“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers; it has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”
—Terence Mann,
Field of Dreams
For baseball ideologists, the role of baseball in American culture is to serve as an example which the rest of the culture might follow, and to instill in America’s youth the values and sensibilities which will prepare them to become positive, productive members of that culture. The ideology of baseball is not just about baseball, but also about America. Baseball films have played an important role in constructing that ideological vision. Indeed, as Bergan (1982) notes, Hollywood baseball films have been especially pure in reflecting an idealized image of the game, and in keeping the mythology of baseball intact. Although the news media, particularly since the 1970s, have often provided a critical focus on the game and those who play it, reporting the unpleasant realities of drug abuse, escalating salaries and labor strife, and players and owners who seem to care only about themselves and the riches they can make from the game, baseball films have continued to provide audiences with an idealized vision of the game; the way it is meant to be. It is a vision not just of baseball, however, but of America. It is this vision which we shall explore in the discussions to follow. We begin, though, with an historical overview of America’s game in film—over 100 years of baseball cinema. While few of the films produced prior to 1933 were readily available to us, we are fortunate that a number of authors have documented the films produced in the first third of the 20th century. We are indebted in particular to baseball film historians Rob Edelman (1994), and especially Hal Erickson (2002) for their fine summaries of these early motion pictures, which we draw upon extensively in describing the first 20 years of Hollywood’s baseball feature films.
James Earl Jones as Terence Mann in Field of Dreams (Universal Pictures, 1967).
Given the prominent, even privileged, status the game of baseball began to assume during the Progressive Era, it is no surprise the entrepreneurs of the fledgling film industry would make it the subject of some of the earliest American films. The first attempt to capture the game on celluloid was probably the Edison Company’s 1898 kinetoscope short The Ball Game, which featured brief scenes of a Newark, New Jersey, baseball team. Edison’s single-scene Casey at the Bat appeared the next year. Filmed at Edison’s estate in West Orange, New Jersey, it depicts nothing more than a batter striking out and arguing with the umpire until the argument erupts into a bench-clearing brawl. Several similar kinetoscopes were produced in the next few years, but the sheer novelty of seeing moving pictures of baseball players would soon wear off.
Most of the commercial films made during the early 1900s were short features. Stories were kept simple, often resembling hurriedly-performed stage plays crammed onto one reel. Travelogues, comedy sketches, crude newsreels, and vaudeville turns were staples (Gomery, 1991). Films about baseball made during this era were little more than re-creations of baseball-related vaudeville routines or showcases for baseball’s stars, with brief glimpses of game action (e.g., 1907’s Christy Mathewson and the New York National League Team).
During the formative years 1905–1915, American films gradually grew longer, production and editing techniques more sophisticated, and subjects more complex. By 1917, Hollywood was giving the world feature-length narratives that would come to be called Classic Hollywood (Gomery, 1991). Baseball one-reelers were still well-represented during this period, notably by Universal’s “Baseball Bill” series, featuring titles like Baseball Madness and Strike One, and Selig’s “Mudville” series of comedy shorts. But movie audiences had come to expect feature-length films with well-known performers (the beginning of Hollywood’s studio star system), and baseball films began to evolve into the full-fledged narratives familiar to contemporary audiences. Many of these studio star vehicles would take baseball as their subject, or treat it as a useful backdrop, plot device, or gimmick.
Little Sunset (1915) was just such a star vehicle for action film actor-director Hobart Bosworth. Generally regarded as the first feature-length baseball film, Little Sunset, like many early baseball pictures, can also be properly categorized as a melodrama, with baseball incidental to its plot. The storyline is typical of these early baseball melodramas: “Little Sunset” Jones is the young mascot of a minor league team, orphaned by his mother’s death but befriended by the team’s star player, Gus Bergstrom (Bosworth). When the boy becomes ill, a distraught Gus fails miserably in the field and at the plate. Frustrated, Gus leaves the team, but returns for a joyous reunion with Little Sunset, just in time to win the pennant for the team. The baseball backdrop is secondary to the plot, and the plot is designed to showcase Bosworth’s screen talents.
Similarly, baseball serves as little more than setting in silent screen star Charles Ray’s star vehicles The Pinch Hitter (1917) and The Busher (1919). However, Ray’s films are notable for pioneering two staples—or clichés—of American baseball film. The first is the portrayal of the protagonist as hayseed-turned-hero. In The Pinch Hitter, Ray plays the rube ballplayer who leaves his rural home to play in the big city, only to become the brunt of urban ridicule until he wins the big game for his team. This presentation of the baseball protagonist would be reworked in numerous films, notably Associated Exhibitor’s 1925 remake of The Pinch Hitter, Buster Keaton’s 1927 comedy College, and Joe E. Brown’s baseball trilogy of the 1930s.
Ray’s other baseball film, The Busher, established a second staple used in many subsequent films, that of the minor-league talent whose success and promotion to the big leagues go to his head. The strutting braggart must then learn hard lessons in humility (in Ray’s case, he is fleeced by a notorious woman and demoted back to the minors) before realizing success both on and off the field.
Baseball probably had less to do with the success of these films than did their stars. Just how important box-office appeal had become to the success of Hollywood films is witnessed in the miserable failure of the 1916 film Casey at the Bat. Rather than casting a popular screen star in the title role, the producers turned to DeWolf Hopper, a Broadway matinee idol whose presence in the film was designed “to add culture and class to a still unrespectable medium” (Erickson, 2002, p. 14). Hopper had popularized Ernst Lawrence Thayer’s 1888 poem “Casey at the Bat,” reciting it thousands of times on stage, but neither his name nor his reputation would substitute for a Hollywood film idol. Audiences found Hopper unconvincing—Variety reported that Hopper “failed utterly to look the part” and “acted it extremely badly” (quoted in Edelman, pg.51). Although Hopper’s attempt to expand the Casey poem into a feature film was an unqualified flop, his popular stage performance of the piece was preserved on film with soundtrack six years later.
Audiences might not have accepted Broadway stars in motion pictures, but baseball stars were another matter. A pioneer in making the jump from the diamond to the silver screen was major league baseball star Michael Joseph “Turkey Mike” Donlin, who parlayed a successful playing career (a .333 life-time batting average, largely with the New York Giants) into modest film stardom. Donlin had dabbled in show business even while playing, teaming up with his actress wife Mabel Hite in vaudeville turns. In 1915, he starred in the feature Right Off the Bat, a film loosely based on his playing career. It is difficult to know just how much the story of Donlin’s career was embellished for the film, but it is worth noting that some five years before the Chicago “Black Sox” gambling scandal broke, Right Off the Bat portrays gamblers attempting to bribe Donlin to throw a championship game. When bribery fails, the gamblers assault and kidnap Turkey Mike, but he escapes and arrives at the ballpark just in time to hit the home run that wins the game.
Right Off the Bat was not a critical success, but it did solid box-office business. Studios were thus convinced to cast other ballplayers in films roles. Donlin himself went on to play supporting roles in a half-dozen other pictures, sharing billing with Ty Cobb in Somewhere in Georgia (1916) and Babe Ruth in Headin’ Home (1920).
Cobb was arguably the greatest player in the game when he starred in Somewhere in Georgia. The film—and Cobb’s performance—received a lukewarm reception by critics, but found favor with audiences. Cobb plays a bank clerk who competes with a fellow employee for the affections of the bank president’s daughter. Discovered by a Detroit scout while playing for the local team, Cobb is quickly signed and promoted to the big leagues. In his absence, the unscrupulous rival woos the girl and hires a gang of toughs to abduct Cobb. Cobb thwarts the scheme by thrashing his would-be captors, escaping their clutches just in time to win the big game and claim the hand of his true love.
A baseball name could also draw at the box office for a second feature, as Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson and his New York Giants manager John McGraw proved when they headlined the successful two-reel short Breaking Into the Big League in 1913. However, even the popular McGraw’s presence as co-star could not rescue the inane five-reeler One Touch of Nature (1917), the tale of a fictional Giants second baseman who overcomes his prominent father’s objections to his romantic involvement with a vaudeville performer by hitting a home run to win the World Series.
Both baseball and movie houses were, of course, racially segregated during this era, so there were no major league African American baseball players to cast in films, even those pictures produced exclusively for black audiences. There were, however, well-known black athletes, including heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson who plays himself in As the World Rolls On (1921). In the film, Johnson rescues a youth from a life of street crime by teaching him to box and play baseball. The young man goes on to play professionally for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League. The real Monarchs players are featured at the end of the film, perhaps the first African American ball players to appear in a Hollywood feature.
Headin’ Home (1920) is noteworthy for reasons beyond Babe Ruth’s film debut. One is the stark contrast of the story line with George Herman Ruth’s real life and his entry into baseball. In the film, the Bambino plays George, a quiet, unassuming, clean living young man who lives with his aging mother and younger sister in the village of Haverlock. George is too shy to approach Mildred, the girl of his dreams, and his great passion (besides baseball and Mildred) is whittling bats from blocks of wood. He is judged a buffoon by Haverlock’s locals, who are somehow unappreciative of his considerable baseball talents. George takes that talent to a bigger town, where he saves Mildred’s brother from the clutches of a wanton woman, then returns to Haverlock to (in this order) rescue Mildred from the unwanted advances of a crooked big-city ball player, hit the game-winning home run for the local team in the big game, and sign a big-league contract with the New York Yankees. Only in his baseball prowess and his affiliation with the Yankees does George bear any resemblance to the real Ruth.
Another notable aspect of Headin’ Home is that it is considered by some to be the last “pure baseball” release (i.e., a film about a baseball player playing baseball) made by Hollywood for nearly seven years. During this period, a number of film makers included a baseball element in their mix of subplots, gimmicks, settings, plot devices, and/or release titles. But as baseball-film historian Hal Erickson has noted, “baseball movies pure and simple were hard to come by” (2002, p. 15) from 1920 to 1927. Some of the films produced during this period come closer to fitting the baseball genre than others. The 1925 iteration of The Pinch Hitter, for example, is a barely-altered remake of the 1917 picture of the same title (although it can be argued that both versions were nothing more than melodramas dressed in a baseball uniform). Often considered a Western because it stars cowboy film hero Hoot Gibson and begins in a desert town, Hit and Run (1924) blurs the line between genres by marrying the baseball plot to the setting and stock characters of the Western. In Hit and Run, Gibson stars as Swat Anderson, the cowboy clean-up hitter for the Desert Twirlers. Discovered by a big-league scout (played by “Turkey Mike” Donlin), Swat is soon carrying his professional team, the Blue Sox, toward the league championship with his colossal home runs. Gamblers with their money on a rival team kidnap Swat, but he escapes in time to hit the home run that clinches the pennant for the Sox. Just as difficult to categorize (but much easier to criticize) is the 1926 baseball-Western Out of the West, in which cowboy/ballplayer Tom Hanley is kidnapped by rivals, but escapes in time to hit the game-winning home run in the big game. Out of the West’s only shred of originality comes in the finale, when Tom turns down a professional baseball contract to stay on the ranch and marry his sweetheart.
Producers also needed fresh angles and contexts for melodramas, a Hollywood staple during the first half of the century, so baseball is the incidental backdrop for films like Trifling with Honor (1923), Life’s Greatest Game (1924), and Catch as Catch Can (1927). These melodrama-baseball films (and others, from Little Sunset in 1916 to For Love of the Game in 1999) might not even merit mention in a discussion of baseball cinema if not for their unwavering fidelity to the ideology of baseball, particularly their presentation of baseball’s moral order, the dangers of gambling, the importance of marriage, and the celebration of the dedicated, honorable and stoic baseball hero. In Trifling with Honor, for example, Bat Shugreve is not only the star of the Pacific Coast League, he is also the escaped convict once known as the “Gas Pipe Kid.” When crooked gamblers learn Bat’s true identity, they confront him with his past and threaten to expose him unless he throws a game. Resisting their blackmail attempt, Bat goes to Judge Drury and make a clean breast of things. The judge has the blackmailers apprehended, then releases Bat in recognition of his recent status as a positive role model for America’s youth. Bat returns to his team in time to pinch hit the home run that wins the big game.
Life’s Greatest Game is more complicated but just as lachrymose. When Cubs pitcher Jack Donovan refuses to throw a game for a crooked gambler, the villain gets even by concocting a tale of marital infidelity that succeeds in breaking up Jack’s family. Jack’s wife and young son leave him, intending to leave the country by steamship, but literally miss the boat. By the time Jack discovers the gambler’s chicanery, wife and child are (wrongly) believed to be lost at sea. Eighteen years later, Jack is managing the New York Giants into the World Series when the Giants sign a college pitcher for the stretch run. As scripted fate would have it, the rookie hurler is his son, Jack Junior. Seething because he still believes Jack Senior abandoned him and his mother, the younger Donovan intentionally loses a World Series game to spite his father. Upon learning the truth and discovering his father still loves him, Jack Junior pitches and slugs the Giants to victory in the Series’ deciding game, and reunites his parents in the bargain.
