Moments from Sports Films that are completely implausible!

I love sports movies. But often it seems that the director or producers know NOTHING about the gaming they are using as a backdrop. Or more likely, they didn’t care.

Any examples took you completely out of the moment?

I have a few:

  • In The Natural, despite being the road team, Redford hits a walk-off homerun. I guess with him breaking the lights, the other team forfeited their 9th inning at bat.

  • In Major League, Pedro “President Palmer” Serrano, went through the whole season with the inability to hit a curve ball. How would he have stayed in the lineup even on that rotten team? Did the scouts of the other team miss that fact? The guy would be batting 0.000.

  • In “The Kid From Left Field” (an underrated Gary Coleman KID film), Ed McMahon fires the manager of the Padres to hire Coleman. Let’s forgive that a kid was the manager. That’s the premise. My beef is that the fired manager gets a job an opposing team and gets them into the playoffs where they face the Padres. What are the odds that a crappy manager, fired in favor of a kid, would get a position mid-season on a team good enough to make the playoffs pre-wild card.

Any more?

Days of Thunder. I know you said “Moments…” but I just don’t where to start with this one.

Driven. Sylvester Stallone and the young guy hotshot (don’t remember their names) take off in two cars from a party/display. They just jump in and start 'em up. Uh, guys? Those were CART cars. CART cars do not have onboard starters!

Thanks for the opportunity to bitch about something that’s more than a tad annoying.

Not just in movies but even on TV commercials, there’s a football game being played at night. It’s maybe raining, or snowing, or not. It’s so dark you can barely see the ball. Nobody plays night football under lights that dim. Unless it’s by the headlights of cars. Surely not in a stadium where people paid money to watch it.

I could name dozens of examples. Once in a while a movie will get it right, but the dramatic effect of playing in the dark must thrill directors no end.

Just about every boxing movie, where every punch from each combatant lands flush on the opponent’s face. For 15 rounds, sometimes.

Trivia - a lot of FB clips you see on TV and movies is from the CFL since they can get that footage very cheap. Also most Americans won’t recognize the teams.

Quite implausible and - at least to me - not endearing is the tired idea of “a team of losers beats the disciplined and well trained champions by a combination of luck, will and sometimes cheating”.

What’s the message here?

To be fair, there weren’t any moments in *Driven *that were plausible to begin with, so there is that. Wow, that’s a bad movie. Thanks for making me remember it.

In The Babe, it shows that Babe Ruth while playing his final season using a courtesy runner to run the bases for him. To a modern fan, this is preposterous – you have to run the bases yourself at a major league level.

More research indicates that the practice was permitted in that time, it only when the batter was injured on the play (someone could run for him but the batter could resume playing when it was time for him to take the field). But the movie made it clear this wasn’t because Ruth was injured, just because he was slow and out of shape, and showed the runner standing near first base ready to run (IRL, the player would come off the bench).

The entire point was to have Ruth wave the courtesy runner away and circle the bases after hitting a home run, which was so corny that it did nothing to overcome the ridiculousness of the situation.

Of course, on Miracle it’s pretty implausible that the US would have beaten the Soviets, and it’s hard to believe that the Soviet coach would have benched one of the greatest goaltenders in the history of the game because of one mistake. :wink:

Bull Durham, my all-time favorite baseball movie, has a few such moments (which I forgive).

In one scene, the entire infield gathers on the mound to discuss, among other things, Nuke’s dad being in the stands, how to remove a curse from a fielder’s glove, and a teammate’s upcoming wedding. After a couple minutes of this, Larry the bench coach trots out to see what the hell is going on, and Crash gives him the rundown. “We’re dealing with a lot of shit here.” It’s a funny scene, but in reality, the home plate ump would have been out to break up the meeting after about 20 seconds.

Later, Nuke gets called up to the Majors because “the big club is expanding its roster.” Roster expansion occurs on September 1, and the Minor League season traditionally ends on Labor Day. So at the very most there are 6 days left in the season at this point, probably fewer (in 1988 Labor Day fell on Sept. 5). Yet, Crash gets cut by the Bulls and ends up signing with the Asheville Tourists to “finish out the season.” Seems unlikely.

In Rookie of the Year, another underrated kids’ movie (which I only saw because I was an extra in it), the Cubs play a climactic game against the Mets, with the winner going to the World Series. Yet no prior mention was made of them having reached the playoffs - it’s presented more like a regular-season tiebreaker game, but the situation is never really fully explained. Even if it were the playoffs, the movie was made in the pre-wild-card days when the Cubs and Mets were in the same division. There’s no way those two teams could have played for the NL Championship then.

In *Fever Pitch *(2005) the Red Sox win the World Series.

I have to contest this one. The owner wanted the team not only to lose, but to come in “dead last” so that she could move the team to Miami. She purposefully signed guys that were terrible. Hell, they even had a dead guy on their list of potential players (“Well cross him off then!”).

As for the other team’s scouts, maybe they did catch that fact. How many hits did we see Serrano make?

I think it’s possible that Willie Mays Hayes had never even played ball at any sort of pro level.

I like Necessary Roughness, but it’s a movie where the football team is a bunch of walk-ons, playing “iron man,” and they’re pretty bad until they have to beat their hated rivals at the end of the game.

In this case and other movies like it, I’ll take the tropes into consideration if it’s entertaining enough. Just about everything that happens on the football field there is implausable, but I’ll allow it because it’s fairly amusing.

I don’t believe that a werewolf would ever be allowed to play high school basketball.

Why?

Ah, Driven, at least it captures an interesting period in American open-wheel racing history. The one redeeming part of the movie is the montage of the real CART drivers getting ready for the final race of the season. In this and almost all other racing movies, invariably all that is required to pass another car is to jam further down on the throttle (oh, the pedal goes down further, why didn’t I think of that before?)

As for the Natural, I was always under the impression the playoff game was held in New York. Its not listed a goof in imdb.com. However, the Chicago game where he breaks the clock at “Wrigley” after Glenn Close stands up has the Knights batting last.

A nice corollary to this is shifting gears to make things go faster. I have never actually counted how many times in “Bullitt” McQueen upshifts out on the freeway before sending the Charger into the firestorm, but if it’s less than six I’d be surprised.

It’s remotely possible that Pedro (“Hats for bats”) Serrano just waited out pitchers who couldn’t get a curve ball over, and sat on the fastball.

It’s unlikely that Wild Thing, who couldn’t get the Yankee slugger out all year, and has no other pitch but a fastball (albeit a good one) gets him on 3 straight heaters, just by trying harder. But damn, I love that scene.

Rookie of the Year: after the kid loses his magical arm in the climactic scene, he wiggles out of the jam by committing 2 balks: attempting a hidden ball trick, while on the rubber without the ball (resulting in the runner on 1st getting picked off); and goading the next runner into stealing by dropping the ball.

Yeah, we watched “The Express” a while back and not only did the “playing at night in the dark” thing bother me, but I wasn’t even sure that there were that many college teams playing night games back in those days.

Could the movie have been set in pre-championship-series days? The winner of each league went straight to the World Series before 1969.

In a land where they’ll allow mules to kick field goals, a werewolf playing basketball doesn’t seem too far fetched to me.