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THE GREATEST BASEBALL FILMS  
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Peter Dreier
March 27, 2024
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_ Most baseball films are pure entertainment. But baseball is often
the setting for notable films that tell a bigger story about
America’s social conditions. As the Major League Baseball season
begins, here are 13 examples. _

The highest grossing baseball movie of all time, "A League of Her
Own," chronicled the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League
(AAGPBL), which existed from 1943 to 1954., Photo: Columbia Pictures

 

"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn
baseball," wrote Columbia University scholar Jacques Barzun in 1954.
That observation remains true today.  Our national pastime has
inspired great poems, paintings, novels, music, and plays, but for
most Americans, baseball is best represented by the hundreds of films
about the game.

Of course,  many baseball flicks were duds. Since the silent movie
era, for example, there have been at least a dozen films just about
Babe Ruth, including two of the worst films of all time – “The
Babe Ruth Story” (1948) starring William Bendix and “The Babe”
(1992) featuring John Goodman.

As we approach opening day on March 28, fans may want to watch (or
re-watch) some of the most outstanding movies about baseball. (There
are many great baseball documentaries, but they’re not included
here). 

Most baseball films are pure entertainment. But baseball is often the
_setting_ for notable films that tell a bigger story about America’s
social conditions.   For example, the 1976 film "Bad News Bears" –
about a girl trying to make it on an otherwise all-male Little League
team --  was not a great movie on its own, but  it appeared during
the early days of the feminist movement, and a few years after
Congress passed Title IX.  It inspired many girls to participate in
sports. 

The films described below address racism, corrupt business practices,
sexism, immigration, mental illness, homophobia, and workers rights.

“BULL DURHAM” (1988). Writer/director Ron Shelton based the film
on his  experiences as a minor league player for five years.  The
film depicts the players and fans of the Durham (N.C.) Bulls, a
single-A minor league team. It stars Kevin Costner as Crash Davis, a
veteran catcher who had a brief (21 day) sojourn in the major leagues.
The Bulls recruit him to teach promising rookie pitcher Nuke LaLoosh
(Tim Robbins) about both the physical and mental aspects of the game.
Each season, groupie Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) selects one Bulls
player as her companion and lover. She is attracted to both the naïve
LaLoosh (described as having a “million dollar arm but a five cent
head”) and the seasoned and sophisticated Davis. Baseball fans will
identify with Annie’s words: "The only church that truly feeds the
soul, day in, day out, is the church of baseball.”  Shelton
recounted the film’s behind-the-scenes stories in his 2022 memoir,
_The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham_. 

“MONEYBALL” (2011).  Based on the nonfiction book by Michael
Lewis, the film explores Oakland Athletics general manager Billy
Beane’s (Brad Pitt) effort to assemble a competitive team for the
2002 season with a limited $41 million payroll budget. With the help
of Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale economics major with no
baseball-playing experience, Beane looks for undervalued talent using
sophisticated statistical data. The team’s old-school scouts and
manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), as well as many fans, scoff
at this approach to evaluating players. The film chronicles Beane’s
success --  including an American League record of 19 consecutive
wins and the American League West championship. The A’s lost to the
Minnesota Twins in the Division Series, but two years later, the
Boston Red Sox won the World Series using those ideas. Beane’s
approach – called sabermetrics – is now widely accepted throughout
baseball. Many players appreciate the information they get to improve
their skills, but they also worry that it is being used as a tool by
owners
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to undermine their bargaining power during contract negotiations 

“42” (2013). Among the many fictional portrayals of Jackie
Robinson’s heroic crusade to integrate major league baseball, this
is the best. Even if you're not a baseball fan, the film will tug at
your heart and have you rooting for Robinson to overcome the racist
obstacles put in his way. It is an uplifting tale of courage and
determination that is hard to resist, even though you know the outcome
before the movie begins. But the film strikes out as history, because
it ignores the true story of how baseball's apartheid system was
dismantled.  The film portrays baseball's integration as the tale of
two trailblazers—Robinson (Chadwick Boseman), the combative athlete,
and Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), the Dodgers owner and shrewd
strategist—battling baseball's, and society's, bigotry. But the
truth is that it was a political victory brought about by a social
protest movement
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led by civil rights groups, labor unions, the Black press, radical
politicians, and the Communist Party. For example, Andrew Holland
plays _Pittsburgh Courier_ reporter Wendell Smith, but he's depicted
as Robinson's traveling companion and ghost-writer, ignoring Smith's
key role as an agitator and leader of the long crusade to integrate
baseball more than a decade before Robinson became a household name. 
As an activist himself, Robinson would likely have been disappointed
by a film that ignored the centrality of the broader struggle that
open the door for him  – and many Black players who followed in his
footsteps --  to pursue his dream.