Catch as Catch Can features a story line even more convoluted, thanks its subplot of political corruption. When baseball manager Reed Powers is accused of, then fired for, accepting a bribe to fix a game, only a handful of others know he is innocent. Reed takes the rap to protect the pitcher who did take the bribe and did throw the game: Phil Bascom, the brother of Reed’s sweetheart, Lucille. Phil, a decent young man, was coerced into this act of corruption by crooked political operator Ward Hastings. When not bribing ballplayers, Hastings is busy trying to depose the city’s mayor, who just happens to be the father of Lucille and Phil Bascom. Reed spends four of the film’s five reels trying to expose Hastings’ many schemes and clear his own name. This he does, of course, thus securing both the job of chief of police and the hand of the lovely Lucille from a grateful Mayor Bascom.
The hybrid of baseball and other genres was not confined to westerns and melodramas. During this period of quasi-baseball films, the national pastime would also make cameo appearances in comedies. In The Battling Orioles (1924), a Hal Roach farce (sans Harold Lloyd), the opening baseball sequence merely sets up the subsequent Roach slapstick feature. And The New Klondike (1926) is a comedy tale of the Florida land boom (which later turned out to be not so funny when the bubble burst) in which the principal characters only coincidentally happen to be employed in baseball, giving them a convenient excuse—spring training—to be in Florida in the first place.
Ironically, when “genuine” baseball films returned in 1927, it was once again Babe Ruth who was largely responsible for their re-emergence. After the Babe’s remarkable 1926 comeback culminated in an American League pennant for his New York Yankees, baseball’s popularity soared and Hollywood rushed to cash in with four major studio releases devoted to the national pastime in 1927. Fittingly, the first of these was Babe Comes Home, starring Ruth as a ballplayer trying to give up chewing tobacco, not for health reasons, but because the stains it leaves on his uniform distress the woman (and laundress) he loves. She relents in her attempts to reform the Babe, even providing him a timely chaw during the big game. Babe responds by hitting a game-winning grand slam, then swears off tobacco in favor of love.
Ruthian influences are also evident in two of the other 1927 releases, Slide, Kelly, Slide and yet another version of Casey at the Bat. In both films, the title characters are prodigious home run hitters who display the sort of brash charm, colorful behavior, and good-humored swagger of the Babe.
The protagonist of Slide, Kelly, Slide is Jim Kelly, a rookie pitcher and power hitter whose cocky demeanor and penchant for practical jokes alienate his New York Yankee team mates, the Yankee manager, his love interest Mary, and even his pal little Mickey Martin, the Yankees’ nine-year-old bat boy. Ostracized by the Yankees, who have lost all patience with his clowning, Kelly gets angry, then drunk the night before he is scheduled to pitch. To make matters worse, he aims a drunken tirade at his veteran catcher (Mary’s father) and the Yankees’ manager, then quits the team. The Yankees make it the World Series without Kelly, where they battle the St. Louis Cardinals to a 3–3 Series tie. But the Yankee pitching staff is completely spent, and Jim Kelly is their only hope. Little Mickey is sent to fetch Kelly to the ballpark, but on his way, the little tyke is hit by a car. In baseball cinema, modern medicine stands helpless in such situations, the only known remedy for children’s injuries and diseases being a spectacular on-field performance by the small patient’s hero. Hence, a humbled and remorseful Kelly takes the mound, pitches a masterful game, then wins the game with a thrilling inside-the-park home run. Kelly is forgiven by Mary, her father, the Yankees, their manager, the fans, and of course little Mickey, who is wheeled onto the field for the post-game celebration.
In contrast to Jim Kelly, Mike Casey—protagonist of Casey at the Bat, Paramount’s 1927 baseball offering—is more bumbler than braggart, a slow-witted but well-meaning rube with a home run swing. Casey’s prodigious appetite for beer and pretty girls completes the Ruth caricature. As the star of the Centerville town team, Casey’s favorite bit of grandstanding consists of turning his back to the pitcher until there are two called strikes, then blasting the next pitch out of the ball park (and occasionally the Centerville city limits). Such power displays catch the attention of the New York Giants, who sign Casey and send him to the big club forthwith. As he leads the Giants toward the pennant, a crooked character named O’Dowd conspires with Casey’s hometown rival, Elmer Putnam, to foil both Casey and the Giants’ hopes. The pair first convince him that he is so sick he should not play in the pennant-deciding game. Casey finally sees through the scheme in time to arrive at the ballpark to pinch-hit in the bottom of the ninth, with two out. Turning his back on the first two strikes, Casey takes a mighty swing at the next pitch—and strikes out. But wait! O’Dowd has substituted a trick baseball for the regulation horsehide, one that is impossible to hit. O’Dowd and Putnam are exposed and led away by the police, and the final at-bat is replayed with results so predictable only the distance of Casey’s home run is in question.
In complete comedic contrast to these Ruthian characters is Specs White, the hero of 1927’s fourth baseball film The Bush Leaguer. Specs is a timid, bespectacled, absent-minded inventor whose inestimable pitching skills are of much less consequence to him than his latest invention—an advanced gas pump. Accepting a contract to pitch for the Los Angeles Angels only for the purpose of financing his invention, Specs discovers he suffers from “crowd fright” when pitching in the “big time.” About the same time, he falls head over heels for Alice Hobbs, who just happens to own the Angels. Fortunately, Specs’ love for Alice inspires him to overcome his phobia and pitch the Angels to victory. Alice is led to believe Specs has sold out to gamblers, a charge that appears to have some validity when he misses the start of the pennant-deciding game. But Specs’ tardiness is due to his protracted yet successful negotiations to sell his invention for a bundle. He arrives at the ballpark in time to foil the crooked gamblers, hit the game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning, and win the heart of Alice.
The financial success of 1927’s baseball films led to fairly regular releases of baseball pictures for the next several years. Paramount’s 1928 entry Warming Up would be the most forgettable of the lot if it could not lay claim to being the first baseball picture with sound. In the film, small-town pitcher Bert “Bee Line” Tulliver is as insecure as he is talented when he reports to the majors for a spring training tryout with the Green Sox. Things go badly for Bert as he is tormented and ultimately humiliated by a bullying teammate named McRae. Only the intercession of Mary Post, the daughter of the Green Sox owner and Bert’s love interest, keeps the slumping Bert on the team. When McRae is traded to another team, Bert’s confidence returns, his natural talent emerges, and he leads the Sox to the World Series. But his old rival McRae is playing for the opposing team, and Bert believes McRae has not only jinxed him, but is vying for the affections of Mary as well. Facing McRae early in the Series with the bases loaded, a jittery Bert walks his nemesis and is promptly benched. But Bert must pitch in the deciding game of the Series and, inspired by Mary, who pledges her everlasting devotion from the stands, Bert strikes out McRae and the Green Sox win the Series.
Warming Up failed in just about every way a film can—Variety described it as an “asinine concoction” (quoted in Erickson, 2002, p. 470)—but especially technically. In an attempt to cash in on the success of Warner Brothers’ recent hit The Jazz Singer, the film was released with a hastily conceived phonographic system that attempted to match a musical score and sound effects on a disk with the pictures on the screen. The crude, unsynchronized noise it produced proved to be more a distraction than an enhancement.
The fact that Warming Up was a critical, technical, and financial loser did not discourage Paramount from trying again in 1929 with Fast Company, the first true “talkie” baseball film. A film adaptation of Ring Lardner and George M. Cohan’s Broadway play Elmer the Great, Fast Company did little to change the formula of the baseball romantic comedy. Elmer “Hurry” Kane, the Yankees’ power-hitting rookie, is a hayseed who falls for vaudeville actress Evelyn Corey. His love for her unrequited, Elmer begins to think about returning to his home town. Yankee skipper Bert Wade, fearing the loss of Elmer’s considerable talents, forges a series of phony love letters to Elmer from Evelyn. The ruse succeeds, and Elmer powers the Yankees into the World Series. A gang of crooked gamblers try to coerce Elmer into throwing the Series, and when Elmer’s average begins to slump, Wade believes they have succeeded. In fact, Elmer is off his game because he has learned the love letters supposedly sent by Evelyn are counterfeits. When Wade learns that his prize rookie is love-sick, not corrupt, he convinces Evelyn to come to the deciding game of the Series to cheer on Elmer. She agrees and to her surprise, decides she actually has a soft spot for the yokel slugger. Inspired by her affection, Elmer scores the game-winning run.
The musical They Learned About Women and the comedy Hot Curves, both released in 1930, could not sustain the box-office success of Fast Company, even though both featured the new technology of fully synchronized sound (to say nothing of suggestive titles). They Learned About Women even featured two popular vaudeville performers, Joseph T. Schenk and Gus Van, in the role of Blue Sox battery mates who moonlight as (not surprisingly) vaudeville partners. Between contrived musical numbers, a convoluted love triangle develops. The Wrong Guy—Blue Sox catcher Jerry Burke—is about to wed the Right Girl—Mary—but only because the Right Guy—Blue Sox pitcher and Mary’s true love, Jack Glennon—has been tempted and then jilted by a scheming temptress. Such failures in romance can have only one consequence in baseball films and Right Guy Jack predictably goes into emotional and baseball funks. Not until Wrong Guy Jerry, noble friend and teammate that he is, realizes Jack and Mary were meant for each other and reunites the Rights will the Blue Sox have a chance to win the World Series. Once reconciled with Mary, Jack shrugs off his slump in time to put down the opposing team’s rally and win the World Series.
Hot Curves also featured a vaudevillian, comic Benny Rubin, who plays Benny Goldberg. Benny is signed by the Pittsburgh Cougars ostensibly as a catcher, but in reality because Cougar management believes he will attract more Jewish fans to the games. Nonetheless, Benny proves his worth to the team, as does Benny’s pal, rookie pitcher Jim Nolan. As the season progresses, Jim’s pitching steadily improves and he strikes up a courtship with Elaine McGrew, daughter of the Cougars’ manager. Enter romance-wrecking jezebel Margie who proves so great a distraction for Jim that he is suspended for poor play before Benny can rescue him from the gold-digger. To add to the Cougar’s woes, Benny is thought to have perished in a plane crash. But Jim is recalled to the team for the World Series and Benny turns up to catch him in the deciding game. With the Cougars down by a run in the final inning of game seven, Benny gets a single and Jim belts a home run to win the Series and reclaim the affections of Elaine.
Despite mixed results realized from the baseball releases of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hollywood continued to produce baseball films through the 1930s. Perhaps the best of them were comedian Joe E. Brown’s trilogy, Fireman, Save My Child (1932), Elmer the Great (1933), and Alibi Ike (1935). Each casts Brown as a naive, small-town ballplayer who is used, insulted and/or duped in the big leagues, disappears for a few games, makes an unlikely return, leads his team to victory in the late-innings of the big game, and wins the heart of his love interest. It was a predictable formula but with Brown as the lead, Warner Brothers had an accomplished ball player and popular screen star to give credibility and box office appeal to the three money-making films.
The other baseball films of the decade were generally less memorable, be they comedic shorts like One Run Elmer (1935), a two-reel talkie starring Buster Keaton in a series of slapstick gags with a baseball backdrop, or features like the lamentable Swell Head (1935), a melodrama about a ball player blinded after being beaned and his struggle to recover his sight and his true love. Almost all dialogue with only a smattering of baseball, it is a point of some dispute as to whether Swell Head is even a baseball film. The same judgment might be made of Girls Can Play (1937), a murder mystery in which the star pitcher of a women’s softball team ferrets out the killer of her team’s catcher. “Murder mysteries abounded in the early days of talking pictures” according to Erickson (2002, p. 145), and film makers cast about for novel ways to frame these programmers. Girls Can Play uses baseball (or more correctly, softball) as little more than a unique setting into which the mystery formula is dropped.
Perhaps the only film that can truly claim to straddle the baseball and mystery genres is Death on the Diamond (1934), in which St. Louis Cardinal pitcher Larry Kelly turns sleuth to find out who is poisoning, shooting, strangling, and bombing his teammates in an attempt to derail the Cardinals’ pennant drive. Kelly himself is framed, set up to appear to be a conspirator with corrupt gamblers. In a climax true to the formula for both genres, Kelly redeems his reputation, apprehends the killer (with a well-aimed pitch), then slugs an inside-the-park home run to win the season’s final game and clinch the National League pennant.
