Quick takes on 6 baseball films

I’m a huge baseball fan (St Louis born and bred!) but have somehow passed the age of 40 having missed some of the greatest films about the sport. No longer! These are mostly classics that many of my friends have been giving me a hard time for never having seen. No excuses anymore.

The Natural stars Robert Redford as a hot shot young baseball player with dreams of being the best who ever played. On the eve of his debut, he is shot in the stomach by a crazy woman, and spends 16 years away from the game he loves. He shows up one day with a fresh baseball contract to play for the fictional New York Knights, the league’s worst team. After riding the bench for awhile, he gets a chance to play and shows everyone he is still the most talented player on the team. All of a sudden, the team starts winning. However, the owner and his business partners have betted against their own team, and they employ a hot sexy young woman to woo Redford, and it leads to a big slump in his playing. What eventually turns it around is a visit from his high school sweetheart, and resettling his mind. But when that long-ago bullet is discovered still resting in his gut, it threatens his team’s playoff chances, and his life too. I found the film a little heart-warming for its own good, and nearly completely unbelievable. For a player supposedly so naturally gifted, the player sure seems to be awfully streaky; he’s either hot or cold with nothing in between, and the team always goes the way he plays. Sorry to say, but in baseball, one man can’t carry a whole team (see Mike Trout). Decent enough film, but I’m not sure why this one gets so much acclaim. ★★½

We righted the ship with Eight Men Out, the story of the 1919 Black Sox scandal. I knew the story very well, having grown up on Field of Dreams as one of my faves, and was hoping for a great yarn of a tale. I was not disappointed. Starring John Cusack, John Mahoney, Christopher Lloyd, Charlie Sheen, David Strathairn, and a bunch more recognizable faces, the movie follows the infamous Chicago White Sox team as they are just finishing out a successful season as clear favorites to win the upcoming World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. Unfortunately, the team as a whole is living under the burden of not being paid fairly for their work, under their cheapskate owner, Charles Comiskey. As such, they are ripe for a deal when gamblers come offering cash to throw the series. The movie does a fantastic job of painting all the different parties in their respective colors: the players who are willing to throw the games, those who resent their teammates because they want to win, the various gamblers and lowlifes trying to make a buck, and the families of the ballplayers at home. It’s a true ensemble cast with a lot of characters and moving parts, and it all comes together great. I think casual film lovers will find plenty to like, but die hard baseball buffs will eat it up even more. ★★★★

Speaking of Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner is one of the best at sports films (I even like his, shall we say, less-than-popular films, including For the Love of the Game). It’s criminal that I’d never seen Bull Durham, widely regarded as the best baseball film of all time. The film that made stars of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, and solidified Costner (he had been in The Untouchables the year before), it is about the Durham Bulls, a minor league team with two players going in opposite directions. Nuke (Robbins) is a hot shot young pitcher with a million dollar arm; he has majors written all over him, if he can just get his head straight and be more consistent on the mound. To teach him the ropes, the team brings in Crash (Costner), a career minor-leaguer who’s played 12 years with only a single small stint in the majors. While Crash gives Nuke the advice needed on how to succeed on the field, Annie (Sarandon) helps get him straight psychologically. Annie treats baseball as her religion, and knows more about the sport than most men. Every year she picks one rookie on the Durham Bulls to share her talents with. Not only does she bed them, but she teaches them everything she knows about staying calm on the diamond and keeping your head in the game when under stress. This is a truly perfect film. It really gets you inside a ball players head and the psychological aspects of playing, plus, because of the realness of it, I could practically smell the hot dogs and popcorn. The movie exudes baseball. It is smart, extremely funny, and romantic without being sappy. ★★★★★

Going back to the classics with The Pride of the Yankees, the story of Lou Gehrig from 1942. It stars the great Gary Cooper as Gehrig, showing his life from his early days as a high school star, to his recruitment by the Yankees, and subsequent rise to stardom, ending after his diagnosis with the disease that would later bear his name, and his famous speech at Yankee Stadium. Going in, I knew a bit about Gehrig’s life, and was expecting this film to take some leeway with the particulars, as many historical dramas of this era did, and they definitely gave Gehrig’s life the Hollywood treatment. Still, I didn’t mind it so much, and the movie is definitely well done. It presents Gehrig as a bit of a saint, which is fine, added some stuff that didn’t happen, and stretched out his relationship with his wife (they didn’t meet until he was in his 30s, but the film shows them getting together when he’s still a rookie). All that stuff aside, Cooper gives a fantastic performance. It helps that Cooper was known for such a natural style, and Gehrig was your blue collar everyday worker kind of man. And the cherry on top came about 20-30 minutes in, when Gehrig is in the Yankees locker room for the first time, and in walks the Sultan of Swat. The filmmakers got the great Babe Ruth to play himself (as well as a couple other teammates). As a baseball fan, seeing video of the Babe in the flesh, walking and talking, left me star struck. ★★★★

As a lifelong Cardinals fan, I can’t watch The Pride of the Yankees without also watching The Pride of St Louis. The story of celebrated pitcher Dizzy Dean, the filmmakers here chose to almost entirely focus on Dizzy’s legendary colorful personality, so much so that it comes off as shtick. His fast-pace talking and self assuredness is endearing in the beginning of the movie, as he bemoans having to start in the minor leagues rather than whisk straight to the majors, but it grated on me after awhile. The movie follows his meteoric rise to become one of the best pictures in baseball and a world series winner with the Cards in 1934, but then Dizzy’s subsequent injury and quick exit from the sport he loves, only to find a second life in the broadcasting booth. Even as a diehard fan of the sport and the team, the movie didn’t do much to hold my interest. It’s rather forgettable and unfortunately. ★½

Finishing up with a baseball film from the writer/director team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who would later go on to make Mississippi Grind and Captain Marvel. Sugar follows a young man named Miguel Santos, a promising young pitcher in the fertile baseball land of the Dominican Republic. He lives and breathes baseball and dreams of making it to the big leagues in the USA, not because he loves the sport, but because he wants the money to help his family’s situation, who live very poor. Miguel, nicknamed Sugar, shows talent, and catches the scout’s eye enough to get an invite to spring training for the fictional Kansas City Knights. At spring training, he shows enough to skip rookie ball and go straight to their single A affiliate, the Swing, in Iowa. But there he hits a brick wall. Injured in a routine play, when he returns from the break, he doesn’t have the command he once did, and his confidence is shaken. I loved so many aspects of this film. The depiction of the pressures to succeed for young players, especially for those where they have entire families relying on them. The “haves” and “have nots” due to where they are coming from (Sugar gets a signing bonus of $15k, whereas another player in single A, an American who played on scholarship at Stanford, got a bonus of over a million). Plus the isolation Sugar feels coming to America, not speaking a lick of English. I think MLB has come a ways in the last 10-15 years since this film was released, in helping non-English speakers acclimate, but it still has to be hard. Great film. ★★★★½

• TV series currently watching: Star Wars The Clone Wars (season 4)
• Book currently reading: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy