My 10 Favorite baseball flicks

A couple weeks ago I blogged the best baseball books I've read (though I probably forgot a few to be honest). So now, with nothing happening with the Twins (will they really go to spring training with Johan Santana still in the fold?), we might as well cover the best baseball movies.
Movies are a little bit of a different animal. Many of them, perhaps most of them, are bad. Not that I haven't read some bad baseball books (Slouching Toward Fargo by Neal Karlen comes to mind), but I think movies don't try as hard to be good because they know stupid people will fork over their $8 to see bad baseball movies, something your average Joe won't do for a book.
(Football is worse, though. Almost every football movie is terrible. They create a bunch of cookie-cutter characters and make them hit each other, get some cheerleaders and a loud, obnoxious soundtrack, and, well, that's usually about it. Baseball movies aren't quite so formulaic - most of the time)

As a kid I can remember every time I saw a trailer for a sports movie on TV I immediately wanted to see it, and as a dumb kid, usually enjoyed them. As an adult, I almost never get excited about sports movies. I generally try to stay away from them, because they're usually lame. But there have been some very good ones.
This is my list, but I should stress that as I am no movie critic, I'm not calling these "the greatest baseball movies ever", but rather, my own personal favorites. Here's my top 10, starting at No. 10.

10. Soul of the Game
A made for TV (don't worry, HBO, not CBS) film set in 1944, after the death of segregationalist commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. With Landis' death, Negro League All-Stars Satchel Paige (Delroy Lindo), Josh Gibson (Mykelti Williamson - aka Bubba Gump) and Jackie Robinson (Blair Underwood) all sense that integration of the major leagues may be around the corner. Branch Rickey is indeed looking to break the color barrier for his Brooklyn Dodgers, but while Gibson and Paige both assume it will be one of them, if not both at the same time, Rickey is eyeing the unassuming, educated and soft-spoken Robinson.
While there's plenty of good baseball scenes, the movie is carried by Lindo's portrayal of the flamboyant Paige. The movie doesn't turn the black players into saints, instead showing them as human beings with just as many flaws as their white counterparts. The final scene, with a Negro League All-Star team preparing to take on a team of big leaguers, with racial tension scorching the field, is just about heartbreaking.

9. *61
Ostensibly about the homerun chase of 1961, this movie is really almost a bio-pic of Roger Maris, one of the most unfortunate souls baseball has ever known.
Barry Pepper not only looks just like him, he plays Maris as the tortured, nervous and uncomfortable person he supposedly was. Director, Yankee fan and tool Billy Crystal, surprisingly, keeps his hero worship mostly in check (though there is a useless scene where a fat italian guy that's supposed to be Yogi Berra appears at batting practice and recites a bunch of Yogi-isms in a forced and distracting manner). I liked the way the movie looked, from the uniforms to the stadiums, to the way they held and swung the bats (but what was with the helmets that looked like they were made of felt?).
By the end of this one you're really pulling for Maris, and feel bad that his record was broken by a bunch of roid-heads.

8. The Rookie
Based on the true story of Jim Morris, the 38-year old science teacher who basically made the Tampa Bay Devil Rays as a walk-on, the Rookie is so perfect as an inspirational fairy tale that it would probably be considered lame, cliched and contrived if it weren't true.
Dennis Quaid is barely passable as a pitcher (you can tell he worked so hard to make his delivery believable that it has an almost robotic feel to it), but he's great as a good-natured coach, teacher and dad, the kind of guy you would want to pull off something like this. It mosies along pleasantly enough for most of the way, but from the part where he gets called up to when he makes his Major League debut it's almost perfect, venturing into tear-jerker territory at almost every moment.

7. A League of Their Own
The fact that Tom Hanks has won I don't know how many Oscars and none of them were for his portrayal of "Jimmy Dugan" (based on the real-life Jimmy Foxx), doesn't seem right to me.
A League of Their Own is an important historical piece, because I don't think most people even knew the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League existed until it was made.
It's easy to pull for the girls in the movie, and they are all believable as ballplayers. The World Series ending is very well-done, partly because unlike a lot of sports movies, you really don't quite know how it will end. But the reason it's a great movie is how well it shows that baseball is something you fall in love with and don't let go of, and that that is something that has nothing to do with whether you're a man or a woman. Hanks' character begins the film hating the idea of women playing ball, but by the end he's neck-deep in it because he's realized it's not about the girls, it's about the game.
A League of Their Own would be higher on my list if it weren't for the horrible little-sister character, horribly played by Lori Petty, which occasionally threatens to ruin the film, and also makes the climax a little disappointing. But Hanks' performance is one of the greatest in baseball movie history.
The speech he gives Geena Davis when she tries to quit the team is mesmerizing, the speech he gives in the clubhouse before the big game is funny and touching, and his cut-off man lecture to the rightfielder (the second one) is an all-time classic.
Still my favorite part is when Geena Davis tells him right before the big game, "Jimmy don't you ever shave, you look like shit," causing him to turn around and say to himself under his breath, "We're gonna win!" Pure gold.

