The Top Ten List: Films About America's Pastime

By Chris Barrymore


As I am admittedly a bit more out of my element with anything other than fantasy hockey, at least from a statistical and/or historical aspect of the sport, I hesitate to comment on the All-Time Teams series or some of the other player-to-player comparisons on this blog. While they do make for interesting reading, I am simply not qualified to strongly agree or disagree.

At the same time, I strive to be an active member of the posting community, and I hereby offer a more pop culture themed Top Ten List.

There are likely some obvious films I have missed, or perhaps some older classics that I haven't gotten around to seeing yet, but off the top of my head, these are the baseball films I remember best, and therefore they make my top 10 list. Hit me up in the Comments section with some of your favs that didn't make my List.

I present them to you in chronological, rather than the traditional numerical order:

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The Bad News Bears (1976) starring Walter Matthau, Tatum O'Neil, Vic Morrow

A slim, pimply-faced teenager named Roger Ebert said this at the time, "Director Michael Ritchie has made a specialty of movies about competition. Downhill Racer, about Olympic ski champions, was his first film, and he also made The Candidate, about a political race, and last year's Smile, about a beauty contest. They're all three very good films - but The Bad News Bears is, in a way, his most harrowing portrait of how we'd sometimes rather win than keep our self-respect. He directs scenes for comedy even in the face of his disturbing material and that makes the movie all the more effective; sometimes we laugh, and sometimes we can't, and the movie's working best when we're silent."




The Natural (1984) starring Robert Redford, Glenn Close, Kim Basinger

This was filmed mostly in Buffalo, where I was living at the time. It was a big deal since Buffalo rarely gets any Hollywood attention.




Brewster's Millions (1985) starring Richard Pryor, John Candy

Not entirely a baseball movie, but Richard Pryor was one of the funniest guys around. Toss in John Candy and you can't go wrong.




Bull Durham (1988) starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins

A somewhat younger and slightly less fat Roger Ebert than you're used to seeing today said, "Bull Durham is a treasure of a movie because it knows so much about baseball and so little about love. The movie is a completely unrealistic romantic fantasy, and in the real world the delicate little balancing act of these three people would crash into pieces. But this is a movie, and so we want to believe in love, and we want to believe that once in a while lovers can get a break from fate. That's why the movie's ending is so perfect. Not because it seems just right, but because it seems wildly impossible, and we want to believe it anyway."




Eight Men Out (1988) starring John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, D.B. Sweeney

Ebert's old partner Gene Siskel, who nobody had ahead of Roger in the death pools of the day, had this to say, "Eight Men Out is fascinating if you are a baseball nut ... The portrayal of the recruiting of the ball players and the tight fisted rule of Comiskey is fascinating ... Thumbs up!"




Major League (1989) starring Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Corbin Bernsen

The fine folks over at Variety had this to say, "Major League lacks the subtlety of Bull Durham or the drama of Eight Men Out, but for sheer crowd-pleasing fun it belts one high into the left-field bleachers."




Field of Dreams (1989) starring Kevin Costner, Ray Liota, James Earl Jones

Now that Ebert has gotten a little older, a little wiser, a little greyer and let's just say heftier, has his man-crush on Costner waned at all? Nope: "As Field of Dreams developed ... I found myself being willingly drawn into it. Movies are often so timid these days, so afraid to take flights of the imagination, that there is something grand and brave about a movie where a voice tells a farmer to build a baseball diamond so that Shoeless Joe Jackson can materialize out of the cornfield and hit a few fly balls. This is the kind of movie Frank Capra might have directed, and James Stewart might have starred in - a movie about dreams."




A League of Their Own (1992) starring Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Madonna, Jon Lovitz, Rosie O'Donnell

Because there really is no crying in baseball. Or fantasy baseball. Right Commish?




The Sandlot (1993) starring James Earl Jones, Denis Leary, a bunch of kids you never heard of

Now looking less and less like a white Cecil Fielder, and more and more like a white dude who just ATE Cecil Fielder, our friend Mr. Ebert had this to say, "If you have ever been lucky enough to see A Christmas Story, you will understand what I mean when I say The Sandlot is a summertime version of the same vision ... Neither movie has any connection with the humdrum reality of the boring real world; both tap directly into a vein of nostalgia and memory that makes reality seem puny by comparison."




Fever Pitch (2005) starring Drew Barrymore and a bunch of less attractive people

This one gets a free pass into the Top Ten because Drew Barrymore is in it. Not much of a Jimmy Fallon fan, but I would watch Barrymore do a mime act in the shoe section of Target if that's what her career leads her to.

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