Baseball season is, finally, just around the corner. It’s also Saturday, a perfect time to fire up some baseball movies to get you ready for spring training.
I am, in addition to my life as a musician and my baseball fandom, a Movie Guy. I teach classes about movies, I have a crippling physical media addiction, and I spend too much time on Letterboxd. Naturally, I am a big fan of baseball movies, as they represent an intersection of my biggest interests.
So I’m here today to give you my personal top five baseball movies. You aren’t going to agree with it, in all likelihood; I batted around some options with friends before writing this and they all vehemently disagreed about something, whether it was something I included or, more often, an omission. Head to the comment section to tell me how you feel, but also, it’s my list — it can’t be wrong!
We’ll get to some honorable and not-so-honorable mentions at the end. Starting at No. 5:
5. A League of Their Own (1992, directed by Penny Marshall)
In anticipation of a possible shutdown of Major League Baseball due to World War II, a women’s baseball league is launched; we follow the Rockford Peaches, with their star catcher Dottie (Geena Davis) and her little sister Kit (Lori Petty), who pitches. Their manager is a drunken ex-MLB star, Jimmy Dugan (played by Tom Hanks and loosely based on Jimmie Foxx).
This is a wonderful film with a lot of baseball, and for large sections it’s very funny; Jon Lovitz has a hilarious brief appearance as a scout, and there’s nice comedic rapport between Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell, two of Dottie and Kit’s teammates. (They’re good, honest!) It has its moments of drama, as well, and thankfully avoids a contrived romance between Dottie (who is married) and Jimmy, despite the studio trying to shoehorn one in (which can be found in a deleted scene that would’ve been a disastrous inclusion).
Dottie is a legitimately fascinating character, someone who is extremely closed off to the point of harming the people around her and who doesn’t really believe women should be playing baseball, but she’s smack in the middle of a film with legitimate feminist credentials.
4. Major League (1989, directed by David S. Ward)
One of the more popular baseball films of all time, this is a story with a somewhat convoluted MacGuffin about a team owner wanting to move the Cleveland Indians to a warmer climate and thus bringing in players who will be terrible, thus tanking attendance and giving her a platform on which to move the team. Of course, this band of misfits — including the aging Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger), the recently incarcerated Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn (Charlie Sheen), the athletic but not exactly talented Willie Mays Hayes (Wesley Snipes), a formerly good pretty boy, Roger Dorn, who’s afraid to get dirty (Corbin Bernsen), and a powerful hitter with a serious hole in his swing, Pedro Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert) — comes together and wildly outperforms expectations.
For Brewer fans, this one is especially notable: while it ostensibly takes place in Cleveland, it was filmed in County Stadium and features Bob Uecker in what was arguably his most legendary on-screen appearance as the team’s very funny play-by-play announcer, Harry Doyle. That’s not all, though: Pete Vuckovich, who won the 1982 Cy Young while pitching for the Brewers, plays the film’s “villain,” Haywood, the big slugger for the Yankees. (Former Dodger catcher Steve Yeager also appears as Duke Temple, an assistant coach.)
The off-the-field stuff in this is kind of lame (there’s a love story between Jake and his ex-wife, played by Rene Russo, and some drama including Wild Thing and Dorn’s wife) but there’s a lot of baseball, a lot of big stars, and Uecker’s important role. I’m also just a huge fan of some of the crowd banter; I still say “too high” about once every other game during the season.
3. Field of Dreams (1989, directed by Phil Alden Robinson)
This would top the list for a lot of people, a fantasy drama about a Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner), an Iowa farmer who builds a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield because he thinks it will allow the long-deceased Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) to come back and play. Amy Madigan also stars as Ray’s wife, James Earl Jones is here as a reclusive ex-writer that’s sort of a cross between James Baldwin and J.D. Salinger, and the legendary Burt Lancaster makes his final feature film appearance before his death in 1994.
There are certainly some nits that can be picked with this film (check out Nick Offerman’s hilarious rant, courtesy of the PosCast), but it also contains an undeniable magic (both literally and figuratively, you might say). It also made a lot of people aware of the story of Shoeless Joe and the Black Sox, even if it’s not completely accurate, and the ending will forever be a moment for dads and sons everywhere.
A missed opportunity: when all the old ballplayers come back at the end (we hear the names Mel Ott, Gil Hodges, and Smoky Joe Wood), it would’ve been a cool twist if some Negro Leagues players were included. Imagine Joe Jackson and Mel Ott playing against Oscar Charleston and Josh Gibson!
