Can’t find a baseball game? Find a baseball movie
MIKE BURKE
Allegany Radio Corporation Sports
You need your baseball fix; you’re only human. Your inner clock tells you it’s baseball season, and it is. There’s just no baseball.
Face it, you’ve been watching archived memory-lane baseball games the past month or so when you normally would have been watching current spring training games. That’s just how it goes. Even if the repeat is a repeat involving two teams you don’t particularly care for, you watch anyway because the rhythm of baseball, which, in reality, is the rhythm of life, forces you to.
Baseball, after all, for those of us who don’t love baseball, but who need baseball, is hypnotic. It’s a proven scientific fact (Burke Laboratories). As Jimmy Dugan tells Dottie Hinson, “Baseball is what gets inside you. It’s what lights you up, you can’t deny that.”
Those words are spoken in “A League of Their Own,” the (spoiler alert!) greatest baseball movie ever made.
What constitutes a baseball movie? I am of the opinion that a baseball movie is not specifically about baseball. For when you set out to do a movie solely about baseball it fails miserably. Or so I’ve been told.
However, if baseball provides an undercurrent or a stream to the plot that follows a completely abstract storyline, said movie, through the evolution of time, becomes a baseball movie. Or a whatever kind of movie you happen to be looking for at the time, and at this time, we’re looking for baseball.
There isn’t always going to be a replay of a baseball game on, and even if there is, everything needs a little abstract from time to time. Even baseball.
Thus, as a public service –- no, actually, for my own selfish therapeutic purposes – I have dusted off the best baseball movies ever made to help guide you through our quarantine time.
If, for some reason, you have not seen any of these movies, I urge you to find them and watch them.
For as Walt Whitman said on the original Game of the Week, “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game – the American game. It will take our people out of doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.”
1. A League of Their Own (1992):
An absolutely beautiful film from the late Penny Marshall, from the music of Carole King and Madonna (who also plays centerfield) to the perfect storyline and cast.
It is the story of the real-life World War II-era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and the growing rivalry that exists between two sisters (unbeknownst to the oldest sister) who join the league. The cast features Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Rosie O’Donnell, Madonna, David Strathairn, Garry Marshall, Bill Pullman and Jon Lovitz, who steals every scene he’s in.
It’s gripping, heartwarming, heartbreaking, funny, accurate and factually based. And the actual baseball in the film is pretty darn good too. The only myth about League is that the film’s most famous line — “There’s no crying in baseball.” — is the film’s best line. Not even close.
The best line of the film is delivered by manager Jimmy Dugan (Hanks) when he tells his best player Dottie Hinson (Davis), who is about to quit because baseball has become so hard for her, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard … is what makes it great.”
And besides, everybody knows there is most certainly crying in baseball. The game, after all, as Bart Giamatti reminds us each fall, “is designed to break your heart …”
2. Bull Durham (1988):
The day to day (and night to night) of minor league baseball, written and directed by Ron Shelton, a former Baltimore Orioles farmhand, and starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.
Costner plays Crash Davis, an aging minor league catcher who is sent down from Triple A to the “bus leagues” and the Durham Bulls to mentor Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh (Robbins), a young pitcher who has “a million-dollar arm and a 5-cent head.” Both, however, become involved with baseball groupie Annie Savoy (Sarandon), and the story goes from there.
Actually, the story and the movie begin with Annie’s brilliant sermon on The Church of Baseball.
Best line: “It’s a long season, and you gotta trust it. I’ve tried `em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in and day out, is the Church of Baseball.”
Or … “Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls — it’s more democratic.”
Best tune: “Sixty Minute Man,” Billy Ward and his Dominoes
3. Eight Men Out (1988):
True-life drama about the 1919 Black Sox Scandal and how it nearly ruined baseball. Accurate to the word of the book written by Eliot Asinof, it has a great cast and tells a great story because, like “All The President’s Men,” it really happened, which is really scary.
It covers, beginning to end, the game’s most disastrous scandal that nearly became its fatal one, and serves as a great reminder that, yeah, what Pete Rose did was pretty bad and that he should never be allowed back anywhere near the game.
Best line: “Say it ain’t so, Joe. Say it ain’t so.”
4. The Natural (1984):
This adaptation of the Bernard Malamud novel is the one that got the 1980s baseball movies (good baseball movies) boom going.
Doesn’t stay accurate to the book, but in a movie like this one, in which Robert Redford is the star and has a gorgeous left-handed swing to boot, that’s okay. Directed by Baltimore’s Barry Levinson, “The Natural” also stars Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Kim Basinger and Wilford Brimley, who plays New York Knights manager Pop Fisher, but who will remind you of former Allegany football coach Jack Gilmore.
The film recounts the experiences of Roy Hobbs, a one-time phenom with great “natural” baseball talent, spanning decades of Hobbs’ life and career and the decisions he made along the way that proved costly.
Best line of the film? Roy Hobbs telling Iris (Close) from his hospital bed, “God, I love baseball.”
5. The Sandlot (1993):
Any kid who was not allowed to be in the house during 1960s summer days, other than to eat and to sleep, is in this movie. It’s about growing up, being on your own and finding great adventure with your buddies. It’s about the evolution of leaders (pee wee sports had thankfully not come along yet), lifelong friendships, family, and doing the greatest thing you’ve ever done in your life — play baseball all day long with your friends.
