And speaking of Ty Cobb and baseball movies, what’d y’all think of “Cobb” starring Tommy Lee Jones?
Well, seeing how it was based on the Al Stump hatchet-job-of-a-biography, I thought it sucked. They turned Cobb into an utter raving lunatic, which he was not.
There are so many great baseball movies, almost all of them have been mentioned above. I have to disagree with “The Natural” being mentioned as a great baseball movie. In my opinion, it was overlong, slow and very pretentious. Robert Redford made a horrible baseball player, and the ending was so overblown it belonged in a Sylvester Stallone move. yes, yes, yes, we figured out that it was a religious allegory. I’d like to paraphrase Calvin Trillin and say that if I can figure out the symbolism of a movie it’s pretty heavy handed.
All of the great movies have been mentioned. It’s interesting how many of the great baseball movies have been based on books. This isn’t a recent trend, but it goes back to at least the fifties with " It Happens Every Spring" and “Alibi Ike”, through to the nineties (“Field of Dreams” and Eight Men Out spring to mind. Of course, it does help that their have been so many excellent books written about baseball. George Plimpton has a theory that the larger the ball, the worse the writing, and it does seem to hold. There is a lot of good golf writing out their and almost none on basketball.
As an aside, I was responsible for giving W.P. Kinsella (Author of Field of Dreams (originally titled Shoeless Joe)) a baseball book. I gave the late Ray Belanger, who was the Atlanta Braves scout for Western Canada, a copy of “Home Game” by Paul Quarrington. He liked it so much he passed it on to W.P. Kinsella. It is an excellent book, if you can track it down.
Keith
P.S. RE: Ty Cobb He wasn’t really an utter raving lunatic, just a misanthrope.
and in order to be on the positive scale the writing has to be on a topic which involves no ball at all.
Great Movies about other sports:
“Slapshot”
“Chariots of Fire”
“The Hustler” (if pool is a sport)
“The Longest Yard”
“Hoop Dreams”
My favorite is “Slapshot”. Go Hanson Brothers!
Hey, spoke.
I thought Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde in Resevoir Dogs) was the guy in Something Wild. Are you sure? Anyway, the two look and act enough alike, I hope you can forgive my mixing them up if I have.
Actually, I think they’re the same person, like Michael Jackson and Latoya Jackson.
sqweels:
Fie sir! Give me Roger Angell on baseball over nearly anyone else’s topical essays on anything. And Mark Harris’ baseball novels (*The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly, * and It Looked Like Forever) are at least as good if not better than most American novels I’ve read.
No ball at all indeed.
“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.” –Satchel Paige
Does Ken Burns’ nine-part Baseball series for PBS count as a “baseball movie”?
It was indeed Ray Liotta in Something Wild, a fact which you can confirm for yourself here: http://eonline.com/Facts/Movies/0,60,15899,00.html
He’s a great thug, but a lousy Shoeless Joe. 
I don’t think this one’s been mentioned.
An old baseball movie I liked a lot.
“The Stratton Story”, with Jimmy Stewart, made sometime in the late '40s or early '50s, I believe.
It was a true story about a major league pitcher who lost a leg, and with a wooden leg, made a comeback.
How about “Fear Strikes Out”. True story about that nut Jimmy Persall. Played by Anthony Perkins who threw pretty good in the movie right handed considering he is left handed.
Great feel good baseball movie was “It Happens Every Spring”. About a college professor who discovers a liquid that repells wood. Made in the 40’s I think.
A few people (wallym did it first) mentioned <i> Fear Strikes Out </i>, one of my favorite baseball movies. I also like <i> Bang The Drum Slowly </i> if only for seeing DeNiro with a southern drawl. <i> Field of Dreams </i> was a great movie as well, though I normally don’t like Kevin Costner. Surprisingly, he plays a pretty good Iowa farmer. Unfortunately, he plays EVERY part like he’s an Iowa farmer…
A few people (wallym did it first) mentioned <i> Fear Strikes Out </i>, one of my favorite baseball movies. I also like <i> Bang The Drum Slowly </i> if only for seeing DeNiro with a southern drawl. <i> Field of Dreams </i> was a great movie as well, though I normally don’t like Kevin Costner. Surprisingly, he plays a pretty good Iowa farmer. Unfortunately, he plays EVERY part like he’s an Iowa farmer…
I enjoyed The Natural for the most part, except I hated the fact that they changed the ending. If anyone who’s seen it hasn’t read the book, you should.
Bull Durham I can watch again and again and again. Its better lines have made it in to my and my wife’s everyday talk. At least once a month, when one of us says something to which the other reacts incredulously, the other invariably says, “What do you mean, ‘William Blake?’”
The Bad News Bears captures it all on a totally different level. The scene in which Vic Morrow debases his son on the pitcher’s mound, and his son proceeds on the next to hold the ball he catches and let the runners score, is absolutely perfect.
Actually, I was glad they changed Malamud’s ending in “The Natural.” The book’s ending was dumb.
For those of you who don’t know, let me ruin it for ya:
The book follows the movie right down to a ‘T,’ except at the end, Hobbs fails and strikes out.
Then you have a little kid do a, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” kind of thing.
What the hell is the overriding message of that? Hobbs is trying to win out over his past. The moral of the book, then, is what? “If you ever screwed up, just pack it in, because no matter what you do to redeem yourself, there is no making up for it.”
The movie ending makes much more sense.
There’s been some Bad News Bears sequal-bashing in this thread, but I actually thought “Breaking Training,” was good.
Let them play!
Let them play!
Yeah, but I defy you to find anyone who thinks The Bad News Bears Go To Japan was any good.
Or Here Come the Tigers, for that matter.
I know I’m gonna get hammered for this, but For Love of the Game gets an honorable mention in my book. Sure it was long, sure Kevin Costner has all the range of a rusty, crooked BB gun, but the emotional impact on me was amazing. I’m not talking about the relationship stuff; I’m talking about when he gets that final out in a perfect game. I was crying my eyes out. Only suggestion: less chick stuff, more baseball!!! :rolleyes: It felt wierd to be bawling along with my wife at a baseball movie. She cried during the relationship stuff, I cried during the baseball stuff.
Seriously, I think Field of Dreams is the best baseball movie ever made. Every time I see Kevin Costner ask his dad if he wants to “have a catch” I start blubbering like a day-old baby. I’m choked up now just thinking about it. For any guy who grew up distant from his father (which is a lot of us), baseball is one of the few things that really allows father and son to connect. Ranks right up there with handing your dad the wrenches while he works on his lawnmower, or steering the car while your dad works the pedals. Priceless.
‘Bull Durham’ is the best baseball movie. (and one of my ‘10 best ever’ picks)
‘Field of dreams’ makes me cry every time I see it.
And I even liked ‘For love of the game’.
God bless Kevin Costner!
How about that Pepsi commercial that parodied Field of Dreams? “I saved nine cents!”
How can ‘Field of Dreams’ even seriously qualify when Shoeless Joe’s character batted RIGHT-HANDED in the movie?
It’s just syrup, anyway.