Top 50 Baseball Movies: #20-16
An egomaniac, a yipper, a bunch of dudes, an amputee, and a natural
In the run-up to the publication of my book Baseball: The Movie, we’re counting down the top 50 baseball films ever made. Yes, 50.
20. Mr. 3000 (2004)
Love it or hate it, you’ve got to give Mr. 3000 credit for a clever premise. Milwaukee Brewer Stan Ross (Bernie Mac) is a talented but selfish slugger who, in the film’s opening minutes, hangs up his cleats mid-season after securing entry into the Hall of Fame by getting his 3,000th hit. Several years later, he discovers there was an accounting mistake, and he’s actually three hits short, so the tubby, middle-aged Mac squeezes himself into the uniform once more to get those last three hits. Maybe it’s a better concept than a movie. The stereotype of a flashy, me-first Black athlete hasn’t aged well, nor has the subplot in which Ross has an affair with a woman journalist (Angela Bassett, deserving better). The baseball stuff soars, though. Watching a selfish guy learn to become a team player over the course of a baseball season is what these movies are all about, and I'd be damned if I didn’t find myself tearing up in its final moments. Baseball, at its best, is a venue for us to become better people. Mr. 3000 gets that.
19. The Phenom (2016)
Following in the footsteps of Fear Strikes Out (with a touch of Ordinary People and Good Will Hunting), this forgotten indie chronicles the mental health struggles of a hot young prospect (Johnny Simmons) with a bad case of “the yips.” (For the uninitiated, this is a term for when a player’s body betrays him and forgets how to do something terribly simple, like throw to first base or throw a fastball over the plate). Ethan Hawke plays the casually abusive father, and Paul Giamatti sinks into the role of the weary but well-meaning psychiatrist like an old leather chair, but Simmons is really the star here. Instead of tearing himself up with anguish, he plays the young pitcher as a blank slate, as if he has never once learned to express his emotions. I have a hunch that’s what most young athletes are like, and it makes The Phenom into a rarely honest film about athletes and maybe even an entire generation of young men.
18. Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
I interviewed writer-director Richard Linklater for my book. In fact, it’s the only stand-alone interview that I published in its entirety. His baseball films don’t fit into the story I was telling, and that’s because they all have that Linklaterian weirdness. Everybody Wants Some!! chronicles the first weekend of college—before classes have ever started—for a college baseball team in Texas. That means we don’t see much baseball in it, just a single players-only practice that lasts for a few minutes. The rest of the time, the guys—played by a winning group of young actors including a then-unknown Glen Powell—drink, dance, flirt with women, and most of all, compete. They take ping-pong very seriously. At one point, two guys bet over whether one of them can split a baseball with an axe. Whenever there’s a lull, they find something to contend over. Everybody Wants Some!! is a hoot, a classic Linklater hangout movie, but it also offers viewer an authentic view (Linklater was a college ballplayer himself) of the mind and soul of the competitive athlete.
17. The Stratton Story (1949)
A forgotten baseball classic that owes much to The Pride of the Yankees but is far superior to its other imitators, like The Babe Ruth Story, The Winning Team, and The Pride of St. Louis. The Stratton Story is the true story of Monty Stratton, a major league pitcher who lost his leg in a hunting accident but fought his way back to professional baseball. As played here by Jimmy Stewart, Stratton becomes an emblem of post-traumatic stress disorder, standing in for all the men who came back from World War II with mental and physical challenges but with no means of expressing their pain. Stewart himself flew numerous missions in the war and suffered “shell shock,” and he brings a fierce, lived-in intensity to the scenes of Stratton post-surgery, where he storms around his house and snaps at his wife and children because he is so bitter about his injury. Like The Pride of the Yankees, The Stratton Story is a love story as much as a baseball movie, with Stratton’s wife Ethel (June Allyson), nursing him back to health and reviving his confidence as a pitcher, even donning catcher’s gear out in the driveway at one point just to get him throwing again. It’s a heartwarming story elevated by Stewart’s charms, talent, and personal history.
16. The Natural (1984)
The book on which The Natural is based ends with a strikeout. The film ends, as Dave Zirin put it in my book, “with the ball hitting the goddamn lights.” Why did director Barry Levinson mandate such a change? Because the movies demand a happy ending, especially back in 1984, when the country was in a malaise and in need of some optimism. The Natural did what Reagan’s “Morning in America” ad did, offer eager audiences an imaginary return to postwar bliss. Yes, there are some reactionary elements to The Natural, which I detail in my book, but that’s part of baseball, a game that was nostalgic even in its early iterations. When more and more Americans were flooding to the cities, baseball offered a glimpse of our agrarian past.
The Natural was also a transformative film for the baseball movie genre. Prior to it, studio executives thought baseball movies were box-office poison. But with Robert Redford’s beautiful face on the poster, The Natural made $47 million and was nominated for four Oscars, including Supporting Actress (Glenn Close), Score (Randy Newman), and Cinematography (Caleb Deschanel). That’s the secret sauce of The Natural; its incredible roster of actors and craftspeople working at the top of their game. The film’s success paved the way for the baseball movie boom of the ‘80s and ‘90s, which encouraged the fandom of a generation of youngsters, like me, who were just learning about this great game. It expressed how baseball feels at its best, like a Greek myth transported to the modern age. It captures the exact moment, when the ball hits those goddamn lights, that men transform into gods.