, maybe all of it,” Graham said. “I don’t think there’s a world where we don’t come back to Pittsburgh in one way or another. The home base of everyone and their families and their kids is here, (in Los Angeles, but) the show will always have at least one foot — maybe two feet — in Pittsburgh. But at this point, we’re just putting season one in the world.”