No loyalty in baseball? I'm not so sure.

Mr. Gerber has made a compelling argument that Dottie did not purposely drop the ball in the last inning of the AAGPBL World Series, but I remain unconvinced. I’m not going to fight him about this, though, because truthfully I can’t make up my mind about it. However, I am going to take issue with his last statement, the underlying theme of his argument, that Dottie loved the game more than she loved Kit.

When taking the whole movie into account, the answer to this question is painfully obvious: Kit meant immeasurably more to Dottie than baseball did. Dottie did not want to play professional ball at all, she was only persuaded to sign up so that Kit could make the team as well. That is not how someone who was driven by a passion for baseball would act, not even a little. Her husband was over seas, she had nothing really tying her to her home preventing her from playing, and she still would only join up at her sister’s urging.

We again see Dottie’s lack of commitment to baseball when her husband returns from the war in the middle of the playoffs. Not only does she entertain the notion of ditching her team to go back to Oregon, she actually does it! It is only miles down the road that force of her commitment to the Peaches pulls her back to the team. If she truly had the passion for baseball that Dick claims she had, she would have gotten her husband tickets to the remaining games and would have tried to go home with him after game seven, as a champion, without any hesitation. But she wavered. Chase Utley never would have wavered.

Gerber says that Kit wanted it more than Dottie, and that enabled her to jar the ball loose. He’s half right: Kit did want to win the Series more than Dottie did. But this was because Dottie was never really all that interested in winning it at all. If Dottie had really wanted to win she would have had the ball in her glove, not her bare hand, and would have put the tag right in Kit’s face.

Time and again we see Dottie putting others ahead of herself: she joins the league for Kit, she puts her dream life on hold for her teammates, and, finally, she drops the ball for her sister. And yes, I’ve convinced myself of this in the last five paragraphs.

But anyway, there’s one more pressing concern that I have here: why on earth were the Peaches not playing a no-doubles defense? The outfielder never should have let Kit’s liner go over her head, it’s inexcusable.