How the Team of ‘A League of Their Own’ Built Their Own East Coast Baseball Empire

thewrap.com:

This story about the production design of “A League of Their Own” first appeared in the Comedy Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.Production designer Victoria Paul knows how much people love Penny Marshall’s “A League of Their Own”—a film that 31 years later, fans still relish quoting: “There’s no crying in baseball!” and “And how about Marla Hooch…what a hitter!” So when the production designer (who has worked on everything from “My Cousin Vinny” to “Breakdown” to “Bones”) was hired for Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of the 1992 movie, she realized the best way forward was to take her cues from Marshall’s film. “We were all in awe of the movie,” Paul said. “It’s a classic, and we didn’t shy away from looking at how they did (their sets).

We weren’t trying to disassociate ourselves from the movie at all.”The movie set up camp in Pittsburgh, a city that you could say has a passing interest in sports. “I’d never been to Pittsburgh, and the look was just fabulous,” Paul said. “I’m a Philadelphian by birth and it did remind me of Philly in so many ways—cities built in the late 1800s, brick and all.” That backdrop worked well for the urban scenes, but not so much for the ball games.

All the baseball stadiums in the area were fully modern, many decades removed from the wooden joints of the 1940s when both the movie and the series take place. “There is no period stadium there within easy reach,” Paul said. “It’s a baseball show where we were required to be on a ball field for many days.