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Baseball is a great game. I lament its current decline in popularity. However, despite being hardly the best athlete, I enjoyed playing and watching baseball growing up. Certain genre movies I grew up loving and certain sports I grew up loving both happen to be baseball. Playing baseball is different from basketball and football in some ways because there’s more of an individualistic nature to baseball. In basketball and football, multiple people play together (there are individualistic aspects to these sports, but bear with me). Still, when you’re up at the plate in baseball, it’s you against nine other team members playing defense. Hence, this article is titled Nine Favorite Baseball Movies, and a baseball game is nine innings. Nine also represents a unique number for movie lists, often in ten, fifteen, or twenty-five (or, if you’re so bold, fifty). I will controversially leave some movies off that people no doubt love. Movie lists, I believe, are meant to be a personal reflection of taste, not merely listing all the movies everyone loves.
Baseball movies and sports movies used to be a significant part of movie releases when I was growing up watching 80s, 90s, and 00s sports movies. The genre heyday was from 1988-1999, with loads of A-list blockbuster films centered around baseball. Films that were highly regarded and Oscar-nominated as well, like Field of Dreams. Everything from television films like Long Gone, The Comrades of Summer, and Soul of the Game. Ken Burns’s documentary Baseball was released by PBS during the MLB Strike of 1994, significantly damaging the game’s reputation. During the strike season alone, five major baseball movies were released in theaters (Angels in the Outfield, Cobb, Little Big League, Major League II, The Scout), though like the game that year, none of those films gained a strong foothold at the box office. By the end of the decade, baseball movie output had become stagnant. Baseball movies are almost virtually nonexistent despite some success in the genre from the 2000s until now, like The Rookie, Moneyball, and 42.
Baseball history is fascinating, and while I won’t go through it with you from the start, it’s a history that mirrors American history. From its conception, throughout its evolution, and even in its modern-day existence, baseball has a special and unique place in our national history and culture. It’s an American game. It represents American history, flaws and all, a reminder that while progress has been made, we still have a long way to go. The game represents life’s imperfect nature, but there’s also some justice because you only have to get a hit three out of every ten at-bats to be considered a Hall of Fame baseball player.
Baseball is also insanely philosophical, so I’ve always been attracted to it. I’m a very cerebral person. It’s game (until recently) that is not generally defined by time constraints. It’s a very theatrical game, so it lends itself well to motion pictures. I am a Phillies fan, and even when I think about great moments from the Phillies’ past, I think about them as if they were a movie. As if the 1993 team was a movie. The recent 2022 National League Champions as a movie. The game is mythic, nostalgic, and entirely unscripted.
Alright, enough of my rambling. Let’s get down to my nine favorite baseball movies. These will NOT be numbered from best to worst or worst to best, only by the year they were released in ascension. Remember that movie lists are meant to be a personal expression of taste. Now let’s play ball or something.
The Pride of the Yankees (1942)
I grew up a Phillies fan, but my parents were born in the New York market and are big Yankees fans. So naturally, I’ve seen The Pride of the Yankees multiple times growing up with my grandmother and grandfather. It’s a bonafide classic. This film is a stirring tribute to the great Lou Gehrig, whose career and life was cut short by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, later known to the lay public as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” The film came out only a year after Gehrig died and was a rousing success, becoming one of the biggest hits that year, nominated for 11 Oscars.
The Bad News Bears (1976)
How can you not have The Bad News Bears on here? The original underdog kids’ baseball movie. It’s a cynical but unforced film with scenes of raw emotion. It is also an unblinking and rather scathing look at the competition in American society. Not to mention it also happens to be hilarious. Walter Matthau was the perfect choice for Buttermaker. I’m also a big fan of genre director Michael Ritchie who had a long and varied career. This is one of his best films.
