Baseball Movies

With a new baseball season underway you may want to a way to satisfy your jones for the national pastime during rain delays and off days with a movie. Here are the ten best ones out there and why they’re worth watching even if you’re not that into the grand old game.

1-Bull Durham – Kevin Costner’s first baseball movie, the best one ever. Written and directed by former minor leaguer Ron Shelton it captures the day in – day out spirit of the game. Baseball groupie/player life coach Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), pitching wunderkind Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) along with Costner’s “Crash Davis” are the leading characters in a movie full of great ones. The score is dreadful but you can pretty much ignore it.

2-Bang the Drum Slowly – A tearjerker for guys. Great pre-expansion baseball ethos in an early film for Michael Moriarty and Robert DeNiro. Moriarty, whose grandfather George Moriarty was a teammate of Ty Cobb, is Henry “Author” Wiggin the star pitcher on the New York Mammoths and the best friend of 2nd or 3rd string catcher Bruce Pearson. Pearson is “too dumb to play a joke on” and he’s dying.

3-Field of Dreams – Costner’s a fan this time, not a player. It’s hard to believe you could be in America since 1989 and not know what this is about. “Hey Dad?...You wanna have a catch?” Nice score by James Horner – the “Titanic” guy.

4- Eight Men Out – The story of the Black Sox scandal. In 1919 eight members of the Chicago White Sox allegedly conspired to lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. John Cusack is George “Buck” Weaver the White Sox 3rd baseman and the central figure in this telling of the story. He knew about the fix but kept quiet about it. He and the seven who were in on it were banned from baseball when it was uncovered.

5- The Natural – Robert Redford is the title character “Roy Hobbs.” A lot of people rank this as number one but it’s a mystical tale and those don’t have much appeal to me. Randy Newman’s score is on of the best ever for a sports movie.

6-A League of Their Own – During World War II Phil Wrigley, heir to the chewing gum company and Chicago Cubs owner, decided to start up a league for women. It took me a while to see this one but it is a good movie. Tom Hanks has the classic line, “There’s no crying in baseball.” Anybody whose team has lost the 7th game of the World Series knows that’s not true.

7-Soul of the Game – Another fact based tale. This one’s about Jackie Robinson (Blair Brown), Satchell Paige (Delroy Lindo) and Josh Gibson (Mykelti Williamson), all playing in black baseball in 1945. Satch and Josh are the greatest players, but Brooklyn Dodgers President Branch Rickey (Edward Herrmann) chooses Jack to be the first African American to play in the white Major Leagues. Good choice.

8-61* - Billy Crystal made a movie for HBO about the 1961 baseball season and the duel between New York Yankees Roger Maris (Barry Pepper) and Mickey Mantle (Thomas Jane) to break Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a season. Billy Crystal made a VERY good movie.

9 – For Love of the Game – Kevin Costner’s third (and so far final) baseball movie. This time he’s Billy Chapel, a Hall of Fame bound pitcher at the end of his career on a dreary Detroit Tigers team. Billy’s relationship with Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston) is half the movie. The other half is what may be his last game. The athlete’s concentration is represented better than in any other movie albeit very simply. It’s based on a novel by Michael Shaara who also wrote the brilliant novel “The Killer Angels.” Shaara’s book is better than the movie but the movie is worth seeing. The score by Basil Poledouris may be the best ever for a sports film…either that or Jerry Goldsmith’s score for “Rudy”.

10-Cobb – Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones) was a great ballplayer, maybe the greatest ever, but he was also a racist (even for that time), more than a little nuts and in general one enormous asshole. He doesn’t come off any better in Ron Shelton’s other (after Bull Durham) baseball movie.

Extra innings to mention a few more. The original Bad News Bears would be in many people’s top 10. On another day it might be in mine.

In “It Happens Every Spring” Ray Milland is a chemistry professor and a baseball fan who develops a substance that repels wood. (He may have passed the formula on to my first wife but I’m just guessing) Ray Milland looks as much like a ballplayer as I look like a show girl. Paul Douglas – one of his three appearances in baseball movies of this era (circa 1950) which makes him a kind of lesser Kevin Costner.
The biopics “Pride of St. Louis” (about Dizzy Dean), “Pride of the Yankees” (about Lou Gehrig), “The Jackie Robinson Story” (Jackie plays himself), “The Stratton Story”(about 30s pitcher Monty Stratton who blew his leg off in a hunting accident) and “The Rookie” are all worth seeing. Ronald Reagan as Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander in “The Winning Team” isn’t any worse than Gary Cooper as Gehrig but the film overall is infinitely sappier.

Worst
The one thing most of the above movies have in common is that they are populated by people who are able to look like ballplayers. Some really good actors (see Anthony Perkins in “Fear Strikes Out”) aren’t the least bit athletic and in a baseball movie you should at least LOOK like you’ve played the game … at least once.

1-The Babe Ruth Story – William Bendix plays The Bambino in an absolutely dreadful movie. For long shots they got former big leaguer Babe Herman to play Ruth but the close-up stuff has to be Bendix and is so bad you’re embarrassed for him, his family, his church, his bartender, just everybody.

2- Fever Pitch – Drew Barrymore meets Jimmy Fallon during the off season and he seems pretty cool until opening day when she finds out he’s a typically obsessive Red Sox fan. As a spokesman for the obsessive Red Sox fan community this thing is so full of holes it makes swiss cheese seem solid as granite. Trust me, she would have known right away because he would have been counting the days till Spring Training like the rest of us.
If you want to see a good movie called “Fever Pitch” see the original. Based on a Nick Hornby novel it’s about an equally obsessive British football fan who roots for Arsenal. Everything about it is better except it’s about soccer.

3-Fear Strikes Out – Based on Jim Piersall’s autobiography (with Boston sportswriter Al Hirshberg). Jim was a Red Sox outfielder in the 50s who had what we now call bi-polar disorder. His disruptiveness eventually led to his being sent to a mental hospital but he came back to have a fairly long successful career in baseball. Anthony Perkins plays Jimmy in the movie and it’s obvious he had never played a game of baseball in his life until they began filming. Karl Malden plays his father who would have driven any of us over the edge.

4-The Fan – Robert DeNiro is the obsessed title character who decides to stalk and, he hopes, kill San Francisco Giants star, hotdog and egomaniac Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes). This film has a really good cast with Benicio Del Toro, Ellen Barkin and John Leguizamo (and a cameo by John Kruck) it just doesn’t add up to much.

5 - Damn Yankees – based on a Faustian novel by Douglas Wallop about a fan of the Washington Senators who sells his soul to the Devil, herein known as Mr. Applegate (Ray Walston the best part of the film), to become the player who can lead his team to the pennant. Some great songs but Gwen Verdon as Applegate’s temptress, Lola, is at most oddly sexy. You‘re way better off to read the book originally titled “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.” Fortunately there have been a lot of those lately.