My movie obsession predates my baseball obsession by a considerable length of time. As soon as I was old enough to sit up for two hours, my parents took me to a movie just about every week, without much regard to genre, quality, or—especially when I went with my dad—age-appropriateness. (Terminator 2 at age nine stands out for me, not just for the memorable scenes of nuclear apocalypse but because I had my eyes closed for so much of the film that I missed half the plot, and we had to go back and see it again the next week.)
Between going to the theater, TV, renting, and Netflixing, it’s a toss-up whether I’ve seen more movies or more baseball games in my life, but the count on both has to be in the thousands, which probably explains why I haven’t cured cancer yet. So it makes sense that I’ve got a particular fascination with baseball movies. What makes less sense is why there are so few good ones.
I hate The Natural. Field of Dreams is better, but not my cup of tea. Going much farther back, Take Me Out to the Ballgame is far suckier than any movie involving Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and ballplayers should ever be, and Pride of the Yankees has aged worse than Mo Vaughn. There is a handful of very good baseball films, mostly comedies—Bull Durham being my favorite, and Major League, and The Bad News Bears—and some decent serious ones: Eight Men Out, Bang the Drum Slowly, A League of Their Own. But there aren’t many of them, really, and I don’t think there’s ever been a truly great movie made about baseball. You’d think two classic American pastimes would go better together—consider how many great movies there are about organized crime, or for that matter, how many great movies there are about movies. What’s so uncinematic about baseball?
Got two words for you: The Sandlot. Boom. Read the rest.
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