Whether Death on the Diamond is properly categorized as a baseball film, while Girls Can Play is not, is a point worth arguing only as it affects the calculation of another lull in the production of baseball films. For at least five, and as many as eight years (depending on how one defines a baseball film), Hollywood lost interest in making baseball pictures.
Ironically, it was the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team previously notorious for ineptitude, who rekindled film makers’ interest in baseball movies. After nearly twenty years of franchise futility, the Dodgers captured the hearts and imaginations of fans across America by winning the National League pennant in 1941, and that in turn captured the attention of Hollywood. So strong was fan affinity that the Dodgers would be depicted in several more feature films in the following two decades, but Twentieth Century Fox was the first studio to try to cash in on the Dodgers’ newly acquired popularity with the release of It Happened in Flatbush in 1942. Mirroring the Dodgers’ rags-to-riches story, the underachieving and unnamed Brooklyn team in this feature is whipped into shape by their feisty new manager Frank Maguire. Along the way, Maguire faces challenges that include torpid players, new ownership interested mostly in profits, a romance with Kathryn Baker who just happens to be a member of that new ownership group, and a petition circulated among disgruntled players requesting his ouster. Undaunted, Frank relentlessly pushes the team to the pennant.
In 1942, RKO Pictures released The Pride of the Yankees, the film biography of New York Yankee great Lou Gehrig. The Pride of the Yankees recounts the spectacular baseball career and untimely death of Gehrig, a victim of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Released in the first year of America’s entry into World War II, the film’s opening narration pointedly reminds viewers that Gehrig’s “valor and fortitude” in the face of death would be necessary virtues for many young Americans in the years ahead. The Pride of the Yankees was calculated to appeal to a broad spectrum of film goers, combining elements of comedy, drama, and even a musical number. The film’s focus on the relationship between Gehrig and his wife Eleanor have led many to categorize it as a romance, but its depiction of the life and career of one of the game’s finest players places it squarely in the baseball genre.
The Pride of the Yankees is something of a landmark in baseball film for a number of reasons. In contrast to its mainly second-rate predecessors in the baseball genre, The Pride of the Yankees was a high quality production with top box-office performers, acclaimed by critics and moviegoers and nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Moreover, it revised the way Hollywood portrayed the baseball player. Although The Pride of the Yankees includes echoes of a past in which baseball was not entirely respectable and baseball players were typically portrayed as either semi-comic egotists, or naive, post-pubescent rubes, Lou Gehrig as portrayed in this film is no bumpkin, nor does he possess an insecurity, immaturity, or some character flaw that baseball must mend. The Gehrig played by Gary Cooper in The Pride of the Yankees is mature, decent, intelligent, humble, urbane, hard-working, and worthy of the public’s adoration. The film is perhaps the first to elevate its baseball-playing protagonist to fully heroic proportions on and off the field.
The Pride of the Yankees not only altered the way the cinematic baseball hero is portrayed, it ushered in a succession of biographical films of baseball heroes in the next decade and a half, depicting the lives and playing careers of Hall of Famers like Jackie Robinson, Dizzy Dean, and Grover Cleveland Alexander, as well as players who overcame enormous odds, like Robinson, Monty Stratton, and Jimmy Piersoll.
Ironically, Hollywood’s next baseball offering after The Pride of the Yankees was the unfortunate baseball B-comedy Ladies’ Day (1943). Wacky Waters is the ace of the Sox pitching staff and victory is assured when he takes the mound unless he is distracted by a “dame” (which we are led to believe in the early scenes he frequently is). His latest distraction is a Latin movie star named Pepita Zorita. With the Sox in the midst of a pennant race, Wacky’s preoccupation with Pepita threatens to cost the other players and their insatiably materialistic wives the money they will realize from a World Series victory. When Wacky and Pepita are married, the other wives hatch a variety of “comic” schemes to keep the newly-weds apart during the championship game, including assault, kidnapping and false diagnosis of a serious disease. Pepita’s absence does not improve Wacky’s pitching, and seems in fact to have the opposite effect. When she finally overcomes the machinations of the other wives to arrive at the ballpark, it is Pepita’s very presence that inspires Wacky to pitch the Sox to victory.
The next in the succession of baseball biopics was The Babe Ruth Story (1948). In this worshipful film biography completely at odds with the reality of Babe Ruth’s life, the Bambino is an oafish, innocent, and always well-intentioned fellow who rises from a happy childhood at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, to professional baseball, to virtual sainthood. Even the disappointments of his later life are tempered by his happy marriage to Claire Ruth. His feuds with management and teammates (notably Lou Gehrig), his carousing and promiscuity, and his failed first marriage are never depicted. The Babe Ruth of this film heals crippled children, rescues little dogs, beats up gamblers, saves baseball, and as he lays dying, volunteers to help others by trying an experimental drug. In any discussion of the worst baseball film of all time, The Babe Ruth Story will figure prominently.
A more pleasant baseball fantasy, It Happens Every Spring, was released the following year. Vernon Simpson is a baseball fan, research chemist, and instructor at Norworth University who is having little luck finding the formula for a substance that, when applied to tree bark, will repel insects. Such a discovery would secure both munificent funding from chemical and timber interests and his future with fiancé Debbie Greenleaf, daughter of the university’s president. While working in his lab one day, a baseball from a nearby sandlot game sails into his lab and smashes the lab equipment containing his latest experiment. Retrieving the baseball from the resulting mess, Vernon discovers the ball now repels wood. He salvages what he can of the formula from the debris of his experiment and concocts a plan to raise the money he needs to continue his research and ensure a future for Debbie and himself. He abruptly takes a leave of absence from Norworth, and pesters skeptical officials of the St. Louis baseball team into giving him a tryout. Thanks to a ball doctored with his formula, the powerful St. Louis lineup is literally unable to get any wood on his pitches and Vernon is immediately signed to a contract. Soon he and his secret wood-deflecting potion are dominating the league’s batters. Seeking to hide his true identity for fear university officials will not approve of his actions, Vernon plays under the name “King Kelly,” goes to comic lengths to avoid photographers, and sends Debbie letters so ambiguous in regard to his whereabouts and circumstances that she becomes convinced he must be engaged in criminal activity. Vernon pitches St. Louis into the World Series against New York, but just before the deciding game of the Series, Vernon spills the remaining formula and must rely solely on his own dubious pitching skills. With New York threatening to rally for the win in the final inning, Vernon bare-hands a hard line drive for the final out, in the process breaking his throwing hand and ending his “pitching career.” He returns home with the money he had hoped to earn, but also with the certainty that Debbie and Norworth officials will now want nothing to do with him. On the contrary, the entire campus has learned Vernon is the great King Kelly and he arrives home to a heroes’ welcome. In winning the big game and the girl of his dreams, earning lots of money and the affection of the hometown fans, Vernon realizes the typical rewards conferred upon cinematic baseball heroes, as well as a prize it is safe to say is unique in baseball cinema—Vernon is named head of Norworth University’s new research lab.
A notable aspect of It Happens Every Spring is the way in which film makers attempt to mitigate the plainly illegal doctoring of the baseball to win games. As baseball historian Hal Erickson writes:
... Yes, the hero of It Happens Every Spring is cheating. No, It Happens Every Spring does not advocate cheating; nor does it state flat out that the team could not have won without cheating. The script very carefully underlines several plot points that take the curse off the loaded-ball gimmick [2002, pp 237].
Viewers have far less moral ambiguity to contend with in another 1949 release, The Kid From Cleveland, a cautionary morality play about juvenile delinquency that seems tragically innocent today. Mike Jackson, a broadcaster for the Indians, befriends young Johnny Barrows and helps him become a batboy for the Tribe. Johnny is a runaway, the product of a bad home environment. The redeeming milieu of baseball, we are led to believe, rescues the boy from a life of crime. In the end, Mike is romancing Johnny’s analyst, Johnny is straightening out his life and family relationships, and the Indians are winning the 1948 World Series.
The Stratton Story is the inspiring 1949 baseball biography of Monty Stratton, an All-Star pitcher for the Chicago White Sox who wounds himself in a hunting accident following the 1938 season. Stratton loses his leg as a result of the accident, and despite the unflagging and patient support of his wife Ethel, he broods over his misfortune for months. As he helps his infant son learn to walk, Monty decides it is time for him to learn to use his prosthesis to do the same. Father and son are soon taking walks together, and more, Monty is throwing again, pitching to Ethel in the yard of the family farm. As he adjusts to life with his artificial limb, Monty’s spirits are restored. The Strattons decide to attend a Texas League All-Star game between the Western and Southern All-Stars at the invitation of the Southern All-Stars’ manager. Unbeknownst to anyone except the manager is the fact that Monty means to pitch in the game, to prove to himself and others that despite the loss of his leg, he is “just the same as anybody else.” Things do not go well for Monty in the early innings, but his shakiness proves to be mostly rust and nerves. As the game progresses, he is increasingly effective, and even hits and runs bases tolerably well. Frustrated opponents bunt to try to reach base, but the tactic fails when Monty proves he can field as well as he pitches. Behind Monty’s gritty effort, the Southern All-Stars win the game, but more importantly, Monty Stratton has triumphed over a cruel tragedy.
Take Me Out To The Ballgame was the fourth baseball film of 1949, but the first musical comedy set to baseball since the release of They Learned About Women in 1930. The musical numbers and drollery dress up a plot that is pretty ordinary baseball cinema. Eddie O’Brien and Dennis Ryan play for the Wolves and the spend the off-season performing as a vaudeville team. Arriving at spring training in Florida prior to the 1906 season, they discover that the Wolves have a new owner, K.C. Higgins, who happens to be a woman (and one who knows baseball, at that). In their first encounter during a Wolves batting practice session, Eddie is insubordinate and K.C. shows him up. Worse, her strict rules for the team threaten to cramp his moonlighting as a song and dance man. But as Eddie attempts to soften up his new boss, he ends up falling for her, and she for him. Enter the inevitable gambler: Joe Lorgan is the owner of a vaudeville club who has bet heavily against the Wolves’ success. He attempts to protect his wagers by hiring Eddie as the top act for his club, a move calculated to wear him out rehearsing all night. Eddie slumps and so do the Wolves, their division lead dwindling rapidly as the season draws to a close. When K.C. learns that Eddie is breaking training, she assumes he is chasing after chorus girls and fires him, and Lorgan, his scheme working better than he hoped, does the same. Eddie’s fans will have none of it, however, and their chants force K.C. to reinstate Eddie just before the critical game of the pennant drive. K.C. forgives Eddie when she learns of Lorgan’s plot and in a farce of mistaken intentions, Dennis gets on base and Eddie hits a home run to win the big game.
Just three years after breaking major league baseball’s color barrier, Jackie Robinson himself starred in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950). Unlike some of the earlier baseball biopics, the film is largely faithful to the events of Robinson’s life and baseball career, although it often softens the nature and intensity of the abuse Robinson actually endured. The film chronicles Robinson’s stellar achievements as a multi-sport collegiate star at Pasadena City College and UCLA, and his frustration in searching for meaningful work in “Jim Crow” America following graduation. After serving in the military, Robinson becomes a star second baseman for the Kansas City Monarchs’ Negro League team. He is scouted and recruited by Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, who selects Robinson to break the color barrier based on the player’s background, character, ability and most of all, the courage to play through the discrimination and hostility he is sure to face. Rickey warns young Jackie that the task of integrating baseball will be an unpleasant and harrowing one, and indeed Robinson faces open and ugly racism from fans, opponents, and even teammates, first on the Dodgers’ Montreal farm club, then in the major leagues. Jackie perseveres, demonstrating both his talent and mettle, proving the skeptics wrong, helping the Dodgers win the National League pennant, and ushering in a new age of race relations in America.
The other 1950 baseball release, Kill the Umpire also serves up a lesson in understanding, albeit one of rather less social significance. Bill Johnson is a former baseball player, a rabid fan and a baiter of umpires. He attends spring training games near his Florida home, but appears to enjoy loudly disparaging umpires more than the game itself. He misses work to take in a ballgame once too often, however, and is fired. With his long-suffering wife threatening to leave him and his angry father-in-law, a former umpire, pressuring him, he reluctantly enrolls in a school for umpires. Although initially (and intentionally) the worst student in the school, Bill begins to take his role as umpire seriously and upon graduation is assigned to the Texas Interstate League, a circuit notorious for its fans’ abuse of game officials. Now Bill is on the receiving end of the harassment, but he steadfastly maintains his composure and integrity, even when threatened by perfidious gamblers and angry crowds.