6. Bull Durham
Maybe the most overrated sports movie in history, but it's still pretty good, which is why it makes the list.
Overrated because some of the stuff in here is just plain stupid. Like Tim Robbins. He's terrible as a pitcher, and I didn't think his portrayal of the dumb, wet-behind-the-ears rookie was really all that convincing, either. There are some issues that stretch the film's credibility, too, like Nuke getting called up from A-ball to the majors (not impossible but extremely rare), a late-30s catcher accepting a demotion to A-ball (no team would even bother to try), and the scene behind the bar when Crash (Kevin Costner) pulls a baseball out of his jacket and Nuke can't hit him with it from literally three feet away. That scene is an embarrassment. Crash's "kisses that last three days" speech is also extremely contrived and lame.
And while I really like the Susan Sarandon character, the parts where she acts as a pitching coach to Nuke and a hitting coach to Crash are ridiculous and unnecessary.
Still, there's an awful lot the movie gets right, making it nearly impossible for any ex-player not to enjoy it.
The obvious highlights are when Crash tells the hitter what's coming when Nuke shakes him off (especially the second such instance), the "cocksucker" argument with the umpire, the fight over song lyrics on the bus, and Trey Wilson's "lollygagger" tantrum in the lockerroom. But there are less-obvious moments that the movie gets right, too, like when Crash shows up in Durham, announces he's quitting, then turns around and asks what time the next day's game starts. Or the scene when Wilson has to cut a struggling player, and the scene when Crash apologizes for a drunken tantrum he directed towards Nuke the night before.
Bull Durham is not the greatest baseball movie ever made, and certainly not the best sports movie ever made, as Sports Illustrated declared it a few years ago. But it's up there.

5. Fever Pitch
It's a credit to a movie that it can star Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore and still be not-horrible, let alone as good as this one is. In fact, I didn't really like Fever Pitch all that much the first time I saw it, because I didn't give it a chance. Any movie with Jimmy Fallon, I reasoned, couldn't possibly be watchable. But in the same way SLC Punk not only overcomes the presence of Matthew Lillard but is actually strengthened by it, Fever Pitch probably wouldn't work with someone else in the lead role.
In recent years I've come to absolutely hate the Red Sox, largely because of oversaturation and a sudden rash of phony "Sawx" fans, and I still love this movie. While it perfectly nails what it's like to be a diehard fan, it does an even better job, I think, of capturing the anticipation for opening day. The agony of waiting through winter, counting down the days, and the magic of finally making the walk to the ballpark, of emerging from the concourse to see that ocean of green on a crisp April day.
I also like how the movie paints Fallon's character as an extremist without mocking him or turning him into a bad guy. It understands people like him (and me). And the Berrymore character is well-written. She doesn't really get the fascination with baseball, but she genuinely tries to. This movie could be a good "how-to" manual for a couple in a similar predicament. And it's also very funny. It's kind of like High Fidelity, which isn't surprising since both are
based on books written by Nick Hornby.

4. The Bad News Bears
More than likely we've all been on a Little League team that had a lot of these same kids on it. Walter Matthau is definitely hilarious as the liquored-up coach, but the kids are the best part. I've known a lot of kids like Kelly Leak, and the fat kid, and the pottymouth kid, and so on. It also works as a sort of social commentary on how carried away adults can get with youth sports. The scene where the kid refuses to pitch for his crazy dad in the big game is a reminder that usually kids are more interested in having fun than winning. Certainly Bad News Bears is not politically correct (which is why the recent remake starring Billy Bob Thornton wasn't quite as good), but watching it today that just makes it funnier.

3. The Sandlot
In a lot of ways, The Sandlot is similar to The Bad News Bears, because it's another example of how much better baseball is for kids when adults aren't involved. They usually just get in the way, and this movie reminds you how much better it is when the kids can just be kids, and go play without having to worry about rules or wins and losses. The Sandlot is set in the 1960s, but it just as well could've been set at Linwood Park on Walker Way in Sioux Falls, circa 1990. As much fun as I had in Little League all the way up through Legion ball, the most fun we usually had as kids was getting a game together at the Park (if we were really lucky we could go 5 on 5 or 6 on 6), with no uniforms, no coaches, no umpires, just a bunch of kids spitting, swearing, sliding and fighting all day long, nearly every day.
The Sandlot is sort of a PG version of that. It's just a movie about what it's like to be a kid in the summer. You play ball, you go swimming, you have sleepovers - over and over.

