The Baseball Movie Countdown, 35-16
We are counting down the 75 best — and worst — baseball movies ever made, plus an exceptional docuseries.
So here’s what we are doing — we are counting down the greatest (and not-so-greatest) baseball movies ever made. I sent out a massive email to several dozen of my friends and asked them to rank as many baseball movies as they would like. Some sent in just one. Others sent in as many as 64.
In any case, we put together a massive list of the movies … we have seventy-five of them in all, and we’re going to count them down all the way up to No. 1. If I pull off the timing (unlikely), then we will announce the greatest baseball movie ever made on August 20, which is the day Mike Schur and I will be at the Aero Theater in Los Angeles to introduce and talk about “A League of Their Own” (tickets here).
You can read Part 1 here — Nos. 75-56.
Just to clarify, this list was (mostly) put together by our crack panel of more than three dozen baseball fans. I do put my thumb on the scale when I see a serious miss, but in general, I am putting this list in the order of the voting. I say this for a couple of reasons. One, several of you wrote in to complain that Long Gone was listed WAY too low at No. 45. That may be so — I still have not seen it — but only one voter (Ellen Adair) nominated it, so that was as high as I could rank it.*
From here on in, every movie was named on at least four ballots. And our top 11 movies were all named on at least 10 ballots.
*Since the list appeared, a second person nominated it — but that second person is Ellen’s husband Eric.
And two, I’m going to tell you that the voting for the top four movies is REALLY close. I mean, REALLY close. I’ve been pretty up front with my view that “A League of Their Own” is the best baseball movie ever made, but I’m not at all sure it will be No. 1, even if the plan all along has been to have this countdown lead up to our LA discussion of ALoTO. The votes are still coming in.
And away we go …
No. 35: Major League: Back to the Minors (1998)
None of the people who put this on their list wanted to explain themselves. I can’t blame them; there really isn’t one good thing about this one. I mean, here’s how bad MLBttM is — the best line in the movie, best I can remember, is Bob Uecker as Harry Doyle saying that you could time a pitcher’s fastball with an hourglass. That’s not a good line. It’s not a good line even when delivered by Bob Uecker himself.
But that’s as good as this thing gets.
No. 34: The Fan (1996)
You would think that a Tony Scott movie starring Robert DeNiro as an obsessive San Francisco Giants fan and starring Wesley Snipes as a sort of Barry Bonds player — and with John Kruk in it! — would at least be, you know, interesting.
And the shocking thing is that … it’s not interesting at all. Maybe you know about the “Gene Siskel Test.” Siskel, one of the best movie reviewers ever, would ask whether a movie was more interesting than a documentary of the same actors simply having lunch. I don’t know that any movie has failed the Gene Siskel Test more profoundly than this one.
I do wonder: Is Robert DeNiro a baseball fan? I guess he has said in interviews that he is not, even though he played one in this movie, and he played a ballplayer in “Bang the Drum Slowly,” which you would bet is coming up. It seems to me that DeNiro SHOULD be a baseball fan. Al Pacino is supposed to be a big baseball fan.
Fun side note: Pacino reportedly wanted to play the fan in this movie.
No. 33: Mr. Baseball (1992)
Jason Kander strongly believes that Mr. Baseball — with Tom Selleck going to play ball in Japan — belongs in the top 10. Jason Kander also believes that “Centerfield” is the best baseball ever recorded.
I think we can all just ignore what Jason Kander thinks.
No. 32: Hardball (2001)
A well-intentioned comedy based on Daniel Coyle’s excellent “Hardball: A Season in the Projects” and starring Keanu Reeves and Diane Lane (and a young Michael B. Jordan!) should have been so much better than it was. It’s sometimes easy to forget, when watching a bad movie, that nobody WANTED it to be bad. Very talented people worked really hard to make it good. This movie so clearly aimed to be light, fun, and uplifting. It struck out on those three pitches, but let’s acknowledge the effort.