Another lesson in the redemptive powers of baseball, Angels in the Outfield (1951) is the fantasy tale of crusty, bellicose Guffy McGovern who manages a Pittsburgh Pirate team wallowing in the National League cellar. McGovern prowls the dugout bellowing obscenities, perhaps understandably, as he manages an embarrassingly inept Pirate team. One evening, while alone in Forbes Field, McGovern receives a visit from the Angel Gabriel, who takes the manager to task for his belligerent and profane ways, and makes it clear a kinder, gentler approach will yield the miracle his Pirates need to win. And so it does—McGovern changes his attitude and his habits, and the Pirates go on a ten-game winning streak. When he reverts back to his old manner, the team slumps. Helping Guffy find the better man inside him are his love interest, novice sportswriter Jennifer Paige and a little orphan girl, Bridget White, whose prayers summoned Gabriel in the first place. Things are going well for the reformed McGovern until late in the season when he is stunned by a line drive. In his dazed condition he mentions to the press the unique arrangement with angels. Baseball officials order a hearing to determine Guffy’s mental competency, but the Commissioner ignores the testimony of a psychiatrist in favor of that of three clergymen. On to the big game, where Guffy performs his greatest act of kindness. He has learned from Gabriel that fading veteran pitcher Saul Hellman is destined to die in the off-season. With the pennant on the line, Guffy gives Hellman one more shot at glory, and Hellman responds with a gutsy performance to win the game. Predictably, the reformed Guffy marries Jennifer and they adopt little Bridget.
Those who prefer their supernatural influences on the game to be a bit less celestial might find 1951’s other baseball comedy, Rhubarb, more to their liking. Rhubarb is the feline companion of millionaire Thaddeus J. Banner, owner of the Brooklyn Loons. When the eccentric Banner dies, he bequeaths the team and $30 million to Rhubarb, and designates his press agent Eric Yeager as the cat’s guardian. Imbroglios abound. It seems Rhubarb is not the only heir—Banner’s conniving daughter Myra vainly attempts to depose Rhubarb throughout the film. Eric’s life is complicated when his fiancé (and daughter of the Loons’ manager) Polly Sickles discovers she is allergic to Rhubarb. And the Loons are none too happy about having a cat for an owner. Yeager convinces the team Rhubarb will bring them luck, and much to his surprise, that is exactly what happens. Rhubarb becomes a fixture in the Brooklyn dugout, the players petting their feline good-luck charm before they go to bat, and in no time the once-hapless Loons bust out of the cellar and into the pennant race. None of this success is lost on the spurned Myra. She hatches a plot with crooked gambler Pencil Louie, a bookie with heavy bets against the Loons, to kidnap Rhubarb during the World Series. Eric manages to find the kidnapper’s hideout and Rhubarb escapes to turn up at the ballpark in time to inspire a Brooklyn victory. Polly discovers she is not allergic to Rhubarb, but to the lining of his cage, clearing the way for her marriage to Eric, and a big happy family with Rhubarb and his many offspring.
Two more baseball biographies were released in 1952, and while both claimed to be “true stories,” neither is a particularly accurate account of their protagonists’ lives. The Pride of St. Louis is the story of Hall of Fame pitcher Jerome “Dizzy” Dean, a congenial, cocksure young pitcher who climbs the baseball ladder from an Ozarks minor league team to the St. Louis Cardinals’ “Gas House Gang” of the 1930s. Along the way he meets and marries the love of his life, Pat Nash. Dizzy averages 24 wins a season during a five-year span and, along with his brother Paul “Daffy” Dean, pitches the Cardinals to a World Series championship. The brothers become wildly popular, clowning with fans, charming the sportswriters, and generally acting like kids in a major league candy store. But this is a baseball biopic, so it is all too good to last. Dizzy is injured while pitching in the All-Star game, and he never recovers his form. He is traded to the Cubs, then sent to the minors. He broods, begins to drink and gamble, and he hits bottom when Pat, tired of waiting for him to grow up, leaves him. His salvation is, of course, baseball—Diz gets back in the game as the Cardinals’ radio announcer. His distinctive, folksy radio presence rekindles his popularity with fans, but his mangling of syntax and grammar brings down the wrath of what appears to be every teacher of English within the sound of his voice. A chastened Dizzy offers to quit the broadcast booth in the interests of the youth of Missouri and Southern Illinois. In what he thinks is his farewell broadcast, he counsels his young listeners to get the education he never had, and to “give it everything you’ve got.” The teachers are so moved, they drop their complaint. Pat is so moved, she returns to his side. The sponsors are so moved, they keep Dizzy in the booth, where he becomes one of the game’s most beloved announcers.
The Winning Team, released a scant six weeks after The Pride of St. Louis, is an even more inaccurate (to say nothing of mawkish) baseball biography that ostensibly chronicles the life and career of Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander (played by Ronald Reagan). As a young man, “Alex,” has no plans for baseball beyond the few dollars he might earn playing in the bush leagues to put toward a farm, where he will settle down with his sweetheart Aimee. But as Alex moves up to higher levels of play (and pay), his thoughts turn to the possibility of a big-league career. Those dreams seem to be shattered after he is hit on the head by a line drive and begins to suffer from spells of double vision. Apparently unaware of his injury, the Philadelphia Phillies pick up Alex’s contract. As he contemplates a return to the game, Alex’s double vision suddenly clears and his pinpoint control returns. Aimee, never much in favor of being married to a baseball player, sees what the game means to Alex and becomes his biggest supporter as he returns to baseball and rises to fame in the majors. Alex is traded to the Chicago Cubs just about the time he is drafted and sent to Europe to fight in World War I. Stunned by an explosion in combat, his spells of double vision and vertigo return. Shortly after his return to civilian life and the Cubs, he collapses during a game. Despondent when a doctor tells him the relapse will mean the end of his pitching career, Alex goes out and gets very publicly drunk. Now word in the league is that his problem is booze, a rumor made more credible by the stoic Alex’s refusal to tell anyone, including Aimee, what is really wrong with him. Turning to drink in earnest, he is soon out of the big leagues. Aimee leaves him. He becomes a vagabond, playing exhibition and pick-up games for a few dollars, and is eventually reduced to a carnival sideshow act. In the meantime, Aimee discovers the truth about his real affliction, and along with Alex’s old friend, St. Louis Cardinals’ manager Rogers Hornsby, rescues him from his degrading circumstances. Hornsby offers him a contract, Aimee supplies the inspiration, and Alex is soon making a comeback, one that culminates in a masterful pitching performance that wins the World Series for the Cardinals.
The Big Leaguer, released in 1953, is the only baseball film that takes place entirely in training camp. Veteran baseball man Hans Lobert is a scout for the New York Giants. Each year, he sifts through the Giants’ new prospects at the team’s tryout camp in Melbourne, Florida. Only a very few of these rookies will be good enough to stick with the Giants’ organization, and fewer still will ever make it to the big leagues. A collection of young men—reminiscent of the typical group of diverse characters thrown together as comrades in war movies—vie to make an impression that will keep them in professional baseball. The camp is important to the players, but Hans’ job might also be on the line should he fail to accurately assess the talent assembled for the two-week camp. The brightest prospect seems to be Adam Polachuk, a young man from Pennsylvania coal country who is supposed to be in college fulfilling his father’s wish that he become a lawyer. Instead, he is taking his shot at the big leagues. Lobert’s niece and assistant Christy takes a shine to Adam, providing the obligatory romance angle. Adam’s father uncovers Adam’s deception and shows up in Melbourne, but after watching his son play, he gives his blessing to the young man’s baseball aspirations. His faith in Adam, as well as Hans’ evaluation of him as a legitimate big-league prospect, are validated when Adam smacks a game-winning home run in the culminating event of the camp, an intersquad game against the Dodgers’ rookies.
When The Kid from Left Field debuted in 1953, it ushered in another distinct and enduring trend in baseball films—the presence of children as central characters. Of course, children are seen in many other baseball films prior to 1953, but they are confined to relatively minor roles, usually cast as objects of pity and/or willing subjects for inspiration by the film’s baseball hero. However, The Kid from Left Field and later films including Roogie’s Bump in the ’50s, Safe at Home in the ’60s, The Bad News Bears in the ’70s, Rookie of the Year in the ’90s and Hardball in the ’00s place children on the field and at the center of the narrative. The title character of The Kid from Left Field is Christy Cooper, nine-year-old son of Larry Cooper, a widower who was once a major league star for the Bisons. Despite a wealth of knowledge and gifted insight about the game, Larry has been reduced to a mere peanut vendor in the Bisons’ ballpark. When he shows more interest in the action on the field than in peddling peanuts, Larry is fired by his despotic boss. Young Christy approaches the team owner, Mr. Whacker, in an attempt to have his father reinstated. He succeeds in saving Larry’s job and in the process so impresses Whacker that the owner makes Christy a Bisons batboy. In the dugout, Christy begins passing on advice to the players, tips on hitting and strategy he has heard from his father. Although initially skeptical about the kid’s coaching, it does not take long for the Bison players to realize this is good stuff. Following Christy’s suggestions, the team begins to turn its woeful season around, no thanks to their incompetent and malicious manager Billy Lorant. When the resentful Lorant learns Christy is managing the team behind his back, he dismisses the lad. Predictably, the team goes into a slump. Eventually, Whacker learns it was Christy who was responsible for the Bisons’ earlier success and, always looking for a clever marketing angle, the owner fires Lorant and names Christy the new manager of the Bisons. Larry keeps providing Christy the information he needs to successfully manage the ballclub, but the elder Cooper will take no credit and swears Christy to secrecy about their father-son collaboration. But when Christy is hospitalized with pneumonia, he must reveal it was his father who was the coaching genius behind the Bisons’ success. Christy is lauded for his honesty and Larry is named the new manager of the Bisons.
Roogie’s Bump (1954) combines the fantasy element of Angels in the Outfield with the emphasis on youth of The Kid from Left Field to create a really dreadful movie, a serious contender for designation as worst baseball film ever. Young Roogie Rigsby hasn’t much going for him as the story opens. Uprooted from his Ohio home after the recent death of this father, he finds himself living in Brooklyn with no friends. The neighborhood kids will not let him into the local sandlot games and bully him because he is short. Roogie’s luck changes when he is visited by the ghost of the great Brooklyn pitcher Red O’Malley. O’Malley’s spirit gives the youngster a bump on his right arm, a bump which confers upon Roogie phenomenal pitching ability. “Phenomenal” may be an understatement—Roogie is now able, with the assistance of crude animation, to throw a baseball through a brick wall and bring down great industrial smokestacks with what one would assume is his four-seam fastball. Roogie manages to get himself a tryout with the Dodgers. The Brooklyn manager, Coach Boxey, wants to sign the boy and let him play when he grows up, but Dodger publicity agent P.A. Rikert overrules the coach and has the boy put on the Dodgers’ pitching staff immediately. Roogie’s freakish talents make him both an instant hit with fans and an instant target of all sorts of commercial interests seeking to capitalize on his fame. Boxey, infuriated by this corporate exploitation of the boy, takes Roogie off the roster—at least until the outcry of the fans and pressure from baseball officials force him to reverse his decision. Roogie is reinstated just in time for a relief appearance in the late innings of a crucial game. Alas, the ghost of Red O’Malley, having regrets about placing the boy in such a situation, reappears and revokes Roogie’s powers. Still, Roogie has great value to the Dodgers as their good-luck charm, and he remains with the team as they go on to win the pennant.
In The Great American Pastime (1956), suburbanite lawyer, father, and baseball fan Bruce Hallerton decides coaching his son’s Little League team would be just the thing to promote father-son bonding. Bruce soon realizes that: 1) His own son has been assigned to a different team than the one he’s coaching; 2) He has been handed the worst team in the league; 3) The players’ parents expect him to win every game while giving their sons preferential playing time. Despite pressuring from the parents to win even if it means bending the rules, Bruce holds firm to the ideals of play fair, teaches his young charges to play the game well, and leads them to victory in the season finale against the league’s top team. Released twenty years before The Bad News Bears, The Great American Pastime does not have the sardonic edge (nor the profane and insolent children) of The Bad News Bears, but it does consider what happens when adults organize kids’ games and turn sand lot sport into miniature major leagues.