Long Gone (1987)
Ah ha, now we’re getting somewhere unfamiliar. I, too, had to seek out this gem recently because I had heard so much about it from Twitter followers. This is a genuinely authentic baseball story released on HBO in 1987, starring William Petersen, Virginia Madsen, Dermot Mulroney, and Henry Gibson. Despite being unheralded, it’s also widely celebrated by many baseball historians as one of the best baseball films ever made. It combines Bull Durham, Slap Shot, Bingo Logo (it just missed this list), and The Longest Yard. Luckily I posted the full movie available on YouTube, so please, if you haven’t, enjoy!
Eight Men Out (1988)
Another film I loved growing up and still love is John Sayles’ Eight Men Out. Though it takes liberties with history (doesn’t every movie?), it’s a wonderfully detailed-looking picture. The production design is fabulous, and the old-time baseball scenes are well-filmed. It brings you back to a particular time and place. Sayles wisely cast the picture with actors who look like they could be baseball players from the 1920s, including Michael Rooker and Don Harvey. It’s a film my dad and I often watched growing up, and for those interested in the seedier side of baseball history, it can’t do worse than this.
Bull Durham (1988)
I love everything about Bull Durham, and no, I don’t care that it’s more of a love story than a baseball movie per se. It’s about love, love of the game, romance, sex, and love of life. It’s a beautiful film full of many memorable moments and dialogue. It’s a wonderfully written film, Ron Shelton’s best sports movie, and a screenplay. Often considered the best baseball movie, and while I mulled putting it on the list because I wanted to highlight some other films, it’s also impossible to leave it off.
Major League (1989)
Another film near and dear to my heart, I can practically recite David S. Ward’s memorable screenplay line by line. Major League is a more cliche sports story than Bull Durham, but equally enjoyable to watch. The focus on memorable characters sets it apart from other cliche sports movies. There’s also just sheer love of the game, which comes across in how the sports action is filmed, which is authentic. It lasts because of the memorable moments and the great Bob Uecker as Harry Doyle.
Field of Dreams (1989)
At my very heart, I am a sentimentalist. I love baseball’s myth and sentimental nature, perfectly encapsulated in Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams, another film I felt I couldn’t leave off. Although there are minor flaws, like the dad not throwing the baseball in proper form at the end, Field of Dreams encapsulates the fantasy aspect of baseball better than any film, including The Natural. No matter how cynical you can get about the hokey nature of the film, it sweeps you up each time.
The Sandlot (1993)
The Sandlot is a film I watched often growing up, and it’s grown to become a significant cult classic, especially amongst people my age. This movie is pure nostalgia. It gets to the heart of what baseball is, which is about friendships and memories that last a lifetime. It represents a time when younger people responded to the game more. My favorite is A Christmas Story; it’s shot from the point of view of a child. Hence we think a relatively innocent dog is The Beast!
Little Big League (1994)
“Baseball was made for kids; grownups only screw it up.” We come to the star attraction of this list, Little Big League, one of my all-time favorite movies growing up and something I’ve seen around 15-20 times. It’s one of the most unjustly forgotten sports movies ever made. We’ve seen fantastic kids’ baseball movies like Rookie of the Year and Angels in the Outfield, but what separates Little Big League is that the characters are real people. The plot seems fantastical; a kid becomes the owner and manager of the Minnesota Twins. Billy Haywood is a bright, intelligent, sensitive young kid who loves baseball and is passionate about baseball and baseball history. This largely mirrors me as a kid, so naturally, I have an instant connection to the film. The screenplay doesn’t dumb down the proceedings for a mass audience; it’s smart about baseball, just like Billy. We believe that Billy could manage a professional baseball team. It’s also a reminder that the great minds of the game don’t necessarily come from the best athletes of the game. It’s surprisingly unpredictable as well. The ending doesn’t go reasonably as you expect. The film has a great subtext about Billy getting a big head and losing sight of what’s essential in life. I love Little Big League, and it’s just so fun to watch. It’s about the love of the game from a kids’ level. Even more than The Sandlot or Rookie of the Year, Little Big League captures that the best.
