Historic ‘A League of Their Own’ baseball park destroyed in fire

There’s no crying in baseball — but tears were likely shed after a historic ballpark went up in flames this week.

The Jay Littleton Ball Park in Ontario, Calif. — which served as a filming location for 1992’s A League of Their Own — was destroyed in a fire that began Thursday night, Ontario’s director of communications, Dan Bell, told Entertainment Weekly.

“It’s a terrible loss for our community,” Bell said. “Everyone here either played or had relatives or kids who played on that field over the years. In its 87 years of existence, a lot of people played on that field.”

The Ontario Fire Department confirmed in a press release to EW that the first fire engine responded to the scene around 11:30 p.m. local time on Thursday, before the department dispatched an additional seven engines and four trucks. A total of 51 responders showed up and contained the fire after just over an hour, finding no victims and sustaining no injuries.

“When units arrived, they saw fully engulfed grandstands of the ballpark,” Bell said. “So they went into full attack mode and tried to put it out as quickly as possible, but being a wooden structure of grandstands from 1937, it went up pretty quickly. So the end result is, unfortunately, a total loss of the grandstand structure.”

Bell continued, “The grandstands are all gone, the dugouts are all gone, everything associated with being a spectator at that field is gone. The field itself is intact, but any observation area for a game is destroyed.”

The fire’s cause is still under investigation, the fire department said in the release.

Jay Littleton Ball Park erected its grandstands in 1937, and minor league team the Ontario Orioles played there during their one and only season in 1947. Since then, the park has hosted a number of Hollywood productions, including 1948’s The Babe Ruth Story, 1988’s Eight Men Out, 1992’s A League of Their Own and The Babe, the 1999 X-Files episode “The Unnatural,” and, most recently, Amazon’s television reboot of A League of Their Own.

“It just had that look and feel of a historic ballpark,” Bell said.

Directed by Penny Marshall, the original A League of Their Own is the fictional history of the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which launched during World War II. The movie starred Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Madonna, and Rosie O’Donnell as players on the Rockford Peaches, and Tom Hanks as their alcoholic manager.

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Aaron Matthiesen, the president of the Ontario Eastern Little League, said the park was the backdrop for perhaps the most memorable moment in the original A League of Their Own. “The dugout here on the third baseline is where Tom Hanks had his iconic line: ‘There’s no crying in baseball!'” he told ABC 7.

Beyond its cinematic significance, Jay Littleton was a fixture of the Ontario community and still used for little league and high school games.

“We’ll have to look at what we’re gonna do in the future with that field,” Bell told EW. “Being such a significant part of our city’s history, we’ll look at how we move forward with it.”