"A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN" (1992) is responsible for one of filmdom’s
most famous one-liners: “There’s no crying in baseball,” spoken
by Tom Hanks as the manager of the Rockford Peaches of the All
American Girls Professional Baseball League.  The highest-grossing
baseball film ever ($132 million), it is based on the real-life
AAGPBL, which lasted from 1943 to 1954 and employed over 600 athletes,
playing a sport they loved while dealing with the sexist stereotypes
of the era, like the requirement that they all use make-up and wear
skirts as part of their uniforms.  The remarkable cast, including
Geena Davis, Madonna,  Rosie O’Donnell, and Lori Petty, portrays
the daily travails of players trying to win ballgames while worrying
about their boyfriends, husbands, and brothers in the World War 2
military. One scene makes it clear that the AAGPBL was, like major and
minor league baseball at the time, all-white
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unsaid in the film is that many players were lesbians
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but the league owners insisted that they stay in the closet and look
like the girl next door.  The film helped inspire a resurgence of
women’s baseball and softball leagues as well as a growing number of
women playing on all-male high school and college baseball teams.

“SUGAR” (2008).  Of today’s roughly 1,500 major league players,
one-quarter were born in Latin American countries, with by far the
largest number (11% of all players) from the Dominican Republic.  The
film follows Dominican pitcher Miguel Santos (nicknamed Sugar, and
played by Algenis Perez Soto) struggling to make it to the major
leagues and lift himself and his family out of poverty. Playing for a
low-level minor league team in a small Iowa town, he faces numerous
challenges. He speaks little English,  confronts persistent racism,
and feels lonely and isolated. He’s pitching well until an injury
during a routine play sidelines him to the disabled list. The team
eventually releases him. His dream shattered, he moves to New York
City where – like many new immigrants – he struggles to make ends
meet with dead-end jobs, far from home and from even the small
celebrity he enjoyed as a ballplayer.   

"EIGHT MEN OUT" (1988), based on Eliot Asinof’s nonfiction book,
depicts the infamous Black Sox Scandal in which eight members of the
Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to intentionally lose
the 1919 World Series in exchange for money. The team was one of the
greatest ever assembled, but in those pre-union days, owner Charles
Cominsky refused to pay his players a decent wage, fueling their
resentment and their willingness to take a bribe.  One of the
players, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, was an unwitting participant. In
fact, he performed almost flawlessly during the series (batting .375
with 12 hits, a World Series record), but he was nevertheless, like
his teammates, banned from baseball for the rest of his life. 

“FIELD OF DREAMS” (1989).  A year later, Jackson showed up again
in this film based on W.P. Kinsella’s novel, _Shoeless Joe_.  Kevin
Costner stars as an Iowa farmer who, while walking through his
cornfield one evening,  hears a voice whispering, "If you build it,
he will come" – one of the most famous lines in movie history. At
great financial risk, he plows under the cornfield to build a baseball
diamond that attracts the ghosts of baseball legends, including
Jackson, as well as thousands of visitors eager to watch the legends
at play.  In his final film role, Burt Lancaster plays Moonlight
Graham, one of the long-dead players who show up at Costner’s field.
The character is based on  Archibald Graham, who played one inning in
a major league game in 1905 as a right fielder but never got to bat. 
He gave up the sport to become a small-town doctor in Minnesota. 

