The six teams, all based in the Midwest, were comprised of nearly 100 women between the ages of 16 and 27 who played for $50 to $85 per week.
The league that would later inspire the 1992 movie A League of Their Own and the enduring exclamation, “There’s no crying in baseball!” had just kicked off its third season when LIFE featured it in a photo essay in 1945. They settled on a compromise: The All-American Girls Professional Ball League. But it wasn’t baseball, either: the ball was larger and the bases, closer.
The ball was smaller, the bases farther apart and stealing bases forbidden in softball was permitted. Wrigley spearheaded the effort to remedy professional baseball’s wartime decline with a women’s league, one question dogged the league’s founders: what, exactly, to call it.