No. 31: Mr. 3000 (2004)
I love the premise — an egotistical ballplayer named Stan Ross* (played by Bernie Mac) retires with exactly 3,000 hits and then, at age 47, has three of his hits taken away because they were supposedly double-counted. He makes a comeback to get back to 3,000.
*Terrible baseball name. This movie could have been 9% better if they had given Bernie Mac’s character a better name.
There’s actually a lot of fun stuff in this movie — Robin Yount and Paul Molitor refuse to come to Ross’ number retirement because he was such a jerk, Ross (spoiler alert) sacrifices in his last at-bat to fall one hit shy of 3,000 so that he could help the Brewers finish in third place (how great is that!) and, in the end, he rebrands himself as Mr. 2999.
I’d have had a lot more respect for Jason Kander if he’d fought for Mr. 3000 as a Top 10 movie rather than Mr. Baseball.
No. 30: Trouble With the Curve (2012)
I would NEVER have put this movie this high — it is, probably, the most frustrating baseball movie I have ever seen — but the voters have spoken.
This did give me a great opportunity to republish my sprawling 2013 TWtC review.
No. 29: The Pride of St. Louis (1952)
I was surprised to see this Dizzy Dean biopic get more love from voters than other baseball biopics like The Winning Team (Grover Cleveland Alexander), The Stratton Story (Monty Stratton), The Jackie Robinson Story, and the wretched The Babe Ruth Story. Maybe by calling it “The Pride of St. Louis,” it reminded some of the classic “The Pride of the Yankees.” Whatever the case, it’s pretty awful.
No. 28: Fear Strikes Out
This biopic about Jimmy Piersall is pretty bad, but it is memorable. Legendary sportswriter Leigh Montville writes: “I should mention the one scene that I remember forever from all the baseball movies I have seen: Anthony Perkins as Jimmy Piersall climbing the screen in back of home plate at Fenway Park in Fear Strikes Out. That's a true oldie. Anthony was getting ready for that shower scene in Psycho.“
My first baseball job was covering the Charlotte Knights when they were the Class AA affiliate of the Chicago Cubs, and I spent quite a lot of time around Piersall, who was some sort of roving Cubbie instructor. Piersall was famously bipolar — that’s what Fear Strikes Out was about — but he was also a legendary grump. He yelled at me on numerous occasions, though I never took it personally.
I do recall — and I don’t know if this actually happened or if I imagined it — that at one point Piersall was ranting at someone, probably me, and somebody in the press box shouted out, “Karl Malden’s your old man!” Malden played Piersall’s oppressive father in Fear Strikes Out. Like I say, it might never have happened, but I do have a powerful memory of it.
No. 27: Million Dollar Arm
I liked this story a lot more than our voters did — well, I mean, maybe not A LOT MORE, but I’d have it ranked Top 20. Jon Hamm is fun. Lake Bell is fun. Bill Paxton playing Tom House is fun. The true-ish story of an Indian reality show that led to two baseball players getting signed to minor-league deals is fun. In the end, I guess the movie is predictable and not particularly memorable, so only four people nominated it. All I can do is bow to the wisdom of crowds.
No. 26: Angels in the Outfield (1994)
I don’t think anyone was voting for the original 1951 movie starring Paul Douglas and Janet Leigh — well, actor Richard Kind likes both of them — so we’re talking about the 1994 Disney movie starring Danny Glover and Tony Danza.
This one gets a huge rating boost from Baseball Hall of Fame librarian Cassidy Lent, who declares it her No. 1 baseball movie of all time.
She writes: “This is the first baseball movie I remember watching. And we watched it a bunch! There’s just something so hopeful about it, even when it hurts the heart (looking at you, Dermot).”
By the way, the orphan who sees Angels? Yeah, that’s a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Apparently, he’s a huge baseball fan — a lifelong Dodgers fan — which makes him one of our key targets for The Joy of Baseball podcast.
No. 25: Brewster’s Millions (1985)
