A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : TEAR DROPS BY THE SCORE : Another Secret Chapter in Film History

There’s no denying that “There’s no crying in baseball” is one of the funniest lines in one of this summer’s funnier movies, Penny Marshall’s “A League of Their Own.” Indeed, several lines from the popular film are finding their way into popular usage.

At a women’s caucus at last week’s Democratic National Convention, Democratic nominee Bill Clinton quoted two lines from the film, apparently at the prompting of his wife, Hillary. Clinton used a line spoken by team manager Tom Hanks when one of his players threatens to quit because the game has gotten “too hard”: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it weren’t hard, everyone would do it.”

The “no crying” line, spoken in dismay and disbelief by the loutish, hung-over manager played by Hanks, is addressed to his right fielder, played by Bitty Schram, as he chews her out--again--for missing the cutoff person on her throws from the outfield. As his scolding becomes more animated, she begins to tear up.

He pauses. He looks back at her. “Are you crying? (pause) There’s no crying in baseball!”

The line almost always draws a big laugh and, while it may not go down in history with, say, “We don’t have to show you no stinking badges” or “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night,” it has already entered the lexicon. At least one radio station, WTEN, an all-sports station on the East Coast, plays the “there’s no crying in baseball” sound bite whenever an interviewee gives a whining answer to a question.

So where did the line come from? The film’s writers, the successful team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, can give you the funny version or the serious version.

Says Mandel: “We were in a story conference for a movie, this was several years ago, and there was a female director--we’re not naming any names here. Well, anyway, things got kind of tense and she began to cry.

“A producer at the meeting, a man, says under his breath: ‘What is this crying? Did Howard Hawks ever cry at a meeting?’ ”

Says Ganz: “The line just flowed from the character. It was so right, coming from this guy from the old school of baseball, who finds himself managing a women’s team. He’s appalled by the idea of women in baseball, let alone his participation in it. So he’s soldiering through.

“It was in the script from the beginning and Tom Hanks embraced it. He got all there was out of it.” Sort of a home run.

While there may be no crying in baseball, audiences have shed plenty of tears in baseball movies. Some notable examples:

* Gary Cooper recalling Lou Gehrig’s farewell in the heart-rending “Pride of the Yankees”: “People all say that I’ve had a bad break, but today--today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”

* Jimmy Stewart, recovering from the loss of a leg in “The Stratton Story” with the help of his grit and his gal, June Allyson.

* Robert De Niro, succumbing to illness in the poignant “Bang the Drum Slowly.”

* Anthony Perkins overcoming mental illness in “Fear Strikes Out,” the story of Jimmy Piersall.

* Kevin Costner in the all-time baseball tear-jerker, “Field of Dreams,” playing a New Age farmer who builds a diamond in a cornfield for Shoeless Joe Jackson and who gets to “have a catch” with his long-deceased father.

Hankies all around.