Kit won. Dottie did not drop the ball on purpose. If she did, this changes from a pretty good baseball movie to an awful chick flick.
There’s a huge difference between telling your team that they’ll have to go on without you since your husband just came back from war, and actually playing in the game and throwing it. The first is an understandable but difficult choice, the second is an unforgivable offense.
This is my take. She loved her sister and husband more than baseball. She dropped the ball for both of them.
Was Lombardi about to give up baseball? Was the runner his younger brother with an inferiority complex? If not it wasn’t really very similar.
Watching the clip (saw movie years ago) I think it’s just a hard slide. (IOW not on purpose)
Could people’s assessments be flavored purely by their own ethics for such things? I used to play team sports, and to me, Dottie dropping the ball on purpose would be a reprehensible act, one that rendered Dottie a crappy person. You don’t deliberately throw a game–hell, the whole season, effectively–not ever. Not when your teammates, who worked as hard as they did, have every reason to think they can depend on you. No matter how disappointed your sister would be, a stand-up person would not do her teammates that way. It would be dishonorable and unethical, and your sister could expect no such act from you. To me, Dottie was someone who would never do such a thing.
OTOH, if you’re closer to the end of spectrum that says, “It’s just a game,” you might see this quite differently. How could you crush your own sister’s hopes, over a game? Sure, she is pinning her dream to “just a game,” it’s true, but that’s the reality, and she’s your sister. Perhaps throwing the game has its ethical wrinkles, but it’s nothing compared with deliberately destroying your sister’s dreams. That’s the dilemma Dottie faced, so how could she choose anything else, when her sister’s happiness has as its only cost, the loss of a game?
Several of us think it’s as plain as the nose on your face, what occurred in the film, having nothing to do with our own value systems. But is our assessment really just a reflection of our own sensibilities? We want Dottie to be a good person, so do we choose the outcome that best makes her one, as we see it?
And the answer is…no, turns out I’m just right. 
No, he understands completely. What series it was matters for fuck all.
One of the themes of the movie is how the women became more competitive, and took the game more seriously, than anybody envisioned or maybe even wanted when the league was founded. The owner just wants something to put on during the war, and wants to sell femininity and cheesecake as much as baseball. The manager is an apathetic drunk. In the early days, the players have to resort to gimmicks like doing the splits and kissing spectators.
But as the movie progresses, the competition ratchets up and takes over. By the final game, the stands are full and it’s obvious the spectators take the game seriously. The manager has long since been won over. The last scene reeks of intense competition, with the players covered in grime, sweat, and blood.
Finally, Kit hits the game-tying triple, blows through a stop sign, and declining to slide, goes in high to take out the catcher. Even today, even in men’s baseball, this is one of the most balls-out hyper-competitive moves a player can make.
After all that, to have her sister drop the ball on purpose . . . well, it would spoil the movie for me. So for my money, she dropped the ball because she was half-unconscious.
I hate pulling the “You don’t get it” card. But if someone can read these two posts and STILL believe that Dottie dropped the ball on purpose, then I’m sorry, but you don’t get it. You don’t get sports and you don’t understand why they’d be important to someone like Kit and you don’t get why a purposely dropped ball would be worse than losing 100 games in a row.
This is not exactly an iron-clad proof, but an anonymous poster on a blog claims to have been told by the screenwriter that Dottie dropped it on purpose.
Anyone know if this scene is online somewhere? Looks like Youtube doesn’t have it…
Post 36 has a link.
I found the screenplay online (Pornub Porn Videos) and it seems to support the notion that there’s a slight delay between Dottie hitting the ground and the ball falling out of her hand.
HOWEVER, no such delay exists in the final film, making me believe that what the screenwriter wanted was overruled by a director who obviously understood the characters and how a professional athlete would act.
Agreed. The scene gives no reason at all to think the ball was dropped on purpose.
Eggfuckingdamnzacktly.
This is a serious “what are you guys smoking keep it the hell away from me” moment for me.
When my family watched it we we all thought Dottie dropped the ball on purpose and *we were pissed because we thought it wrecked the movie. *
I think it’s just sloppy stunt acting/filming/editing that gives rise to the debate. At least I hope so because as others have said, dropping the ball makes Dottie a bad person and strips the film of almost all meaning and narrative arc.
Full disclosure: I’m an only child and my parents are both youngest siblings. We all hated Kit.
My best friend and I (both of us the oldest in our families, both with younger sisters) rented this movie tons of times when we were teenagers in the mid-90s, and it never even occurred to me that Dottie might have deliberately dropped the ball until I saw the subject come up here. I was surprised that anyone would think that, as it would be a huge jerk move on Dottie’s part. And I say this as someone who has never followed or played sports even casually; I like A League of Their Own because of the characters and setting, not because I’m into baseball.
I’m not even particularly competitive when it comes to games, but the only situations in which I can see throwing any kind of competition would be either if I had been dragged into it and just wanted it to end or if I were playing with a small child or mentally handicapped person who would be disproportionately upset if they lost. In the particular situation depicted in A League of Their Own Dottie would be betraying her teammates and treating her sister in an incredibly patronizing manner if she dropped the ball on purpose.
I’ll also point out that it wasn’t a do-or-die play (as in Dottie has to score or they lose), as she drove in the tying runs with her drive. In other words if he sister holds on it’s now a tie game, not a loss, and hardly heartbreaking.
She’s shown as an infallible catcher for the entire film until her one mistake. Purposeful.
Yep.
I always thought the epilogue at the Hall of Fame helped sell that. I could be mis-remembering but to Geena Davis’ character that wasn’t her life it was something she did and moved on. To the others, this was a huge and important thing. Ultimately yes it’s a story about familial love and not “SPOOOORTS!”
Uh… the underdog overcomes in every sports movie ever. You think all those games were thrown?