The 15-year run of baseball biopics would in end in 1957 with the release of Fear Strikes Out, loosely based on the story of Boston Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall’s battle against mental illness. From the opening of the film, where we see Jimmy as a child playing catch with his father John, the younger Piersall is constantly pushed (and frequently berated) to play better by John, who is vicariously living his dream of baseball stardom through Jimmy. Despite stellar high school and minor league careers, Jim’s best never seems good enough for his father. While in the minors, Jimmy meets and marries Mary Teevan, a nurse who offers support, but no solution to his problem. The constant pressure applied by his father to achieve ever more begins to take its toll on Jim’s psyche. By the time he makes the Red Sox’ major league team, he is moody, paranoid and hostile. Jimmy finally snaps, suffering a mental collapse in the middle of a game, screaming and climbing the backstop until he is subdued by teammates. He is admitted to a mental hospital, where he works for months with a therapist to come to grips with his condition. The dawning awareness that his father’s unrelenting demands lie at the root of his problem leads to a brutally direct confrontation between Jim and John. Freed from the heavy burden of his father’s expectations, reunited with Mary and reconciled with John, Jimmy returns to the Red Sox to play for himself and his love of the game.
Damn Yankees (1958), a film adaptation of the hit Broadway play, has the distinction of being the last baseball musical produced by Hollywood. The Washington Senators are the worst team in baseball, but they haven’t a bigger fan than Joe Boyd. There is not much the aging, pudgy Boyd can do to help his beloved Senators except curse their rivals, the perennially successful New York Yankees. But one day the devil, calling himself Mr. Applegate, appears and offers to transform Joe into the slugger the Senators so desperately need. Joe agrees to sell his soul, with one stipulation: he can void the deal and return to his former life by walking away from the Senators at any time, right up until the penultimate day of the baseball season. And so Joe Boyd becomes Joe Hardy, a 22-year-old power-hitter. What Joe does not know is that Applegate’s machinations include snatching the pennant away from the Senators and handing it to the Yankees on the final day of season, even as he snatches away Joe’s soul. Joe Hardy proves to be just what the underachieving Senators need, and his remarkable prowess drives the Senators to the top of the standings. Success on the field is fine, but Joe misses his wife, Meg, and rents a room in her home just to be closer to her. Applegate fears Joe’s devotion to Meg might spoil his plans, so he summons “real sexy babe” Lola to seduce Joe. Joe proves to be a man of profound fidelity, and Applegate’s schemes are thwarted when Joe and Lola become friends and join forces to outwit the devil. The Senators win the pennant, Joe returns to his loving wife and former life, and Applegate is left seething but powerless in the face of Joe’s overwhelming virtue.
Despite the box office success of Damn Yankees, it would be four years until another baseball film would be released, and it would take the excitement generated by Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle’s 1961 home run race to inspire the production of Safe at Home (1962). A morality play about the evils of fibbing, Safe at Home is the story of ten-year-old Little Leaguer Hutch Lawton, who is having trouble fitting in with the other kids. Attempting to impress his peers (and to defend his oft-absent father), he tells the other boys that his dad has friends on the New York Yankees team, including Mantle and Maris. Hutch is pressed to invite the two Yankee sluggers to the Little League banquet and he sneaks off to the Yankee’s Fort Lauderdale training facility to find the two players and ask them to extract him from the lie by appearing at the dinner. He does manage to attain an audience with Mantle and Maris themselves, but instead of helping the boy perpetuate his deceit, they give him a stern (to say nothing of stiff and badly delivered) talking to about the importance of honesty and send him back home. Expecting to be further disgraced, but ready to face the consequences of his dishonesty upon his return, Hutch is redeemed when Mantle and Maris invite Hutch’s team down to Florida to spend a day with the Yankees.
It would be easy to blame the miserable Safe at Home for the eleven-year drought of baseball films that would follow. Not until 1973 would Hollywood produce another baseball film. One can posit numerous other explanations for this hiatus, from the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s, to overly cautious attitudes bordering on the paranoid about producing certain types of movies, to struggles within Hollywood’s power structure, to simple coincidence. Whatever the case, the drought would end with only a trickle of films in the 1970s and would not again reach a steady flow of baseball releases until the 1980s.
Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) is one of only two baseball films produced in the 1970s that is about adults, rather than little-leaguers, playing baseball. (The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings is the other.) It is also one of the first baseball films to portray (albeit rather circumspectly) issues like racial tensions in the clubhouse and labor disputes as elements of professional baseball. But the film is primarily about the relationship of two players on the New York Mammoths, pitcher Henry Wiggen and third-string catcher Bruce Pearson. Wiggen is a bona fide star while Pearson, his slow-witted roommate, is a marginal ballplayer who is not expected to make the team. The two share a secret learned in the off-season: Bruce Pearson is dying of Hodgkin’s disease. At the time, Henry is in the process of bargaining a new contract with the Mammoths and when negotiations reach an impasse, he offers a compromise: He will accept less money if he is contractually tied to Pearson. Or, as Wiggen puts it, “Whatever happens to one must happen to the other. Traded. Sold. Whatever.” The chance to sign Henry Wiggen for less than his true value is an offer too good for the miserly Mammoth club officials to pass up, so the deal is done and Pearson makes the team. Not that making the New York Mammoths is an entirely good thing. The team’s clubhouse is wracked by dissension, petty jealousies, and constant ragging, and the discord carries over into the Mammoths’ performance on the field. But when word spreads through the team that Pearson is dying, the players’ attitudes change, along with the team’s fortunes. They quietly rally around Pearson and begin to support each other as well. Finally given an opportunity to play, Bruce becomes a good hitter and Henry helps him become a better catcher. The Mammoths clinch the pennant, but it is obvious at that point that Bruce is too ill too continue playing. He leaves the team before the playoffs begin but the Mammoths go on to win the World Series. A few months later, Henry Wiggen is the only member of the Mammoths organization—player or management—to attend Bruce Pearson’s funeral.
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976) is probably better-known for its softball treatment of the racial discrimination faced by black ballplayers in the first half of the 20th century than its critique of the treatment of ballplayers by ownership. Like The Jackie Robinson Story a quarter of a century earlier, Bingo Long offers a largely sanitized account of the scale and harshness of the bigotry confronting black ballplayers and African Americans in general prior to the civil rights movement. Bingo Long is a star pitcher for the Ebony Aces of the Negro leagues in the late 1930s. The Aces are owned by Sallison Porter, a mean-spirited, exploitive owner. When Porter releases an injured Aces player, then docks the pay of the other players to pay the hospital bill, Bingo decides he has had enough. He and Elite Giants catcher Leon Carter contact some of the best players in the Negro leagues and together they organize a barn-storming baseball team. The team proves so popular with fans, and steals so much talent from the Negro leagues, that Porter and the other owners conclude they had better put the Traveling All-Stars out of business before the All-Stars do the same to them. They organize a boycott of the Traveling All-Stars’ games, but Bingo and Leon keep the team in business by playing exhibition games against White semi-pro and town teams, clowning their way through the games like baseball versions of the Harlem Globetrotters. Porter’s hired thugs beat up one of the Traveling All-Stars and stab another, but the players will not be intimidated. Porter finally offers Bingo a deal: The Negro League All-Stars will play Bingo’s Traveling All-Stars in a winner-take-all game. If Bingo’s team wins, they will become a member of the league, but if they lose, the Traveling All-Stars will disband and the players will return to their original teams. Of course, Sallison Porter is too corrupt to play the game on the up-and-up, so he schemes to undermine Bingo’s chances. None of those machinations look likely to succeed, except the kidnapping of the Traveling All-Stars’ clean-up hitter Leon Carter. But Leon escapes his captors and shows up just in time to hit the home run that wins the game. The Traveling All-Stars have won a place in the league, but the signing of one of Bingo’s talented young players by the Brooklyn Dodgers after the big game foreshadows the end of the Negro leagues themselves.
The Bad News Bears (1976) was the first and easily the best of the four films about little leagues that dominated baseball cinema in the 1970s. It is a parable about middle-class parent’s over-organizing kids’ sports, their obsession with winning, and their willingness to hire out the chore of developing their own children because they are too busy to do the job themselves. One of those parents, Los Angeles City Councilman Bob Whitewood, threatens legal action to force the ultra-competitive and very white suburban North County League to include the Bears, a team as diverse as they are inept. Whitewood hires former minor league pitcher Morris Buttermaker, paying him under the table to coach the Bears. Buttermaker, now a swimming pool cleaner by trade, is content to let the kids play while he sits in the dugout and swills beer. That changes after the league’s best team, the Yankees, and their arrogant, overbearing coach Roy Turner embarrass the Bears in a 16–0 drubbing. North League officials and Turner tell Buttermaker everyone would be better off if the Bears just dropped out of the league. The Bears themselves make it clear to Buttermaker they do not appreciate his laissez-faire approach to coaching and threaten to walk. All of this seems to awaken Buttermaker’s competitive instincts. He talks the Bears out of quitting, collectively and individually, whips them into shape, and recruits a couple of key players. One is Amanda Whurlitzer, daughter of his ex-girlfriend and an accomplished pitcher. The other is Kelly Leak, a young hoodlum and the best player in the league. Buttermaker’s dramatically improved team begins to win, and by the end of the season they find themselves in the championship game against the Yankees. As the prospect of a championship grows nearer, Buttermaker’s competitive fires begin to burn too hot. He orders Kelly Leak to run teammates off fly balls to ensure they are caught, tells another player to allow inside pitches to hit him so he can reach first base, and contemplates risking injury to Amanda Whurlitzer’s overworked pitching arm. When the Bears do not seem to share his obsession with victory and the vindication he believes it will bring them, Buttermaker launches into a profanity-laced tirade about winning and revenge. As he looks into the faces of his players who sit in the dugout in stunned silence, it becomes apparent to him that he is coaching like Roy Turner. That fact becomes even more evident to him as he watches Turner berate and then strike his own son, who is pitching for the Yankees, for failing to follow instructions. Reminded of the true purpose of kids’ sports, Buttermaker inserts his reserves—the team’s worst players—into the lineup to finish the championship game. Incredibly, the scrubs keep the game close and put on a valiant rally in the bottom of the final inning. But in a close play at the plate, Kelly Leak is tagged out trying to stretch a triple into a homer, and the Bears fall short by one run. After the game, the teams meet at home plate where the Yankees are presented a four-foot high championship trophy and the Bears receive a seven-inch runner-up token. When one of the Yankee players offers a condescending congratulation to the Bears, the second place trophy is thrown into the dirt at his feet and the Yankees are told to “Wait till next year.” This sparks a wild, beer-squirting celebration by the Bears and their parents.
The sequels that followed The Bad News Bears in the subsequent two summers are, at best, pale reflections of the original. The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977) features most of the original team, sans coach Buttermaker and pitcher Amanda Whurlitzer, making a trip to Houston to play a game in the Astrodome against a team from Texas for the right to play a game in Japan. No explanation is offered as to why the Bears were selected for this singular honor, but it provides a handy device for various Bad News Bears status offenses and other misdemeanors, scatology, and prolific cussing to take place on a road trip. Produced for a teen audience, one of the film’s themes is that responsible adults are mostly imbeciles, so the players run off their new, authoritarian coach, dupe their parents into thinking they will be properly chaperoned on their trip to Texas, then drive themselves to Houston, leaving a good many hoodwinked grownups in their wake. Once in Houston, a run-in with the law produces a demand by authorities that they produce an adult supervisor. As luck would have it, Kelly Leak’s father Mike lives in Houston. Although father and son are estranged since Mike divorced Kelly’s mother, the elder Leak agrees to his son’s request and pretends he is the Bears’ coach to get the kids off the hook. It soon becomes obvious even to the Bears that they need a real coach, and Mike again agrees to step into the role, drilling the Bears into readiness for the big game which they win in dramatic fashion. Mike and Kelly are reconciled and the Bears are off to Japan.
The saga mercifully ends with The Bad News Bears Go To Japan (1978). Although the Bears have earned the right to play in Japan, the Junior League decides to cancel the game because the Japanese champions are too competitive. The Bears make a public appeal for support, and their plea is answered by Marvin Lazar, a luckless publicity agent of dubious character. Lazar manages to get the Bears to Japan, where he engages in a series of schemes to promote a game between the Japanese champions and the Bears. The game is finally on, but gamblers bent on fixing the outcome compel Lazar to add three illegal and obviously overage players to the Bears’ roster. The Bears are not happy about their new teammates and the Japanese players, who earlier befriended the Bears, discern the plot. Realizing the game is a sham, both teams walk off the field. Later that day, the Japanese team and the real Bears meet in a sandlot for game of baseball untainted by media hype and adult corruption of the game. The kids get to play, and Lazar gets a valuable lesson in the true meaning of sport.
