The Girls of Summer

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ZACK WITTMAN 23 The Girls of Summer WOMEN HAVE ALWAYS LOVED AMERICA'S PASTIME. IT HAS NEVER LOVED THEM BACK.

- By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Everybody knows the secret of life. The secret of life is: Keep your eye on the ball.

I'm borrowing that from a 1998 song by America's sweetheart, Faith Hill, but if you don't know the song, you still know that simple truth. You also know that to fail is to strike out; to fail valiantly is to go down swinging; to be surprised is to be thrown a curveball; to help a buddy out is to go to bat for him; and to succeed brilliantly is to knock one out of the park.

And even if you haven't seen A League of Their Own, or have somehow missed Jennifer Garner's Capital One ads, you've probably heard the maxim "There's no crying in baseball." In January, I was standing in the locker room of George M. Steinbrenner Field, in Tampa, next to my teammates, whom I had met only the night before. When we heard the immortal words of Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan, the aggrieved manager of the Rockford Peaches women's baseball team, piping out of a nearby speaker, we recognized them and laughed. Then we clapped (or took out our phones for photos) as Len Milcowitz, the field coordinator and unofficial emcee of the weekend, emerged wearing a full Peaches uniform to drive home the point. He'd worn it in our honor, he said. "You represent the true spirit of baseball in this country, period," he told us.