From Field of Dreams to The Natural, 11 Baseball Movies to get you Ready for the World Series

It's the San Francisco Giants versus the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. After the Giants gave a proper thumping of the St. Louis Cardinals last night in game seven of the National League Championship Series, 9-0, we thought we'd celebrate the great game of baseball with an ode to some of our favorite films about the sport.

As long as there have been movies, there have been sports movies. Since the advent of the medium, going as far back as 1894’s silent film Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph, which captured a specially arranged boxing match between James J. Corbett and Peter Courtney just so that it could be filmed, we have thrilled at seeing athletes, already larger than life, portrayed on the big screen. Professional athletes and movie stars—who among us hasn’t dreamed of being one or the other at some point in our life? So it shouldn’t be surprising that films about athletes, about sports, are often some of the most beloved of all time.  They’re also a screenwriter’s dream—with built in drama, easily identifiable heroes and villains, and clearly defined stakes. Whether it’s an unknown, blue-collar boxer agreeing to take on world champion Apollo Creed, or a ferocious football game between inmates and prison guards, sports movies fulfill a primal desire in the movie lover’s brain—watching the little guy fight back.

It would be another 25-years after Corbett until the silver screen got its first baseball movie, 1920’s Heading Home, a silent film directed by Lawrence C. Windom about a young ball player by the name of Babe Ruth. The film stars Ruth himself, and there’s a moment in the picture that captured the inherent mythology that all great sports movies possess—Babe Ruth cuts down a tree to make his own bat. If that sounds familiar to you, you’re no doubt a fan of The Natural, which came out 64-years later and stars Robert Redford as a ball player whose bat, cut from a tree felled by a lightning bolt, becomes practically an instrument of godlike powers.

So grab your peanuts and your cracker jacks, and take a look at our list of 11 baseball movies that were absolute homeruns.

–Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) Paramount Pictures

When this film was released, not many people knew who played terminally ill catcher Bruce Pearson. What they did know was that his performance was incredibly affecting. In the film (based on the 1956 novel of the same name by Mark Harris), star pitcher of the fictitious New York Mammoths, Henry Wiggen (Michael Moriarty) is engaged in a contract dispute with team management. The film opens with Henry and his best friend, catcher Bruce, leaving the Mayo clinic where Bruce has just been told he’s dying of Hodgkin’s disease. When Henry abruptly agrees to end his holdout, so long as the team doesn’t waive Bruce in favor of a hot-shot young catcher, management is perplexed. Eventually the team catches on that Bruce is dying, and, as they rally around him, they hit their stride. Eventually, the Mammoths make a run for the World Series, but unfortunately Bruce is too sick to keep playing.  The actor playing Bruce, however, would be just fine. A few months after his fantastic performance as the dying catcher, Robert DeNiro’s star would continue to rise with the release of Mean Streets. 

–The Bad News Bears (1976) Paramount

If there’s ever been a better curmudgeon than Walter Matthau, tell us where you’re hiding him. In Michael Ritchie’s film, Matthau plays the hilariously named Morris Buttermaker (there is nothing smooth about this guy), a former minor league player and an alcoholic (no other professional sport churns out more alcoholic characters in film than baseball, and yes, I can hear you, hockey fans) who’s tasked with fielding a little league team of lackluster athletes, all of whom were excluded from the incredibly competitive Southern California Little League. The hapless Bears lose their first game 26-0, having to forfeit before securing a single out. Eventually Buttermaker finds some local help for his Bears in the form of the talented daughter of an ex-girlfriend, Amanda Whurlitzer (Tatum O’Neal), and motorcycle riding, chain-smoking, super athlete Kelly Leak (Jackie Earle Haley). The team, made up of singular personalities at each and every position, begins to gel. They eventually make it all the way to the championship game against their bitter rivals, the Yankees. The entire film is a boozy, hilarious riff on a team of misfits coming together, thanks in large part to the biggest misfit of them all—their coach.

