Greatest Baseball Movies

Here we are. The 2008 season is underway and the Sounds are 4-15…*blink blink* Whaaaaaaaaaatttttttttt?

Yeah, it has been a disappointing start to the season. We seem to excel during the day games and have, so far, been pretty opposite of excellent during night games. This is not a good trend. Kind of like being good at javelin catching. The Sounds are NOT a 4-15 team. They have some real pop in the middle of the lineup in players like Brad Nelson, Russell Branyan, Laynce Nix, etc. and also some good pitchers in DiFelice and Narveson as well as Bray and hard throwing rightie Luis Pena. This team is a long way from being bad and I have faith that more wins are on the way.

This weeks/months/years (I tend to procrastinate at times) blog was actually inspired by a day off in Omaha, normally not a source of inspiration. This blog is about baseball movies. More than almost any other sports movies, baseball movies tend to lend themselves to our best sides. Football has Rudy, but it is mainly populated by movies such as Everybody’s All-American or North Dallas Forty or Any Given Sunday. Boxing has Rocky I-CVII but it also has Raging Bull. Basketball has Hoosiers yet it also has a sports movie starring the guy from Welcome back Kotter. If you know what the name of the movie or the actor is…don’t contact me, you are obviously obsessed with stupid things. Get a life.

Let’s look at three great baseball movies. The Natural, Field of Dreams and Bull Durham.

The Natural stars Robert Redford who, despite being a pretty boy, has done some great movies Three Days of the Condor, The Candidate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid among them. The best way to look at this movie is that, to me, it is everything baseball CAN be. The golden age of baseball. Sentimental, sappy, full of hope. Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a can’t miss prospect who encounters disaster on his way to a tryout with the Chicago Cubs. He drops off the face of the earth for 16 years before deciding to give it another shot. His outstanding talent and desire to play the game the right way and help his team win wins out in the end. He even utters Ted Williams famous line, “All’s I want is that when I walk down the street, people would say, There goes Roy Hobbs, the greatest hitter who ever lived.” The only complaint I ever found in this movie is that it is based on a classic book by Bernard Malamud. In the book, Hobbs character is not a nice guy at all. He is an egotistical primadonna who takes the Judges bribe to throw the game before having a change of heart but his bad karma catches up to him and he strikes out with everybody thinking he did it on purpose. Then again, this such a hopeful film that Redford and director Barry Levinson probably had the right idea. Randy Newman’s soundtrack (yeah, the same guy who wrote “Short People”) is also a bonus.

If The Natural depicts everything that baseball CAN be, Field of Dreams depicts everything that we HOPE for in baseball and the impact the game has had on our lives. It pays tribute to the role baseball can have in the father-son relationship and the wonderful memories it can provide.

Field of Dreams revolves around Ray Kinsella, a family man trying his hand at farming. He has a great family and a great life but, he is haunted by the specter of his father, a man he cut out of his life at a young age in a moment of youthful rebellion. One day Ray hears voices in his cornfield telling him to build a ballfield in his cornfield. This starts a series of events which delves into the spiritual as ballplayers long dead come out of the corn to play on Ray’s field. The highlights of he movie to me revolve around Burt Lancaster who is great as Archie “Moonlight” Graham. Kevin Costner (Ray) and James Earl Jones first learn of Graham when they attend a Red Sox game and the scoreboard goes ballistic, kind of like the Guitar Scoreboard at Greer Stadium when it rains. Archie Graham turned out to be a ballplayer who played one game for the New York Giants and never got an at-bat, leaving baseball after the season. The two go on a quest to a small Minnesota town to find Graham only to learn that Graham died some 20 years before. Before they leave town Costner is transported back 20 years where he encounters an older Graham (Lancaster) who is the town doctor. Lancaster utters a great line only he could deliver. When Costner reminds him that he only had about a five minute career as a ballplayer before leaving to become a doctor, Lancaster tells him “Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes... now that would have been a tragedy.” Still a classic. James Earl Jones speech in the movie has been reprinted in ballparks all over the country.

Bull Durham is still the closest Hollywood has come to accurately depicting the minor leagues. Hilarious on so many levels it has a real affection for the struggle minor leaguers go through and just how difficult it is to reach “The Show”. From the bus rides to the everyday grind to the end of a players dream, Bull Durham captures the spirit of it all. Costner (again) does a great job as the grizzled veteran catcher, Crash Davis, sent down to Single-A Durham to teach prized prospect Ebby Calvin “Nuke” Laloosh(Tim Robbins) the in and outs of the game. Susan Sarandon plays a devoted fan who also happens to look like, well, Susan Sarandon. As the movie goes on, Costner teaches Robbins to respect the game while Sarandon teaches Robbins how to grow up in other ways. Of course Costner and Sarandon wind up together at the end. The conversations on the mound with pitching coach Robert Wuhl are priceless. Costner’s visits to the mound are even better. Costner was a pretty good ballplayer in his own right and the movie was written and directed by a former minor leaguer, Ron Shelton and they both worked hard to give the film an aura of authenticity.

There are some other good baseball movies like Major League and some bad ones like Babe. John Goodman looked like he was going to hit his own head with that swing of his. If you have some other favorite baseball movies, send me an email at chuck@nashvillesounds.com.