This film holds a pretty firm place in American pop culture. You can still visit the field, which is in northeast Iowa (not a long drive from many places in Wisconsin), and they’re now staging major league games there every now and then — in 2026, the Phillies and Twins will play a game there in mid-August.
2. Moneyball (2011, directed by Bennett Miller)
Who would’ve thought that a book about obscure baseball stats and economics would make for a compelling film?
This is arguably the highest-quality movie on this list. It’s beautiful to look at, has an excellent score by Mychael Danna, and has two Oscar-nominated acting performances, from Brad Pitt as Athletics general manager Billy Beane and Jonah Hill as his top assistant, a fictional character that seems to be based mostly on the real-life Paul DePodesta, who was just hired as the GM of the Colorado Rockies. Some call it the best performance of Pitt’s career.
There are other stars here: Robin Wright plays Beane’s ex-wife, a young Chris Pratt plays the catcher-turned-first baseman Scott Hatteberg, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won an Oscar playing Truman Capote in Miller’s earlier film Capote, plays A’s manager Art Howe.
As for picking nits, the common baseball-related complaint about this movie is that there is nary a mention of the three-headed monster that led the early-2000s A’s rotation, Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Mark Mulder, nor the 2002 American League MVP, Miguel Tejada. An uninformed viewer might be led to believe that Hatteberg, 36-year-old David Justice, and middle reliever Chad Bradford were solely responsible for the 103 games that team won.
But honestly if the exclusion of Hudson, Zito, Mulder, and Tejada is ruining this movie for you, you’re a curmudgeon.
1. Bull Durham (1988, directed by Ron Shelton)
Bull Durham is simultaneously a hilarious baseball movie, a romantic comedy, and a moving and rather profound meditation on how we deal with the changing seasons of life. On the surface, it’s a story about a love triangle between a local woman (Susan Sarandon) and two players on opposite ends of their minor league careers: Costner again as Crash Davis, who has had a long and successful minor league career but couldn’t quite make it in the big leagues, and Tim Robbins as a young, stupid, and talented pitcher — this is where the “million-dollar arm and ten-cent head” line comes from.
Ron Shelton, who played minor league baseball, was the writer and director, and the fact that he spent time in the minor leagues is obvious. You will not find a place with funnier or more real-feeling banter between players, and the way it discusses and depicts baseball is intelligent and accurate. The film features a couple of legendary baseball scenes: nothing dramatic, just things like the meeting on the mound (“we’re dealing with a lot of s***!”).
But it’s in the way it seamlessly shifts from a hilarious sports rom-com to an introspective look at a very relatable feeling: well, that’s over, now what? I don’t think I would’ve appreciated this aspect of the film as much when I was younger, but as a guy in his late 30s, I identify deeply with the way Crash must come face-to-face with the end of his playing career and face the next phase of his life.
But even without that, it’s a great romantic comedy and in my opinion the funniest of all baseball movies. One of my favorite movies ever made, of any genre.
The hardest cut for me is The Sandlot, the best of all the 1990s baseball movies for kids. That list also includes Rookie of the Year, Little Big League, and Angels in the Outfield, but The Sandlot is a far superior film. I didn’t see Rookie of the Year until I was an adult, and while there are certain entertaining and/or funny aspects, the baseball is ludicrous and the climactic play is a blatant rule violation. Little Big League is automatically excluded because it stars Pete Crow-Armstrong’s mom. (It does benefit from the inclusion of a large number of real players, including Ken Griffey Jr., Iván Rodríguez, Randy Johnson, Rafael Palmeiro, Tim Raines, and more.) I haven’t seen Angels in the Outfield since I was a little kid. I don’t remember liking it.
The Sandlot, though, is pure childhood magic, a mix of the sort of To Kill A Mockingbird-style vignettes of kids in summertime with the fun central story of a kid who doesn’t know ball learning ball. The movie itself knows ball, too, which makes it all the more enjoyable, and it has one of the most memorable ensemble casts in kids’ movie history. Also, an incredible Ray Charles needle drop.
Eight Men Out is another movie from the late 1980s about the Black Sox, this one based on the Eliot Asinof book of the same name that covers the 1919 scandal (a book which, it must be said, has been accused of massaging the truth). The film sort of centers around Buck Weaver (played by John Cusack), who is painted as a mostly innocent participant, and gives a pretty sympathetic view to most of the players involved. It’s good.