"BINGO LONG AND THE TRAVELING ALL STARS AND MOTOR KINGS" (1976)_
_tells the fictional story of former Negro League players who travel
across the Midwest playing local teams during the Great Depression,
when major league baseball was still segregated. With an outstanding
cast that includes Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones and Richard
Pryor, the film depicts the harsh realities, as well as the fun and
pride, of Black baseball in that era. The film is loosely based on
some real-life Negro League players (including Satchel Paige and Josh
Gibson) and on the Indianapolis Clowns and other barnstorming Negro
League teams.  The Black players bristle at the low pay, miserable
working conditions and racism that bars them from the major leagues.
The James Earl Jones character, Leon Carter, compares playing for the
team’s owners to slavery and urges his teammates to organize a
player-owned team, a radical idea that was gaining popularity during
the upheavals of the Depression. Citing W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter says
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“nothing’s going to change until the workers seize the means of
production.” 

"BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY" (1973) stars a young Robert DeNiro as
dim-witted major league catcher Bruce Pearson. His teammates ridicule
him for his limited intellect and ineptness on the field. His only
friend on the team is the brainy star pitcher Henry Wiggen (played by
Michael Moriarity), who takes him to the Mayo Clinic, where he’s
told he is terminally ill with Hodgkin’s disease. During spring
training, the team’s manager decides to release Pearson, but Wiggen
intervenes, agreeing to end his demand for more money on the condition
that they keep the dying catcher. After Wiggen informs his teammates
about Pearson’s illness, their  attitude changes from scorn to
solicitude, and Pearson’s performance dramatically improves. Like
the Mark Harris novel from which it is adapted, the film ends with a
great last line:  "From here on in, I rag nobody."

“LONG GONE” (1987), the least-known film on this list, chronicles
the 1957 season of the fictional Tampico Stogies, a Class D minor
league team in Florida, led by star player and manager Stud Cantrell,
a once-promising player whose World War Two injury kept him from
making the majors.  Owned by two corrupt and stingy local
father-and-son businessmen, the team struggles to lift itself out of
last place in the Gulf Coast League. The Stogies’ fortunes change
when they sign a slugging catcher named Joe Brown.  Because this is
the Jim Crow South, and to keep the KKK off his back, Cantrell
introduces the African American Brown as a Venezuelan named Jose Luis
Brown who doesn’t speak English.  In  a game-fixing scenario
reminiscent of the Black Sox scandal, Cantrell and Brown are both
offered lucrative bribes not to show up to a pennant-deciding game as
the team competes for the championship. The outcome of that game
depends on a conversation about their ethical dilemmas that Cantrell
and Brown have at a local bar.

“THE NATURAL” (1984), director Barry Levinson’s adaptation of 
Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel of the same name,  views baseball as a
metaphor for the promises and pitfalls of the American dream. Roy
Hobbs (played by Robert Redford) is a super-talented ballplayer
destined for big league greatness, but various temptations – corrupt
gamblers, bribe offers from a team owner, and sexual enticement – as
well as his own ego, get in his way. In 1923, the 19-year old pitching
prodigy’s career is thwarted when a woman lures him to her hotel
room and shoots him in the stomach, causing severe injuries. Hobbs
quickly disappears into obscurity.  He  reappears 16 years later as
a rookie hitter for the New York Knights,  seeking redemption despite
the skepticism of his manager, teammates, and sportswriters. His
slugging inspires a comeback by the lowly Knights. By the last day of
the season, they are competing  for the pennant.  The Knights’
owner, betting against his own team, tries to bribe Hobbs to throw the
game. Here, the film dramatically diverges from the novel. In the
hands of Malamud, Hobbs strikes out, ending the Knights’ season. In
the film, he hits a towering home run, clinching the pennant for his
team and rescuing him from his troubled past – an all-American happy
ending. The characters in both the novel and the film draw on real
baseball figures but don’t refer to them by name, including Babe
Ruth, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Branch Rickey,  and, again, Shoeless
Joe Jackson.  The near-fatal shooting of Hobbs by a mysterious woman
is based on a true story.  Most analysts believe that Malamud was
drawing on an incident in 1949, when Ruth Ann Steinhagen, a 19-year
old stenographer who had an obsession with Phillies’ 29-year old
All-Star first baseman Eddie Waitkus
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lured and shot him in a Chicago hotel room when the Phillies were in
the city to play the Cubs. The incident received a great deal of media
attention just three years before Malamud’s novel was published. But
Malamud may also have been aware of a similar incident in 1932, when
showgirl Violet Popovich
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_shot Chicago Cubs shortstop Billy Jurges in another hotel  a few
blocks from Wrigley Field.  