“There’s no crying in baseball!” an exasperated manager Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) yells at his weeping right fielder, Evelyn Gardner (Bitty Schram). Dugan is dressing her down in front of the entire team for letting the tying run reach second after she (stupidly in Dugan’s opinion) threw home. This bit of dialogue became an instant classic in instantly classic movie that recently celebrated its 20^th anniversary. Penny Marshall’s film is set during WWII, when many of the country’s able-bodied ball players are off fighting the war. Chicago Cubs owner Walter Harvey (Gary Marshall) creates a women’s baseball league to make money. They send out scout Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz) to scout players, fulfilling another extremely satisfying film trope that is used in both sports and heist movies—the ‘assembling the team’ segment. If Oceans Eleven perfected this in our modern era for the heist movie, few sports films have done a better job than A League of Their Own did in introducing us to the players we will come to love.  Guess who the tough, smart, noble player is? Yup, the catcher, Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis.) This film boasted a considerable roster of talent, including Lori Petty as Davis’s younger sister, Kit, Madonna as “All the Way” Mae Mordabito, and her best friend, Doris, played by Rosie O’Donnell. Hanks, playing against type as a mean drunk (although of course he comes around) is, predictably, fantastic, but so is the entire cast.

–The Sandlot (1993) Fox

Scott “Scotty” Smalls (Tom Guiry) is the narrator of this coming-of-age baseball film, directed by David Mickey Evans, that recalls the summer of 1962, when Smalls moves into a new neighborhood outside of Los Angeles with his mother (Karen Allen) and stepfather Bill (Denis Leary). Smalls eventually falls in with a group of neighborhood boys who play baseball on a field they call the Sandlot, which is bracketed by a fence that pens in a gigantic dog they call the Beast (they try not to hit any homeruns, lest they lose the ball forever to this gigantic canine monster.) Think of The Sandlot as a sweeter, baseball-centric version of Stand By Me, in which the young stars of the film have a series of unforgettable adventures that will shape the rest of their lives. The film also includes a man who is no stranger to roles in great baseball films, James Earl Jones (also in Field of Dreams, who plays the Beast’s owner (the dog’s real name is Hercules), a former professional baseball player in the Negro League, who ends up becoming a staunch ally of the boys. It’s a feel-good movie, a celluloid rite of passage for kids who love baseball, summer, and getting into a little trouble now and again.

–Sugar (2008) HBO Films

Written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the duo who made Half Nelson, Sugar follows the story of Miguel Santos, known as Sugar, a Dominican pitcher who follows his dream of playing professional ball in United States and earning enough money to help pull his loved ones out of poverty. At 19-years old, living in Bridgetown, Iowa, playing for the Single-A Iowa Swing, Sugar has to contend with dislocation, racism and a series of sharp turns in his fortunes. The family he’s staying with, an older Christian couple who live in an isolated farmhouse, treat him kindly as he struggles to achieve his dream. Yet Sugar is more than just a baseball film, it’s a film about finding yourself as a stranger in a strange land, and the struggle to define, and then re-define, who you are when life doesn’t go to plan. There are many Latin American players in the major leagues today, and Sugar beautifully shows what so many of these young men must endure to make it in the majors, a hard enough feat without also having to uproot yourself from everyone you know and love.

–Moneyball (2011) Columbia/Sony

Based on Michael Lewis’s book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” Bennett Miller’s film is about Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane’s (Brad Pitt) struggle to compete against his big market rivals (the Yankees, the Red Sox) and their staggering financial advantage. Beane’s unorthodox attempt to buck the old school scouting tradition that’s been a part of baseball since it’s inception (and tradition in baseball is sacrosanct) to utilize data analysis to find undervalued players who have the right kind of stats ruffles feathers throughout the organization, especially with team manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Beane’s ace-in-the-hole is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), an obscure recent college graduate and brilliant number cruncher that Beane plucks from the Cleveland Indians. While Lewis’s book was rightfully praised, it was no sure bet it would translate well onto the screen, and when Sony stopped production before director Steven Soderbergh’s version could be filmed, it looked like it would remain on the bench. Instead, Capote director Bennett Miller stepped in, and with the help of his outstanding cast, pulled off what appeared to be something of an upset. Moneyball delivered everything you want in a behind-the-scenes baseball movie—the little guy (the A’s) versus the big guys (the Red Sox, the Yankees, over a 100-years of baseball tradition) while also being smart, beautifully paced and legitimately exciting. With fantastic performances from Pitt, Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Moneyball satisfies throughout. Whether or not you believe Beane changed baseball forever, you’ll agree that Moneyball flat-out worked.

The featured image is of pitcher Miguel 'Sugar' Santos, from the film Sugar, courtesy of HBO Films