Here Come the Tigers (1978) is the final and by far the most wretched of the four little league films of the 1970s. In this utterly predictable B-picture, good-hearted Eddie Burke, a rookie police officer, takes on a motley group of lascivious, foul-mouthed adolescent screw-ups and turns them into league champions.
Although the 1980s saw a resurgence in the production of baseball pictures, with some of them classified among the best baseball films of all time, the decade did not get off to a very promising start when Blue Skies Again was released in 1983. A low-budget film that perhaps justifies the long hiatus in the production of baseball pictures that proceeded it, Blue Skies Again is the tale of Paula Fradkin, who aspires to be the first woman to play not merely professional baseball, but major league baseball. With the assistance of baseball players’ agent Liz West, Paula secures a tryout with the Denver Devils during spring training. Despite an impressive hitting exhibition for Devils manager Dirk Miller, it does not appear that Paula will get a fair tryout. The Devils players resent her, but the primary obstacle standing in her way is the wealthy, vain, obnoxious and borderline misogynist owner of the Devils, Sandy Mendenhall. When Miller, West and others urge Mendenhall to give Paula a shot at making the team, he agrees. But Mendenhall stacks the deck, ordering his players to heckle and insult her, a chore they take up with a venomous and vulgar enthusiasm. Paula naturally loses her concentration during this barrage of ridicule from her ostensible teammates and performs poorly. Mendenhall smugly assumes the case is closed, but Paula’s supporters, including Miller, arrange to have Paula pinch-hit in a spring training game against the Memphis Blues. Once again, Paula is up against a hostile team, but this time they are opponents, not her own teammates. Facing the Blues’ toughest (and judging from his nickname—“Brushback”—their nastiest) pitcher, Paula smacks a line drive to left and hustles it into a double. Brushback gives her a smile of grudging respect. The fans go wild. And Sandy Mehdenhall, when swarmed by the media after the game, changes his stripes and takes credit for finding the first female big leaguer.
With its big budget, a cast of genuine Hollywood stars including Robert Redford in the lead, and a celebrated director in Barry Levinson, The Natural (1984) marked the revival of baseball films as major Hollywood productions. In this loose film adaptation of Bernard Malmud’s novel, young Roy Hobbs, a “can’t miss” minor league prospect, leaves his rural home for a tryout with the Chicago Cubs. He also leaves behind his fiancé Iris, but promises that he will send for her when he has made it big. Shortly before Roy reports to the Cubs, he is shot and badly wounded by a deranged woman, who then kills herself. Roy knocks around, always on the fringes of the game until he finally returns to professional baseball 16 years later as an outfielder for the New York Knights. His spectacular play transforms the bumbling Knights into contenders, a turn of events that threatens to upset the plans of the Judge, the team’s corrupt half-owner, who stands to win sole control of the ball club from his partner, team manager Pop Fisher, if the Knights fail to win the National League pennant. The Judge had already conspired with gambler Gus Sands, and his moll/temptress Memo Paris, to wreck the Knight’s chances by buying off right fielder Bump Bailey. But when Bailey is killed in a freak accident and Roy emerges as Bailey’s replacement and the Knight’s savior, they turn their attention to corrupting Hobbes. Paris seduces Roy and distracted by her charms and the nightlife of New York, he falls into a terrible slump. Roy’s past is destined to catch up with him and it does when the Knights travel to Chicago. His long-lost love Iris contacts Roy after learning he will be playing in Chicago and the erstwhile lovers are reunited. An inspired Roy Hobbs breaks out of his offensive malaise with a barrage of home runs. Once again, the Knights are on a roll, one that carries them into first place with only three games remaining in the season. Desperate to derail the Knights’ charge to the pennant, Gus Sands arranges to have Memo poison Hobbs. Roy falls into a coma and awakens three days later to learn the Knights have lost three straight in his absence and will now have to play a one-game playoff for the National League championship. Against the advice of doctors and despite a final attempt by the Judge to bribe and blackmail him, Hobbs plays in the game and, inspired by Iris and the news that she bore him a son, now a teenager, Hobbs wins the game with a towering, pyrotechnic home run. As the film ends, we see Roy and his son playing catch in the same fields where Roy and his father once played.
Perhaps encouraged by the example of a project as ambitious as The Natural, the producers of The Slugger’s Wife (1985) used much the same formula: a sizeable budget, a notable director in Hal Ashby, a capable cast of stars, and a screenplay by reliable hit-maker Neil Simon (the film’s full release title was in fact Neil Simon’s The Slugger’s Wife). Despite all that firepower, The Slugger’s Wife was a flop. When Atlanta Braves star Darryl Palmer marries singer Debby Huston, it appears to be a good personal and career move. Inspired by Debby’s presence, Darryl has never played better. But when she leaves to perform on the road, Darryl falls into a slump and becomes convinced Debby must be at every game if he is to hit well. His insistence that she always attend his games becomes so suffocatingly oppressive that she finally leaves him to pursue her career. Eventually he realizes that it is wrong for him to expect her to give up her career for his, and that he can play well when she is absent. The film ends with a hint of the couple’s reconciliation.
The rocky-romance-plus-baseball formula surfaced again in Bull Durham (1988), a film often cited as the most realistic cinematic depiction of minor league baseball. The film’s protagonist is minor league journeyman Crash Davis, a AAA-league catcher sent down to the A-league Durham Bulls to tutor raw but talented rookie pitcher Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh. Annie Savoy is a local baseball aficionada who “hooks up with” a Bulls player each season to impart lessons on baseball, romance, literature, and mysticism. This season’s candidates for Annie’s attentions are Nuke and Crash. Crash refuses to “try out” for this role as Annie’s lover but Nuke eagerly accepts it. Over the course of the season, Crash and Annie transform Nuke into a legitimate major league pitching prospect, but Annie comes to realize she has chosen the wrong man. Near the end of the season, Nuke is called up to the majors, and the Bulls organization, no longer needing a mentor for Nuke, releases Crash, who finds solace in the arms of Annie. Crash leaves Durham to finish the season in Asheville but returns to Durham and Annie, and the film ends with the promise of a managerial career for Crash and true love for both.
Eight Men Out (1988), a film version of the Eliot Asinof book by the same title, recounts the infamous “Black Sox” scandal in which several members of the Chicago White Sox baseball club conspired with gamblers to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series to Cincinnati Reds. The film portrays the White Sox as a talented team racked by internal dissent but harboring a common loathing of conniving, miserly team owner Charles Comiskey. Eight of the players are either participants in or aware of the scheme to throw the Series, including one of the game’s greatest players, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, and Buck Weaver, who learns of the plot but refuses to either participate in the fix or report it to baseball officials. During the Series, the money promised to the players by the gamblers is not forthcoming and some of the players begin to have second thoughts about their complicity. They play to win, stave off elimination, and begin to look as if they might even win the Series. But the gambling syndicate headed by the notorious Arnold Rothstein has serious money riding on the outcome and they dispatch a thug who threatens to kill pitcher Lefty Williams’ wife if he wins the next game. Williams throws the game and Cincinnati wins the Series, but suspicions and rumors of the conspiracy abound. Baseball writer Hugh Fullerton, with help from Ring Lardner, investigates and publishes a series of articles that force both baseball and government officials to act. With some nifty legal maneuvering by prosecutors and baseball’s lawyers, confessions are obtained from several of the eight conspirators. When those confessions mysteriously “disappear” during the players’ controversial criminal trial on fraud charges, all eight players are acquitted. But even as the players celebrate their acquittal with members of the jury, the new Commissioner of Baseball, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, decrees that all eight will be banned from organized baseball for life.
All this information about the Black Sox scandal would come in handy for film goers who viewed Field of Dreams the following year. Field of Dreams has the distinction of being only the second baseball film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture (Pride of the Yankees, nominated in 1942, was the first). “If you build it, he will come,” an ethereal voice instructs college-radical-turned-farmer Ray Kinsella. Kinsella obediently constructs it, “it” being a baseball diamond in his Iowa corn field. And he builds it despite the ridicule of his neighbors and the financial difficulties that threaten foreclosure on his farm. His behavior is particularly strange given that Kinsella rejected baseball during his rebellious youth as part of his campaign to alienate his now-deceased father, a former baseball player. When the diamond is finished, the spirits of ballplayers from the past (most notably “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and the other players banned from baseball in the 1919 Black Sox scandal) appear—but only to Kinsella and his family—and play each evening on the field. The mysterious voice then instructs Kinsella to fetch Terence Mann back to the ballfield. Mann, a Sixties writer, is now an embittered recluse living in Boston. Understandably skeptical when first approached by Kinsella, Mann also receives mysterious communications and agrees to go see Kinsella’s field himself. Once there, Mann’s idealism and optimism are restored, and he explains the mystic phenomena of the cornfield (sort of). Kinsella finally understands the meaning of the phrase “if you build it, he will come” when his estranged father appears on the field as the young ball player Ray never knew, and Ray has the chance to put to rest their feud. Reconciled with his father, the younger Kinsella is also about to be financially solvent as well, as hundreds of fans stream toward his farm for the chance to pay to see the remarkable goings-on in his corn field.
A more conventional baseball film, Major League, was also released in 1989. The Cleveland Indians’ new owner is Rachel Phelps, a haughty, conniving former showgirl who inherited the team from her late husband. Her ambition is to move the franchise to Florida (a notion not as far-fetched in 1989 as it seems now), but to get out of the club’s stadium lease, season attendance must fall below 800,000. Phelps makes a number of highly questionable personnel decisions, divesting (she believes) the team of its best talent and replacing them with untested rookies and aging journeyman ballplayers. In the process, she brings together a roster of baseball’s strangest characters to ensure a losing season and miserable attendance. What Phelps has not taken into account is the team’s latent talent and competitive fire, a fire that is stoked white hot when the players detect Phelps’ scheme. The Indians unite behind veteran catcher Jake Taylor and manager Lou Brown, begin to win games, and more importantly, to draw fans. In a thrilling finale, Cleveland wins the American League East title on the final day of the season and thwarts Phelps’ machinations.
Malevolent ownership is also a prominent feature of 1991’s Talent for the Game. The film’s protagonist is California Angels scout Virgil Sweet, a former player who now scours the countryside looking for big-league talent. His latest scouting mission is conducted under a dark cloud, as Virgil has recently learned the new owner of the Angels, wealthy yuppie Gil Lawrence, plans to scrap the traditional scouting system and replace it with a computerized system of statistical player evaluation. To make matters worse, Virgil is stranded in a tiny village in rural Idaho when his car breaks down. It doesn’t take long for the silver lining to show up in the form of local baseball prodigy Sammy Bodeen, a pitcher of remarkable promise. After assuring Sammy’s parents the boy will be well looked after, Virgil and his new prospect are off to Anaheim and a formal tryout for the Angels brass. Sammy performs erratically during this audition until Virgil dons the tools of ignorance and catches for him. With Virgil behind the plate, Sammy begins to deal overpowering pitches, awing the front office personnel. Virgil is promoted to an executive position, but a different sort of promotion is planned for Sammy. Gil Lawrence decides to cash in on the youngster’s talent immediately, advertising him as the team’s savior in a publicity blitz. Lawrence then decrees Sammy will make his professional debut in the major leagues, despite warnings from Virgil and others that it could prove disastrous to the youth’s psyche and career. Sure enough, the pressure gets to Sammy and he disappears before his inaugural game. Talked into returning by Virgil, Sammy reluctantly takes the mound and pitches horribly in his first inning. An incensed Lawrence orders the young pitcher relieved, which prompts Virgil to upbraid the owner and quit his new high-paying position. Virgil’s resignation prompts a walk-out by the other Angels employees present, and Lawrence is left to fume alone in his luxury box. Virgil rushes to the clubhouse between innings, disguises himself as the Angels catcher, and takes the field to catch for Sammy. His confidence bolstered by Virgil’s presence, the young pitcher shows his real ability, overwhelming the opposing team and winning the game.
