She'll get the ball to the plate. Don't worry about that.

Usually when they get someone to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game, it's a politician or somebody who points at weather maps on TV, and who knows if the ball gets halfway there? Mary O'Meara will get it to the plate, all right. They used to pay her to hit home plate all the way from center field.

When O'Meara throws out the first pitch Saturday afternoon at opening day for the West Madison Little League Softball-Junior League, at 1:15 at the Jefferson Fields, the girls waiting to play should take particular note. They will be watching living history.

Mary O'Meara, 73 and a grandmother six times over, a Madison resident for 50 years, once led a life so exciting and unusual that in 1992 Penny Marshall, Madonna and Tom Hanks made a movie about it. They called it "A League of Their Own" and it was based on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which blew like a fresh breeze through the Midwest in the 1940s and '50s.

The teams had names like the Kalamazoo Lassies and Rockford Peaches. One year, 1948, the league drew more than a million fans. They made enough of a mark that in 1988, the AAGPBL was honored with its own display at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Mary O'Meara was there for the unveiling. They gave her a lifetime pass to the Hall, and if there were some tears that weekend -- her husband Tom says there were tears -- can you blame her? Girls weren't supposed to play sports in her day. They were supposed to lead cheers or stay home. When you help break down a barrier, you're entitled to get emotional.

Growing up in the little town of Minster, Ohio, O'Meara -- who was Mary Froning back then -- swam, rode her bike, and eventually got to play softball on weekends for a Catholic Youth Organization softball team. It turned out she was a natural.

O'Meara was 16 years old and playing shortstop in a CYO game on a Sunday afternoon when a board member from the AAGPBL's South Bend Blue Sox, in Minster visiting his mother, spotted her. She had speed and a rocket arm, and a short time later, a contract offer from the Blue Sox.

"My dad and I looked at it," O'Meara was recalling last week, "and saw that it was for baseball, not softball."

The league, started in 1943 by Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley, who feared World War II might suspend men's baseball, was originally softball. But by the time O'Meara got her contract offer, they were playing overhand and hardball. The offer was $50 a month and expenses. First, of course, she had to make the team.

O'Meara signed the contract and showed up with her parents in South Bend for the tryouts. There were more than 100 girls going for just four open roster spots, but O'Meara was undaunted.

"I could tell I could outrun and out-throw them," she said. She made the team and her parents arranged for a room for her in a private home in South Bend. It was 1951 and O'Meara was on her way to what she later called "the most enjoyable four years of my life."

She recalled: "They expected us to play like men but look like ladies. We played in skirts with shorts underneath." They played a schedule of more than 100 games a season, and traveled by bus. O'Meara's first appearance in a game was as a pinch-runner. By 1953, she was a regular in the outfield, where she would chase down fly balls even if it required running into the wall. Her teammates -- "great girls," O'Meara said -- nicknamed her "Fearless."

The whirlwind ended after the 1954 season when O'Meara and the others got a letter saying the AAGPBL was folding, the victim of a diminishing fan base that had discovered television.

O'Meara was crushed, but in the next few years she would marry Tom, move to Madison and start a family that eventually included four children. She's had a happy post-baseball life, and every once in a while, somebody remembers.

It happened in 1988 with the display at Cooperstown, and it happened again four years later when "A League of Their Own" hit the big screen. O'Meara has a large blow-up of the movie poster, signed by many of the AAGPBL players, framed under glass in her West Side home. In 2003, the Milwaukee Brewers enshrined O'Meara on the team's Walls of Honor before a game at Miller Park against the Cubs.

She threw out the first pitch that night in Milwaukee, so she should be able to handle her Little League gig Saturday.

"I can still throw," she said.