The Baseball Movie Countdown, 55-36
We are counting down the 75 best — and worst — baseball movies ever made from documentaries to musicals and everything in between.
A quick word about The Joy of Baseball podcast, where Molly Knight and I talk with all sorts of very cool people about, yes, the joy of baseball — we kick things off tomorrow! All Clubhouse members will get a free subscription for the first season. I think you’ll really like it!
Now, for Part 2 in our baseball movie countdown!
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.
Before we get into it, I will say that somebody — and I’m not going to name names here — nominated “Baseball Bugs” as one of the greatest baseball movies, knowing full well that Sepinwall and I have a blood feud going over whether Baseball Bugs counts as a movie. It does not, and it will not appear in this list even though I love it dearly.
No. 55: The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978)
No. 54: The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977)
I finally saw “The Odyssey” the other day. I’ll offer my review later, but for now I will only say “The Bad News Bears Go on the Odyssey” would have been one heck of a movie for Christopher Nolan.
No. 53: Rhubarb (1951)
Normally, I would be all in for a good-luck cat owning a baseball team and getting kidnapped by a bookie who stands to lose a ton of money in the World Series between New York and the Brooklyn Loons. But I don’t know; maybe I wasn’t in the right mood. I didn’t come close to laughing.
To be fair to the source material, H. Allen’s Smith’s book is actually quite funny, starting from the epigraph …
“This book betokens the death of the novel form in America.”
— Prof. Elmer Roessner
… to the preface’s opening line:
“Rhubarb is the cat who inherited nine more lives — a baseball team!”
No. 52: Spaceman (2016)
Nominated by Ellen Adair, I’m not entirely sure if she’s referring to the Josh Duhamel biopic about Bill Lee, the “Spaceman: A Baseball Odyssey” documentary about Bill Lee, or the Adam Sandler space movie that seems from the description like a discount version of “Project Hail Mary.” The documentary is good. I have not seen the Sandler one.
No. 51: The Scout (1994)
There is so much about this movie that depresses me. For one thing, it stars Albert Brooks, and the concept of Albert Brooks as a baseball scout is so funny and wonderful and filled with promise. You probably know that Albert Brooks’ brother, Charles Einstein, was the editor of the Fireside Book of Baseball and author of the wonderful “Willie’s Time.” This should have worked.
It didn’t. At all.
The player he scouted was the wonderful Brendan Fraser, who should have been an incredible choice — especially because he had the cool name Steve Nebraska.
That didn’t work either.
But most of all, the movie was supposedly based on Roger Angell’s classic New Yorker story simply called “Scout.” If you can find ANY of Roger Angell’s charm, eloquence, or storytelling power in here, you are a better detective than I am.
No. 50: Talent for the Game (1991)
I’m going off the board for this one — not a single person nominated it. Not one. Dozens and dozens of people gave lists — one as long as 90 movies! — and not even one could take a moment to nominate Edward James Olmos’s scouting take? I mean, OK, no, it’s not a good movie. But it’s better than The Scout.
No. 49: Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1949)
Frank Sinatra is in this. Gene Kelly is in this. Esther Williams is in this. No matter how bad it is, it can’t be THAT bad, right?
Well … it’s pretty bad.
No. 48: Damn Yankees (1958)
I think this is the better of the two baseball musicals because the story is better … I’m actually not even sure what the story IS in Take Me Out to the Ballgame. And the Damn Yankees’ song “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo.,” while hardly a banger, is way better than “O’Brien to Ryan to Goldberg.”*
*The Best Damn Yankees song, though, is probably “High Enough.” Oh, give those power ballads!
No. 47: It Happens Every Spring (1949)
The name of the potion that repels wood — the potion that Ray Milland puts on baseballs so he can strike out everyone — is methylethlpropylbutyl. I memorized that years ago, just in case it came up in a trivia contest. It never did, alas, and when I started to write this bit, I realized that I had forgotten the name and had to go look it up. It’s a bummer getting old.
Anyway, as long as you are in the right mood, you’d probably get a kick out of it.
No. 46: Fever Pitch (2005)
I was shocked at how many people put Fever Pitch on their favorite baseball movies list (even if one of them only put it on to emphasize just how much he loathes it). I kind of wonder if the movie would go down a little easier if it weren’t called “Fever Pitch” and it weren’t dubiously based on Nick Hornby’s classic about his fandom of Arsenal. Anyway, even though some on our panel showed real enthusiasm for it, I can’t in good conscience put Fever Pitch any higher than 46.
No. 45: Long Gone (1987)
No. 44: Stealing Home (1988)
I’m putting these together because, frankly, when Long Gone was strongly nominated by Ellen Adair, I thought she was referring to Stealing Home.
Ellen’s one-sentence review of Long Gone, which I have not seen: “An incredibly well-told, well-acted film; the depiction of racism & misogyny leans towards characters’ growth, mitigating its existence in the film — that’s part of the point.”
My one-sentence review of Stealing Home: I probably saw it 450 times because it was always on television, and I remember that Mark Harmon is a baseball player, and Jodie Foster was, like, I think his babysitter when he was young, and she committed suicide, maybe, and this gets him thinking he should play ball, or something like that.
No. 43: Cobb (1994)