Pastime (1991) may be one of the lesser-known baseball films of the 1990’s, but is regarded by many critics as one of the best. Set in 1957, Pastime is about aging minor-leaguer Roy Dean Bream’s final season. Bream clings to the lowest rung of the professional baseball ladder as a marginal relief pitcher for the Tri-City Steamers entry in the California D-league. Doggedly pursuing his failed dream of baseball stardom has consumed virtually all his 41 years. He is without family, friends, or prospects, with nothing to show for a lifetime in the game except a yellowed newspaper clipping of his only major league appearance. Steamers manager Clyde Bigby recognizes this, and despite his impassioned defense of Roy Dean to ownership, it is clear Bigby keeps the old timer on the roster as a simple act of kindness. The one thing that keeps Bream going is a shot at baseball immortality—if he pitches in six more games, he will tie the professional baseball record for pitching appearances. Roy Dean is so quick with a helpful tip for his considerably-younger teammates and so hopelessly optimistic despite his dismal circumstances that the other Steamers players consider him a buffoon. He is joined in the role of team outcast by the only black player on the Steamers, a teenage rookie pitcher of great promise named Tyrone DeBray. Their common antagonist is pitcher Randy Keever, a self-important bigot who loathes Roy Dean for costing him wins and Tyrone because he represents a threat to Keever’s supremacy on the pitching staff. Befriending Tyrone, Roy Dean imparts lessons learned in his many years in the game. Unfortunately, even all that knowledge cannot make up for the physical skills that have abandoned Roy Dean, and after a particularly poor pitching performance, Steamers management decides they must release him. Roy Dean receives this news at a party from a gloating Keever, and trying to hide his embarrassment, he runs from the party to the ballpark. Once there, he turns on the stadium lights, grabs a bag full of baseballs and takes the mound one last time. While pitching this imaginary career finale, Roy Dean suffers a massive coronary. His body is discovered by Tyrone, who has been sent out to search for him. Neither the story nor Roy Dean Bream’s dream end there, however, for Tyrone, inspired by his mentor, will eventually reach the major leagues.
Three notably dissimilar baseball films made their way into theaters in 1992, including a Babe Ruth biopic, the first baseball biography to come along in thirty-five years. If the 1948 film The Babe Ruth Story is a hopelessly sappy and worshipful portrayal of the Bambino, 1992’s The Babe is its mirror image—a characterization that is grotesque, unflattering, at times even sinister. In The Babe, George Herman Ruth is portrayed as an abused, forlorn orphan whose enormous baseball talent cannot compensate for his utter lack of social awareness. He is crude, boorish, naive, desperately lonely and seems alternately dim-witted and deranged. He is regarded by first the Boston Red Sox, then the New York Yankees, as an “overgrown child.” Ruth’s hedonistic appetites match his baseball prowess, leading to a disastrous first marriage, and a career and personal life in shambles. His marriage to second wife Claire helps him salvage his career and find personal fulfillment. When Yankees management makes it clear he will never fulfill his dream of managing the team, he signs with the Boston Braves. After learning his is being used as little more than a side-show attraction by Braves’ management, he hits three massive home runs in a single game and quits, leaving the game on his own terms.
A much happier portrayal of a bit of baseball history turns up in A League of Their Own (1992). In this fictionalized account of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League’s inaugural season, young women from across North America are recruited to play baseball in a women’s league conceived by major league owners as a way to preserve baseball despite the manpower shortage precipitated by the Second World War. Sisters Dottie Hinson, a catcher, and Kit Keller, a pitcher, are recruited out of an Oregon softball league to play for the Rockford Peaches. The Peaches are ostensibly managed by former major league star Jimmie Dugan. But Dugan is a drunk who is bitterly resentful that his last chance to stay in baseball is what he considers the humiliating task of managing a women’s team. At one point, he confronts his boss and thunders “I haven’t got ballplayers, I’ve got girls! Girls are what you sleep with after the game, not what you coach during the game!” Dugan’s attitude is shared by skeptical fans in the sparse crowds that attend the League’s early games. But over the course of the season, Dugan comes to appreciate the skill and dedication of his players. As he takes an increasing interest in managing, his drinking diminishes and, with his help, the Peaches become one of the best teams in the league. The fans’ doubts about women’s baseball are also reversed, due largely to the efforts of Ira Lowenstein, the league’s director and publicist, and the outstanding play of the women, especially Dottie Hinson, who emerges as the league’s marquee player—the “Queen of Diamonds,” as Lowenstein dubs her. The players, a diverse group of women from all walks of life, form a close-knit “family” and prove to a skeptical public that “girls” can play baseball.
Baseball’s international appeal finally received recognition from Hollywood with the release of Mr. Baseball in 1992. The title character is Jack Elliott, an aging New York Yankee slugger who is the worst stereotype of the modern professional athlete—arrogant, boorish, promiscuous, self-absorbed. When Elliott’s contract is sold to the Chunichi Dragons, a Japanese team, he is resentful and defies Japanese cultural mores and baseball conventions even as his game slumps as badly as his behavior. Confrontations with teammates and Dragons manager Uchiyama lead to fines and suspension. Largely through the efforts of his love interest (and the manager’s daughter) Hikoro Uchiyama, Elliott begins to appreciate the Japanese approach to the game and the wisdom of his manager. Jack doggedly works himself back into shape, apologizes to his teammates in Japanese and gains their acceptance, then sets about leading them to the top of the standings. In the end, Elliott wins the pennant, the girl, and a coaching job with the Detroit Tigers.
Films centered on children and baseball had been absent from the big screen for 15 years when Hollywood rediscovered the formula and released four such pictures in a two-year span. Both baseball films released in 1993 are about kids playing the game, the first a fantasy with a plot highly reminiscent of 1954’s Roogie’s Bump. When marginal little leaguer and Chicago Cubs fan Henry Rowengartner falls and breaks his arm in Rookie of the Year, it appears that his baseball career is over for the summer. Shortly after the cast is removed from his throwing arm, Henry attend a Cubs game where he catches an opposing team’s home run ball in the outfield bleachers. As Wrigley custom dictates, Henry throws the ball back onto the field. To the astonishment of all, Henry’s throw is a frozen rope all the way to the Cubs catcher standing at home plate. The youngster’s arm has apparently healed in such a way that he is now capable of throwing a baseball with overwhelming velocity. In this film, at least, the Cubs front office is not peopled by dummies and Henry is quickly signed to a contract. In no time, he is the most dominant relief pitcher in the major leagues and an instant celebrity. Henry’s mom, a single mother, ties to protect her son and keep his life relatively normal but her devious boyfriend sets himself up as Henry’s agent, and along with the team owner’s duplicitous nephew, schemes to sell Henry’s contract to the New York Yankees. When kindly Cubs owner Bob Carson gets wind of the plot, he quashes the deal and demotes his nephew to hot dog vendor. It would not, however, have mattered to Henry because, as he tells Carson, he will not be back next season. Tired of the notoriety, he just wants to be a 12-year-old kid again. But before that precocious retirement, Henry is called on to pitch the ninth inning of the pennant-deciding final game. Just as the dramatic inning is about to get underway, Henry falls on his pitching arm and it returns to its normal condition. His overpowering fastball gone, Henry must resort to unorthodox methods, including a hidden ball trick and a slowpitch softball delivery to win the game and the pennant for the Cubs.
What is in some ways the negative analog to the Bad News Bears, the 1993 film The Sandlot “recalls” the purity and innocence of the game when kids played baseball just for the fun of it. Recent arrival Scotty Smalls seeks acceptance from the kids in his new neighborhood, but they are almost constantly engaged in a sandlot baseball game and Scotty has never learned to play the game. He is befriended and tutored by the sandlot’s best player, Benny Rodriguez and soon becomes one of the gang, sharing their love of baseball as well as the summer’s adventures. When the group finds itself in need of a baseball one day, Scotty borrows his step father’s prized Babe Ruth–autographed baseball, which Benny hits out of the sandlot and into the yard of “the Beast,” a vicious-looking dog protecting the property of the feared, reclusive Mr. Mertle. Always a team, the kids band together to help retrieve the treasured ball and save Scotty the terrible retribution of his step father. Always the leader, Benny takes it upon himself to take on the Beast and confront Mr. Mertle. It turns out that neither Mr. Mertle nor the Beast are very dreadful but the Beast has made a meal of the ball. After they befriend Mr. Mertle, the boys discover him to be a former Negro League baseball player, a contemporary of Ruth and Gehrig, as well as a kind and lonely man eager to talk baseball with the youngsters. Mr. Mertle replaces the Babe Ruth baseball with one signed by the entire 1927 Yankee team, an act of kindness that saves Scotty and seals the bonds of friendship with all the boys.
The year 1994 was a rare one for baseball film, as no fewer than five baseball features were released. And as in 1993, two films about kids playing baseball would make it to the big screen. Angels in the Outfield (1994) is a remake of the 1951 film of the same name. Among the many story changes is the replacement of the Pittsburgh Pirates team featured in the original with a team with a far more appropriate mascot—the California Angels. (The remake is a Walt Disney Pictures film, but the Disney corporation did not buy the Angels franchise until 1996, at which time the corporation renamed the team the Anaheim Angels). In this updated version, the child who summons the divine influences is 11-year-old Roger Bomman. Roger is dumped into foster care by his reprobate of a father, who tells the child that there is as much chance of the family reuniting as the California Angels have of winning the league. The last-place Angels team is mired in a fifteen-game losing streak, but Roger, who takes his father’s mean-spirited analogy a bit too literally, begins praying for the team in hope of securing a normal family life. Al the Angel dutifully appears to Roger, telling the boy he and his heavenly host will help the California team win, but only Roger will be able to see them assisting the ballplayers. In return, Roger must continue to believe in the angels even in the face of the skepticism he will surely encounter. Initially, there is no greater skeptic than George Knox, the belligerent, short-tempered manager of the Angels. But George can find no explanation other than a miracle when the Angels team begins to win with spectacular play. A kinder and gentler George emerges, befriending Roger and his best friend J.P., and even publicly defending the notion of heavenly intervention. A pennant for the California team seems assured, but some sort of heavenly restriction more difficult to fathom than Major League Baseball’s Rule V draft dictates that angels cannot assist players in a championship game. However, the California team has a bond of faith strong enough to overcome any adversity, and they win the big game. The miraculous season leaves George Knox a changed man, one who will adopt Roger and answer the boy’s prayers for a permanent home and a loving family.
If the previous three films fail to remind us that baseball is a kid’s game, Little Big League (1994) will certainly make the point. When Minnesota Twins owner Thomas Heywood dies, he leaves the team to his twelve-year-old grandson Billy Heywood. Billy fires the Twins’ overbearing, abusive manager and names himself manager of the underachieving and self-absorbed Twins, a team that seems more concerned about long-term contracts and investments than baseball. At first skeptical and uncooperative, the Twins are won over by Billy’s encyclopedic knowledge of baseball and his enthusiastic admonitions to play the game for fun, just as they did when they were his age. Playing like kids, the Twins begin to win. But as his team becomes more successful, Billy begins to behave like an adult—to be precise, like the obnoxious adult manager he recently fired. Chafing under the bossy regime of their child manager, the Twins team grows bitter and their play begins to suffer. Before all is lost, Billy realizes what has happened to him. He apologizes to the team, and once again playing the game for fun, the Twins return to their winning ways. Although their season ends with a heartbreaking loss in the pennant-deciding game, their love for the game is restored and they receive a thunderous ovation from the home crowd despite the loss.
Major League II (1994), the first of two sequels to 1989’s Major League, sends a similar message about the proper motivations for playing baseball. The Cleveland Indians return from their thrilling pennant run of the prior season with big contracts and bigger heads. Prima donna third baseman Roger Dorn has purchased the team from evil owner Rachel Phelps and expectations for the team are high. But the Indians are distracted by their new-found fame, wealth, and status, and the team begins to struggle badly, falling to the bottom of the standings. With bickering in the clubhouse and the stands nearly empty, Dorn begins to lose money and is forced to sell the team back to Phelps. At the same time, manager Lou Brown, frustrated by his players attitudes, has a heart attack in the clubhouse. Once again united by adversity and a common nemesis, the team pulls together behind catcher Jake Taylor. As the Indians return to their unorthodox but genuine ways, they rediscover the true values of baseball and win the American League pennant.
While there are no children in The Scout (1994), an emotionally immature character, the child-like ballplayer Steve Nebraska, extends the mid–1990s theme of children and baseball. The title character is Al Percolo, a major league baseball scout with a penchant for finding players with physical talent and psychological problems. After his latest disastrous signing—a young pitching prospect with a great arm but debilitating stage fright—his employer has had enough and banishes Percolo to scouting’s worst circuit—rural Mexico. There Percolo stumbles across Steve Nebraska, a young American who is clearly the best baseball player in human history. Percolo can hardly believe his luck and quits his scouting job to act as Steve’s agent, shopping his new prospect to major league teams. Naturally, the New York Yankees outbid everyone else for Steve’s services with a record-breaking contract, but it becomes increasingly obvious that Steve is yet another talented psychotic discovered by Percolo. Abused as a child, Steve struggles to maintain his mental equilibrium. When he is scheduled to make his debut as the starting pitcher in Game One of the World Series, Steve suffers a mental meltdown and flees to the roof of Yankee Stadium. Percolo, by now something of a father figure to the young man, reassures Steve, helps him confront his fears and talks him down. Steve takes the mound and pitches a perfect game, a triumph for both the player and the scout.
