Baseball Movies: The Top 10 Best in Cinematic History
By Bill Felber
A ranking of the 10 best baseball movies — including comedy, drama, fantasy and musical — in the history of cinema.
Aside from sex, war and politics, few subjects get Hollywood’s attention so frequently as baseball movies. Virtually since the beginning of the film industry, movie-makers have returned to the National Pastime for inspiration.
In 1920, well before the introduction of sound, Babe Ruth starred in a feature film titled ‘Headin’ Home.’ Shot in New Jersey over six days in the middle of the 1920 season, Ruth played a hick-town kid who became a baseball star, then returned to thwart the evil doings of a greedy banker intent on foreclosing on the home of his sweetie.
The Babe’s acting may not have opened a new career path for him, but neither did it kill the genre.
In the 1930s, Joe E. Brown starred as Ring Lardner’s Alibi Ike, and a few years after that Gary Cooper starred in a famous Lou Gehrig biopic. William Bendix played the Babe in a widely panned biography, and Jackie Robinson starred as himself in The Jackie Robinson Story produced in 1950.
Since then Hollywood has found baseball to be a fine source for in all genres:
- Musicals: Damn Yankees, comedy
- Comedy: Major League, the Bad News Bears, romance
- Romance: Take Me Out to the Ballgame, Bull Durham
- Drama: Bang The Drum Slowly, The Natural
- Biography: The Winning Team, Pride of St. Louis
- Fantasy: It Happens Every Spring
- History: Eight Men Out, Cobb
Hollywood has not necessarily hewed closely to factual realities in these presentations. Several, notably John Sayles’ 1980s “Eight Men Out” and Tommy Lee Jones’s 1990s “Cobb” have drawn tepid reviews from baseball historians for their willingness to subvert actual events to fit a good story.
Brad Pitt’s more recent work, “Moneyball,” was frequently criticized for the selective way it distilled the success of the 2002 Oakland A’s down to Billy Beane’s legitimate genius, in the process looking past the contributions of a dominant A’s pitching staff.
Many baseball movies, however, have drawn much-deserved praise both for their stories and for their performances. Listed below are 10 of the best in that respect.