Every character in this movie is somebody you know and somebody you grew up with. You can name them as the movie plays out.
Best line: “You’re killin’ me, Smalls!”
6. Field of Dreams (1989):
A laid-back Berkeley dude from the `60s, played by Kevin Costner, and his former hippie wife build a baseball field in the middle of their Iowa farm and discover ghosts of baseball greats, including Shoeless Joe Jackson and the 1919 White Sox, are living in their cornfield.
The guy also comes to discover he has Dad issues (who doesn’t?) but gets it all straightened out by finally asking his dad to play catch, as though that’s going to help anything. But since the dad is a ghost himself, it works here …
Burt Lancaster is fabulous as Dr. Archibald (Moonlight) Graham. James Earl Jones, who plays a version of J.D. Salinger, steals the show with his haunting and stirring soliloquy on baseball and capitalism.
Best line: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”
7. Major League (1989):
Only thing you need to know — Bob Uecker as Harry Doyle.
The story is really kind of stupid, truth be told. It’s silly, it’s fun and not at all realistic. What does come through as real is how a great old city like Cleveland (even if the baseball scenes are shot in Milwaukee’s old County Stadium) will rally around and embrace its baseball team.
The movie gets off to a perfect start with the opening credits rolling to Randy Newman signing “Burn On” to panoramic shots of the great city of Cleveland.
Best line: Anything from the mouth of Harry Doyle.
8. The Bad News Bears (1976):
The way little league baseball is supposed to be. Walter Matthau is perfect as the beer-drinking ex-minor league pitcher Morris Buttermaker, who agrees to coach the Chico’s Bail Bonds-sponsored Bears team, which is made up of players who are likely future clients of the team sponsor.
Tatum O’Neal plays Amanda, the team’s pitcher. Jackie Earle Haley plays Kelly Leak, a neighborhood loan shark, who happens to be the best player in the league, and Chris Barnes plays Tanner Boyle, the team’s mouthy little tough-guy shortstop.
Essentially, a coming-of-age comedy that’s about not being taken for granted, standing up to the bully and, in the end, the beauty of sticking it to The Man, even in defeat.
9. Moneyball (2011):
A human look at baseball analytics during a time when the Oakland Athletics and general manager Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, were the only ones who did analytics. Now everybody lives by them, including the Orioles. Jonah Hill is great as the organizational stat geek.
Best line: Billy Beane on the A’s 20-game winning streak, “It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball. This kind of thing, it’s fun for the fans. It sells tickets and hot dogs. Doesn’t mean anything.”
10. The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976):
Two of the greatest entities of American culture can be found in this movie — the Negro Leagues and Richard Pryor.
Billy Dee Williams plays pitcher Bingo Long, who steals a group of his fellow Negro League players away from their teams so they can make their own fortune on their own terms by barnstorming. The players include slugger Leon Carter (James Earl Jones) and Charlie Snow (Pryor), a player scheming to break into the segregated major leagues of the 1930s by masquerading as Cuban player Carlos Nevada.
Best line: “You tryin’ to get my dander up, but I is unwrathable!”
Honorable mention
The Bronx Is Burning (2007):
Adapted from Joseph Mahler’s non-fiction bestseller, “Ladies and Gentlemen: The Bronx is Burning,” this production rates very special honorable mention because it’s not a movie. It’s an ESPN eight-part mini-series that chronicles the turbulent year of 1977 in New York City — the Son of Sam serial killings, Jimmy Breslin, the city-wide blackout, the New York City mayoral race, Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner and the 1977 New York Yankees.
Bang the Drum Slowly (1973):
In an adaptation of the Mark Harris novel, Robert DeNiro, two roles before we came to know him as the young Vito Corleone, plays the not-too-bright journeyman catcher for the New York Mammoths who learns he is dying. The real story involves his relationship and unlikely friendship with the team’s sophisticated ace pitcher, played by Michael Moriarty.
61* (2001):
Billy Crystal’s period piece about the 1961 home-run record chase by Yankees teammates Roger Maris (who won, sort of) and Mickey Mantle, and how it affected both players on and off the field. Great portrayals of both Maris and Mantle by Barry Pepper and Thomas Jane.
Cobb (1994):
Tommy Lee Jones was pretty scary as the mean, hateful and bigoted Ty Cobb. And since the mean, hateful and bigoted Cobb would have approved, it must have been a realistic portrayal.
Pride of the Yankees (1942):
Gary Cooper wasn’t a very believable baseball player, much less a believable Lou Gehrig when it came to the baseball parts. But for decades this was the baseball movie of all baseball movies, and a very nice 1940s love story starring Teresa Wright as Eleanor Gehrig.
The movie also contains the only believable portrayal in motion picture history of Babe Ruth (which in itself is disturbing), as the actor who played Babe Ruth understood the part perfectly … That actor’s name was Babe Ruth.
Mike
Burke writes about sports for Allegany Radio and Pikewood Digital. He
began covering sports for the Prince George’s County
Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in
1984. He was the sports editor of the Times-News for nearly 30 years.
Contact him at [email protected]
or follow him on Twitter @MikeBurkeMDT