A film that is not a tidy fit in the baseball genre, Cobb (1994) is a biopic set in the final months of baseball great Ty Cobb’s life. Cobb hires writer Al Stump to author the long-retired player’s authorized biography. Flashback scenes reconstruct Cobb’s life, but little in the film relates directly to baseball and only one scene shows Cobb playing (and, characteristically, attempting to injure an opponent while sliding into base). It soon becomes apparent to Stump that Cobb is a vicious, racist, unbalanced, lonely, and paranoid old man who both anguishes over and glories in his reputation as baseball’s most despised hero. Stump creates two versions of the Cobb biography, the sympathetic portrait that is eventually printed, and the unpublished version that makes it clear “the greatest baseball player who ever lived was also the greatest bastard,” as Cobb’s character in the film puts it.
A similarly dark film, The Fan was released in 1996. A deranged baseball fanatic named Gil is obsessed with San Francisco Giants’ all-star outfielder Bobby Rayburn. Gil neglects job and family to attend Giants games, where he is loud and vulgar in expressing his support for Bobby. When Bobby goes into a slump, Gil imagines emerging Giants star Juan Primo is to blame. Gil murders Primo, then begins stalking Bobby, seeking some sign of appreciation for eliminating Bobby’s “rival.” When Bobby tells Gil he is not happy that Primo is dead, that his teammate’s death has given him a fresh perspective on life and that baseball is no longer his all-consuming passion, Gil is pushed completely over the edge. He kidnaps Bobby’s son and holds him hostage, demanding that Bobby hit a home run in the Giants’ next game. Gil then disguises himself as the plate umpire in the game to ensure its outcome, but he is recognized by Bobby, confronted by the Giants team, and gunned down by security on the pitching mound as Bobby’s son is found and rescued by police.
The second release of 1996, Ed, is no more credible but strikes a much different tone. Country boy pitcher Jack Copper loves to play baseball and he makes the roster of the Santa Rosa Rockets. But once in professional baseball, he begins to try too hard, spending endless hours studying pitching and practicing throwing until the game becomes a chore and he falls into a slump. To make matters worse, he is assigned as a roommate Rockets mascot Ed, a chimpanzee who turns out to be a decent third baseman, and who becomes Cooper’s friend. As Ed’s renown spreads, the Rockets’ scheming owner sees a chance to make a profit by selling the talented chimp to another team, which treats poor Ed like—well, like an animal. All this shakes Jack from his funk. Realizing there are more important things in life than perfecting his pitching, Jack rescues Ed and in the process finds renewed enjoyment in baseball as a game instead of a job. His mental attitude properly adjusted, Jack wins the big game and signs with the Dodgers.
While baseball films have been released on a fairly regular basis since 1996, the pace has slowed to fewer than one per year. When the third film in the Major League trilogy, Major League: Back to the Minors was released in 1998, it had been almost two years since a baseball feature appeared in American theaters. Back to the Minors recycles a smattering of characters from the first two films, including former Indians third baseman Roger Dorn, now the owner of the world champion Minnesota Twins. Dorn is in desperate need of a capable manager for the Twins’ woeful AAA minor league team, the South Carolina Buzz. He turns to Gus Cantrell, a journeyman minor league pitcher and a solid baseball man. The team Cantrell inherits is the typical ragtag collection of baseball misfits, including several former Indians from the previous Major League installments. Cantrell turns the fortunes of the Buzz 180 degrees, but in the process makes an enemy the of manager of the Twins’ major league club, the smug, self-important Leonard Huff. As a reward for their outstanding play, the Buzz are give the opportunity to travel to Minnesota to play the Twins in an exhibition game, a contest which turns into something of a personal duel between Cantrell and Huff. The game is tied in the ninth with the Buzz threatening to take the lead, but the conniving Huff has the indoor stadium’s lights shut off and the game ends in a tie. Later in the season, after the Buzz have won their AAA league title, Cantrell challenges Huff and the Twins to another game. To make the contest more interesting, Cantrell promises his salary for the year to Huff should the Twins prevail, but if the Buzz win, Huff must yield the helm of the major league team to Cantrell. Of course, the Buzz win in dramatic fashion, but the honorable Gus Cantrell turns down the chance to coach the Twins, choosing to remain with his team of loveable minor league misfits.
As the 1999 melodrama For Love of the Game opens, aging Detroit Tigers pitcher Billy Chapel is having a particularly bad day at the end of a particularly bad season. Billy has just learned the Tigers have been sold and the new owners intend to trade him in the off-season. Just as troubling to Billy is the news that his long-time love interest Jane Aubrey is leaving late that evening for a new job in London. And the day will not end until Billy has pitched his final game for the mediocre Tigers, a game in which he must face the playoff-bound Yankees in the season finale in Yankee Stadium. As Billy takes the mound against the Yankees, he reflects on his life, his playing career, and especially his sometimes-rocky relationship with Jane, recollections the audience shares in continual flashbacks between innings. Such distraction apparently serves Billy well, as he retires the Yankees in order, inning after inning. Meanwhile, Jane’s flight is delayed and she passes the time in an airport lounge watching the ballgame. By the time all his reminiscing and ruminating are done, Billy has pitched a perfect game against the Bronx Bombers. Jane, unable to tear herself away from the drama of Billy’s no-hitter, misses her flight. Seizing the opportunity to leave baseball a winner, Billy sends a message to Detroit management that he is retiring “for love of the game,” then bolts for the airport just in time to tell Jane he is retiring and that he wants her to stay. We’re left with the very strong impression that Billy will convince her to stay, and that his passion for the game will be replaced by his passion for Jane.
With the debut of Summer Catch in 2001, baseball cinema had its first back to back chick-flicks. The film is set in the Cape Cod League, the best amateur baseball circuit in the country. Each summer top prospects, mostly college players, come to play with the hope they will enhance their status with the major league scouts who frequent the league’s ballparks. One of those prospects is local kid Ryan Dunne, who gets a chance to pitch for the Chatham Aces. A Boston College dropout who was kicked off his junior college team for fighting with a teammate, Ryan now cuts grass for his father’s lawn care business. Early in the season, he shows talent but still struggles on the mound due at least in part to complications in his personal life. His romantic interest, Tenley Parrish, is the daughter of prominent, wealthy Chatham resident Rand Parrish, who disapproves of his daughter’s involvement with the young ballplayer who mows his extensive lawn. Late in the season, Ryan is called on to pitch the opening game of the playoffs after the Aces’ best pitcher is kicked off the team. At the same time, he learns Tenley plans to leave for a job in San Francisco. Ryan is pitching the game of his life, a no-hitter into the eighth inning, when Tenley appears at the ballpark to see him on her way out of town. As he takes the mound for the ninth, he looks to the stands and sees she is gone. Two outs from a no-hit shut-out, he takes himself out of the game and rushes to the airport. He finds Tenley, pledges his love, and is immediately approached by a scout for the Philadelphia Phillies, offering him a contract and a signing bonus. As the credits role, we see Ryan in his first major league appearance with the Phillies.
Two very different baseball films found their way into theaters in 2002. The Rookie is a biopic based on the true story Jim Morris’ long journey to the major leagues. Jim has nurtured a life-long love of baseball. As a child he plays little league baseball in Connecticut despite the indifference of his father, a career navy man with neither time for nor interest in his son’s passion for the game. The resulting rift between father and son becomes a chasm when the elder Morris moves his family to West Texas, a region largely devoid of baseball. Jim is heartbroken, but sustains his dream of a baseball career. After his pitching days are ended in the minor leagues by a shoulder injury, he becomes a high school science teacher and baseball coach. Pitching batting practice to his high school players, Jim discovers he still has a lot of life left in his thirty-something pitching arm. His players insist that he should try out for the pros, and while he finds the suggestion laughable, Jim does make a bargain with his underachieving team: If they start winning games, he will try out for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays organization. Of course, they win. Of course, he goes to the tryouts and stuns the Devil Ray scouts with his 98 mph fastball. Sent to Tampa’s minor league system, he struggles with the separation from his family and the uncertainty of pursuing what may be a dead end. Frustrated and on the verge of returning home, Jim gets the call to the big leagues, at 35 the oldest rookie in baseball. His success is due in no small part to the unwavering support and patience of his family. It is a family made whole when his appearance in the majors proves to be the long-overdue wake-up call to his father, with whom he finally, if awkwardly, reconciles.
Something of a contrast to the feel-good story of Jim Morris, the other baseball film of 2002, Hardball is the tale of Conor O’Neill, an aimless young man whose life seems to consist of little more than scalping tickets, gambling and drinking. When he calls on a friend, financial analyst Jimmy Fleming, to ask for money to pay a gambling debt, Jimmy refuses to loan him the money. Instead he offers Conor a job coaching the Kekambas, a little league team from the notorious Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago. Only because he is desperate for cash does Conor reluctantly take on the chore, and after the first practice it appears his reluctance is well-founded. As in almost every motion picture about little league baseball, the Kekambas do not appear to be much of a team initially, absorbing an embarrassing loss in the season’s first game to the sort of well-drilled (not to mention better-attired) rival team typically found in such films. Unlike the kids in other baseball films, the Kekambas must also deal with the off-field realities of abject poverty and gang violence, factors Conor must also come to grips with. With hard work and Conor’s guidance, the Kekambas are transformed into a winning team, earning a trip to the championship game. Conor begins to appreciate his importance to the players and their influence in helping him become a better man. The bond between players and coach is cemented when the team’s smallest player, “G-Baby” Evans, is killed by a gang-banger’s errant bullet. Overcoming this tragedy, Conor and the Kekambas triumph in the championship game.
Mr. 3000 (2004) slightly alters the oldest plot line in baseball cinema—the struggle of the baseball hero to learn humility, selflessness and virtue before he can realize true success. But in the end, the result is a film true to baseball film’s enduring tradition. Nine years after his retirement, former Milwaukee Brewer great Stan Ross is waiting to get into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Although a statistical shoe-in by virtue of his 3,000 career hits, Stan’s election has been delayed, perhaps indefinitely, by the fact that he is intensely disliked by former teammates and the media who know him to be an arrogant, obnoxious, selfish bore who quit the Brewers as soon as he had his 3,000th hit. But when a record-keeping error is discovered, Stan is left with only 2,997 hits and a much longer-shot at entering the Hall of Fame. Along with Milwaukee’s profit-oriented general manager, who sees a chance for the Brewers to sell a few more tickets, Stan concocts a scheme to return to the Brewers at age 46 to get back to 3,000 hits. What follows is the typical cinematic transformation of talented-but-self-absorbed-player into true baseball hero. Stan works hard to get back into shape, rediscovers the love for the game he’d known as a boy, comes to see the error of his way in quitting the game, and tries to pass along these lessons learned to his younger teammates. His old flame Maureen, now an ESPN reporter, returns to cover his comeback, and he begins to regret losing her years ago. By the final game of the season, Stan is still one hit short of 3,000 with only one at-bat remaining. Understanding at last what it means to be a team player, Stan lays down the sacrifice bunt that scores the winning run but leaves him with 2,999 hits. It’s a sacrifice that earns him a thundering ovation from the fans, the love of his once-hostile teammates, the respect of the press, and eventually his election to the Hall of Fame, along with the promise of a permanent relationship with Maureen.
Just as the Brooklyn Dodgers’ unlikely 1941 pennant run inspired films like It Happened in Flatbush, so the Boston Red Sox’ improbable 2004 World Series championship serves as the subtext for the romantic comedy Fever Pitch (2005). Ardent (and often obsessed) Red Sox season-ticket holder Ben meets and courts his love interest, a rising young professional woman named Lindsey, during the off-season. Hence, Lindsey has no sense of just how intense is Ben’s devotion to his beloved Red Sox. She finds out as soon as the season is underway and the resulting strain on their once-perfect relationship threatens to end it by September. Ben experiences an epiphany on the proper perspective of the game at just about the same time Lindsey realizes how much the game means to Ben, and how it might bring them together. With Ben on the verge of selling his season ticket rights to prove his love for her, Lindsey sprints across the field at Fenway Park and stops him from signing the contract. As the film ends, the happy couple is celebrating Boston’s first world championship in 86 years.
From 1898 to the present—more than a century—baseball, and its vision of American culture, have been reflected on the silver screen. We now turn to the nature of that vision—the values it celebrates, the ideological assumptions upon which it rests. We begin with the theme which is most central to baseball’s cultural vision, and to baseball films; the theme of community.