“FENCES" (2016) brings August Wilson’s play, about a former Negro
League player frustrated by his life, to the screen.  It is 1957, and
the film's protagonist, Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington), owns a small,
run-down house with a tiny backyard in the Hill District, the heart of
Pittsburgh's black community, where he lives with his wife Rose (Viola
Davis). Maxson is 53 and earns $74 a week ($32,000 a year in today's
dollars) as a garbage collector, which he dutifully hands over to Rose
every Friday. Though he lives paycheck to paycheck -- and can't even
afford $200 to buy a television or $234 to fix the roof -- Troy has
attained a modest level of success as a member of the black working
class. He feels great pride in being able to care for his family, but
is consumed with rage over racism, which he believes has held him back
and trapped him in a life of quiet desperation. In the 1930s and
1940s, he was a star slugger for one of Pittsburgh’s Negro League
teams.  His biggest regret is that he never got to play in the
majors. By the time Jackie Robinson had joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in
1947, he was 43. He believes it was his race, not his age, that locked
him out of the money and fame that could have been his. The film is
devoid of any baseball action, but the sport is present throughout the
film.  Maxson keeps a bat and ball in the backyard, and often
ruminates about his could-have-been baseball career. His marriage is
filled with lust, love, tenderness, banter, and humor, but he takes
out his frustrations on long-suffering Rose and his two sons with
alcohol-fueled outbursts about his plight in life.

“FEAR STRIKES OUT" (1957) belongs in a category of its own. It is
not a great film, but it had a significant and positive impact on
American culture. It is the story of  Boston Red Sox outfielder Jimmy
Piersall’s battle with mental illness, based on his courageous book
by the same name, published in 1955.   In 1952, the 22-year old
Piersall had a nervous breakdown. At the time, mental illness was even
less understood than it is today, and carried a huge stigma,
especially for public figures like athletes and entertainers. During
his first full season with the Red Sox, Piersall's erratic behavior --
taking bows after catching a fly ball, getting into disputes with fans
and umpires and occasional fights with opposing players -- eventually
led to him spending six weeks at Westborough State Hospital, where he
was  diagnosed with manic depression, as bipolar disorder was known
at the time, and treated him with electric shock therapy and
prescribed the drug lithium. In his book, Piersall provides a frank
and fascinating account of his breakdown and how - with the help of
doctors, his wife, and his teammates - he was able to recover and
resume his pro career. The book describes his rise from the sandlots
of Waterbury, Connecticut to the big leagues, but it understandably
focuses on his psychological condition and his growing self-awareness.
Piersall went on to have an outstanding and colorful 17-year playing
career, including twice making the All-Star team.  Unfortunately, the
film -- starring Anthony Perkins as Piersall and Karl Malden as his
domineering father who pushes his son beyond all reasonable limits --
is awful, although it has some tender moments.  Perkins was unsuited
for the role. His acting was tortured and he obviously had no athletic
ability.  But because more people have seen the film than read the
book, it had a significant impact in de-stigmatizing mental illness,
and thus belongs on this list. 

One baseball subject that Hollywood ought to translate into a major
film is the struggle for baseball workers’ rights. It could center
on All-Star outfielder Curt Flood’s courageous effort
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in the 1970s, to challenge the reserve clause (baseball’s version of
indentured servitude) by suing Major League Baseball all the way to
the Supreme Court.  It  cost him  his career.  The film  could
also remind viewers of battles among professional players to organize
and unionize
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against greedy owners as far back as the late 1800s and fast forward
to the recent successful union campaign
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by severely-underpaid minor league players against the current crop of
billionaire team owners. 

_PETER DREIER IS THE E.P. CLAPP DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF POLITICS AT
OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE. HIS MOST RECENT BOOK IS BASEBALL REBELS: THE
PLAYERS, PEOPLE AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS THAT SHOOK UP THE GAME AND
CHANGED AMERICA (2022). _

* baseball
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* American Society
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* race issues
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* gender issues
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* working class issues
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