2. Field of Dreams
A common theme among all the great baseball movies, and pretty much every one on this list, is the examination of baseball's role in the lives of those who love it. It's not just a game to those people, it's a significant part of who they are. Something that has shaped them, and that they can always go back to now matter how far they may have strayed from it.
Field of Dreams of course, takes this idea to an extreme. There are hardly any baseball action scenes in the movie, no "big games", and yet it has still managed to become almost the quintiessential "baseball movie".
You know the story. Kevin Costner builds the field and he doesn't know why he's doing it, but he comes to discover that baseball was the one common bond between him and his father, and it helps him rediscover himself and reconcile with his estranged (actually dead) father. Along the way he helps two strangers - a bitter, aging writer and a doctor who played an inning in the Majors but never got to bat - remember what the game meant to them, too.
I've read a lot of reviews of Field of Dreams that ripped it for being ridiculous, corny, sappy, etc., and while I can kind of understand how someone might react that way, I think that almost proves why the movie is so great.
If you look at it critically, Field of Dreams is sappy and ridiculous.
But that's sort of the point. Those who really love the game love it so much that they don't even question Field of Dreams. It's almost perfect.

1. Major League
Movie critics have never really given Major League much due. When it was released in 1989, it probably (and perhaps rightfully) seemed like a Bull Durham rip-off (aging catcher, goofy rookie pitcher, sexy and smart girlfriend).
But Major League improves on a lot of Bull Durham's mistakes (which, not coincidentally, were mostly baseball-specific things that your average movie critic probably didn't catch), and it also looks at the game from a bigger scope (Majors as opposed to minors).
The early scenes in which the film establishes the plot (the owner wants to tank the season to move to Miami), are often hilarious ("This guy here's dead!" "Cross him off then.")
But any baseball fan will be immediately hooked by the movie's realism. The spring training scenes are great, and establish right away that the filmmakers know how a Major League team is put together, and what the months of March through May are like for fans, players and the manager.
The in-game action scenes are the best of any baseball movie ever. Charlie Sheen was supposedly a good high school pitcher and it shows. Not only is he the best baseball-playing actor we've probably ever seen, his acting is also better than Tim Robbins' was in Bull Durham. Tom Berenger, Corbin Bernsen, Dennis Haysbert and Wesley Snipes (among others) also give true-to-life performances, while James Gammon is practically Oscar-worthy as manager Lou Brown. Bob Uecker is essentially playing himself as the radio guy, but that's certainly not a bad thing.
One could argue that the authenticity of the baseball scenes is less important than how well the movie is written, acted, directed and so on, but I think that misses the point. The actors are so believable that you begin to feel like you're watching and following a real team, and you begin rooting for them. As the Indians heat up and start winning you become a fan, and the movie does a perfect job of capturing the way in which a winning baseball team can take over an entire city. The scenes in the bar where the punk rockers are hugging the construction workers aren't just funny, they're true-to-life.
Many sports movies end with "The Big Game", and a lot of times that ruins them. But watching the final couple innings of the big game in Major League is almost like the real thing because it is so well done. The stadium is full and rocking, the players are on the edge of the dugout, the radio guy is standing up in the booth, and even though you know its a movie you're on the edge of your seat and your heart is pounding.
Then comes the most perfect ending ever.
Wesley Snipes comes charging around third with Uecker's voice-over, "Hayes around third, he's gonna try to score!"
The throw comes home from first, but Snipes executes a perfect hook slide. Faintly, you can hear Uecker saying, "He issss....", and the camera switches to a close up on the umpires face, and he screams, "Safe! Safe!", and we cut back to Uecker, who jumps out of his chair and screams, in the best line in baseball movie history "And the Indians win it! The Indians win it! Oh my God the Indians win it!"
That's the last line in the movie, but we still get another five minutes of celebration scenes, which, again, are perfectly executed. The fans rushing on the field, not sure what to do but just wanting to be a part of it, while the players hug everyone they can get their hands on.

A couple years ago I was working on a column about the best baseball movies that was to run in the paper, but it ultimately got cut when we realized it would be as long as the blog entry I'm doing right now.
But before that decision was made I went down to the Canaries clubhouse one day and went around the clubhouse, asking every player to name his favorite baseball film. Major League was an almost unanimous choice. And I specifically remember what Chad Hermansen, a former Major Leaguer said, because it was going to be the best quote of the story I was working on.
"Anyone who would say anything besides Major League," Hermansen said, "probably doesn't know baseball all that well."