Fin: Reviewing Baseball: The Movie

Wrapping up Baseball Week, plus Hollywood in my neighborhood, more on that Pauline Kael/Nixon thing, and why you shouldn't bet on the Razzies

Welcome to Baseball Week at The S.S. Ben Hecht, where I’ve written daily about baseball and baseball-related movies. Now, we wrap it up with a book about that very subject.

Film critic Noah Gittell has written a book called “Baseball: The Movie,” which came out earlier this week. The book is not merely a list of the 50 best baseball movies or anything like that, but rather a social and cultural history of the genre.

And Gittell, who clearly knows movies and baseball exceptionally well, has nailed it. The book is full of fantastic insights, including things I’ve never noticed before about movies I’ve seen dozens or hundreds of times.

“Baseball: The Movie” is split into sections examining specific baseball film eras. There’s the way baseball movies built up American mythology in the first half of the 20th Century and then confronted subsequent cynicism by the 1970s. There’s also much attention given to the baseball movie boom of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the question of why baseball movies have declined since the turn of the millennium.

I appreciated some of the insights offered about various films that I know very well. Yes, the plot of Field of Dreams would sound like abject insanity if you described it to someone for the first time. Yes, Little Big League, with its non-playing kid manager, was an early forerunner of the nerd-led analytics revolution. Yes, 42, for all its feel-good sentimentality, took no risks at all, and it’s a tragedy that we never go to see Spike Lee’s long-planned conception of a Jackie Robinson biopic. And yes, Moneyball — much as I love it — is largely the story of a hero who saved his boss’s money (but it’s still a considerably better movie than the reactionary retort that was Trouble With the Curve.)

Gittell also lists the best-ever baseball scenes in non-baseball movies. While he omits the obvious #1—The Naked Gun—that film’s legendary baseball sequence later gets its own chapter, which smartly notes that it’s a rare baseball story with an umpire (albeit a fake one) at its center. On his Substack, Gittell has been ranking the best baseball movies, making a persuasive case for A League of Their Own as the best (and offering to sign books “Avoid the clap, Jimmy Dugan.”)

Why did the baseball movie decline? Gittell seems to believe it’s a combination of mid-budget movies getting squeezed out by Hollywood and a lack of interest in anything that’s not superhero movies or prestige. But these things tend to be cyclical, and he sees potential in a movie about the World Baseball Classic.

“Baseball: The Movie” is highly recommended for anyone who cares a little about baseball movies.