This classic swing belongs to Dorothy “Mickey” Maguire, shown here with the Muskegon Lassies of the AAGPBL. Chapman, a hard-nosed, hard-hitting catcher, played in the league from 1943-49. In the movie “A League of Their Own,” there is a dramatic scene, probably based on Maguire, where a telegram from the war department arrives, and one by one the players exhale as the deliveryman passes them by. The real life player who got the news of her husband’s death was Maguire. Instead of running home in tears, she played that night and got a hit. Subsequent news would reveal that her husband was alive after all, a real “Hollywood ending.”
Maguire was a tough player who was nicknamed after Mickey Cochrane. At one point, she had a split finger on her throwing hand, a swelled elbow twice normal size after being hit with a bat, a foot long sliding strawberry on her thigh, a bruised back where she’d been hit by a pitch, and torn rib ligaments. “I’d have been in there if not for the split finger,” she remarked. Maguire was recently inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame for “exceptional accomplishments in athletics.”
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