Whatever happened to baseball movies?

With the possible exception of boxing, baseball has inspired more great movies than any other sport. So why has the genre essentially disappeared?

Welcome to Baseball Week, here at The S.S. Ben Hecht, where I’d be doing a few different essays about baseball and the movies throughout the week. First up: I look at why baseball movies have fallen off the radar completely. 

Between 1988 and 1994, baseball movies that ended up being important were everywhere: In ’88, there were Bull Durham, Eight Men Out, and the first Naked Gun, which was not a baseball movie per se but featured the funniest ballpark sequence ever filmed. In ’89 came Field of Dreams and Major League. A League of Their Own arrived in ’92, Rookie of the Year and The Sandlot in ’93, and Cobb and Little Big League in ’94. 

But the latter half of the ‘90s saw a decline in notable baseball pictures, save for the occasional Major League sequel and the third-best Kevin Costner baseball film, For the Love of the Game.