Not included because I don’t think it really counts as a baseball movie is another late-80s film, the wonderful The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad. You will see this on lists of baseball movies and it does spend a tremendous amount of time at the ballpark, as the film’s whole climax centers around an elaborate scheme where a brainwashed Reggie Jackson is supposed to assassinate the queen of England. A childhood favorite and one of the great 1980s comedies, just not a real baseball movie.
Speaking of non-baseball movies that feature a lot of baseball, check out Blake Edwards’ Experiment in Terror, a 1962 Hitchcock-esque thriller starring Lee Remick and Glenn Ford. This film also features a climax at a ballpark — in this case Candlestick Park in San Francisco, where the climactic events occur during a Giants/Dodgers game, and we see game action that includes Hall-of-Famer Don Drysdale, star outfielder and unibrow owner Wally Moon, and John Roseboro, the catcher most famous for being the guy Juan Marichal hit with a baseball bat. Anyway, it’s good, and Edwards — who sandwiched this movie in between two major hits, Breakfast at Tiffany’s the year before and The Pink Panther the year after — knew how to make movies.
Those of you looking for something from classic Hollywood might consider checking out 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees, the film made to lionize Lou Gehrig, released just a year after his death. Gary Cooper plays Gehrig, and Babe Ruth appears as himself (alongside a few other Yankees), and it was nominated for a whole bunch of Oscars including Best Actor for Cooper and Best Picture. For some time, Cooper’s version of the “luckiest man” speech was more well-known than the actual Gehrig one, of which we have actual footage (though not of the whole speech). Gehrig delivers it better, in my opinion.
A lesser-known, excellent film that is more a movie about guys who happen to play baseball than it is a baseball movie is 1973’s Bang the Drum Slowly, a drama about a pitcher and catcher for a fictional version of the Yankees who are trying to hide the fact that the catcher is severely ill. The most notable aspect of the film is that the catcher is played by a relatively unknown young actor named Robert De Niro. Six weeks after Bang the Drum Slowly was released in 1973, Mean Streets came out, which kicked off one of the most successful decades in the history of Hollywood, as De Niro would star in The Godfather: Part II, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy all within the next nine years.
While it doesn’t fit with the rest because it’s not a traditional narrative film, I’m going to give a shoutout to Ken Burns’ Baseball, the 1994 documentary (that had a postscript added in 2010) that does what it does better than any other doc about baseball out there. The number of legendary players included, balanced with (mostly) good journalists and writers, paints a comprehensive picture of baseball from its earliest days to the present. It’s also how the incomparable Buck O’Neil was introduced to much of America, which is possibly its greatest legacy.
First, I will confess a major blind spot in my baseball-movie-watching history: I’ve never seen The Bad News Bears, neither the original 1976 version nor its 2005 remake. I understand that this movie has a loyal following, and it does seem like something I’d like. I tried to watch it this week, but it wasn’t streaming anywhere and I didn’t have enough time to order it. I promise I will get to it!
Some of you are going to yell at me, but I’m going to say it anyway: The Natural is a completely bonkers movie. This film not only asks us to accept 48-year-old Robert Redford as a 19-year-old boy, but it also includes a serial killer who preys on famous athletes, a gambling plot clearly inspired by the Black Sox, a weird love triangle that includes a long-lost son, and a Major League-esque race to win the pennant in order to stick it to an evil owner. There’s also the absurdity that Redford’s Roy Hobbs is given his chance when the guy blocking him from getting into games in the outfield crashes into the fence and dies. It’s basically Eight Men Out, Major League, and The Rookie combined into a single movie, with an added dash of ludicrousness.
I’ll give a quick shout to 2001’s Hardball, a movie where Keanu Reeves plays a degenerate gambler who, in order to pay off his debts, must coach an inner-city baseball team. It’s melodramatic but it’s pretty good, and it features 14-year-old Michael B. Jordan, right before he showed everyone why he’d eventually be a star on HBO’s The Wire.
The Jackie Robinson story was adequately told in 2013’s 42, a not bad but somewhat forgettable film starring the late Chadwick Boseman as Robinson and Harrison Ford as the Dodgers’ GM, Branch Rickey.
Lastly, I’ll mention Mr. 3000, a movie I have never seen. As far as I know it’s the only major film to ever feature the Milwaukee Brewers prominently. Harrison says he loves it but it isn’t good. You can all let me know in the comments.
FWIW, a national SB Nation Reacts survey produced the following results: