Top 50 Baseball Movies: #10-6

An immigrant, a mistake by the lake, a bubble, and two very different players who suffer the same tragedy

In the run-up to publication of my book Baseball: The Movie, we’re counting down the top 50 baseball movies of all time. Yes, 50.

10. Sugar (2009)

Sugar is the movie that MLB doesn’t want you to see. It tells the story of a Dominican-born player, Miguel “Sugar” Santos, who is drafted by a major league team, travels to Iowa to begin his professional career, and has trouble adjusting to life in America. It’s an immigrant story as much as a baseball movie, but in telling that story honestly, it subverts every trope we’ve come to expect from baseball cinema. There is no big game. The film begins after the season has already started and concludes before it ends. The players come and go, so there is no team identity to be built over the course of happy training montages. A winning streak? Nah, it’s not even about winning in the minors. Most all, Sugar rejects the idea, so crucial to the baseball film, that success means gutting it out and overcoming your obstacles. Without completely spoiling the ending, Sugar finds a path to happiness outside of professional baseball. That’s where most prospects actually end up. In a sense, Sugar isn’t based on a true story. It’s based on thousands of them.

9. Major League (1989)

I used to think the title was a little strange. “Major League” sounds so generic. But it's actually apropos, as it was the first film to attempt to replicate the rhythms of an actual major league season. The film by native Clevelander David S. Ward follows the then-Indians from spring training to a play-in game (a one-game playoff, necessitated by a tie in the standings, to determine who makes the postseason). We follow along and experience it just as the fans would. We track the ups and downs. We get to know the players. We see their growth and their set-backs. Of course, the baseball movie also offers richer rewards. Like Bull Durham, we get a sense of who these guys are off the field, although in Major League, the unexamined misogyny of the players is a tough beat. Watching Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger) stalk his ex-wife (Rene Russo) throughout Cleveland sure feels different in 2024 than it did in 1989. 

Still, neither the film’s pleasures nor its influence can really be denied. Bob Eucker transforms the role of the play-by-play announcer, typically a perfunctory performer in other baseball films, into a source of comic gold, providing memes (“One hit? One goddamn hit?”) and imitations (“Juuuuust a bit outside”) that have permeated the game. He’s funny, but he also knows when to drop the jokes and call the game straight, as he does in the climactic game. In these final scenes, you’ll forget you’re watching a raunchy comedy and you’ll think you’re watching a real team in a real big spot. It’s as invested as you can be in a fictional team’s success, making Major League a major work.

8. The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

The Pride of the Yankees deserves a spot in the Top 10 for its historical significance alone. Before it was made, studio executives thought baseball movies were box-office poison, but the success of this Lou Gehrig biopic with critics, moviegoers, and the Academy paved the way for every baseball movie that followed. It’s more of a great movie about baseball than a great baseball movie, but that was by design. Samuel Goldwyn, who greenlit the film, felt it had to be about more than baseball to succeed, so he ensured a strong focus on Gehrig’s struggles to explain his chosen profession to his immigrant parents, the romance between Lou and the independent-minded Eleanor, and a young man who is cut down in the prime of his life and career, and must face his death with dignity.

It’s this last bit that made Pride resonate beyond baseball. The film was made on the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, and it’s easy to see how much the story mean to young soldiers who were about to risk their lives on foreign land, and, through Eleanor’s tearful support, wives who were preparing to see their husbands off to war. Cooper didn’t fight in World War II, but he did go on several USO tours. On one of them, a soldier requested he recreate Gehrig’s iconic speech from the film, and word caught on. Soon, he was reciting it at Army and Navy bases all over the Pacific. In future years, the baseball film would be a metaphor for American values, but it never found a higher purpose than it did with The Pride of the Yankees. 

7. Field of Dreams I1989)

In writing my book, I was lucky enough to interview Michael Schur, who co-hosts a baseball podcast and who, in his spare time, produced The Office, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Place. He was also set to produce a series remake of Field of Dreams, before it was shelved at the last minute. But in speaking with me about the film and its strange power, he shared the speech he made to his writers before they embarked upon the project. Here’s a direct quote:

“When we were in the writers room, I gave the opening lecture about how we were going to adapt it. What I said was that the entire movie is like a soap bubble. It’s very delicate. It’s shimmering. It catches the light in different ways. It floats around the room in an unpredictable pattern. It doesn’t have a lot of logic to it. It breaks a lot of screenwriting rules in terms of narrative structure and drive and character motivation because it’s this kind of delicate soap bubble that floats around, and you find it beautiful and lovely, and it disappears, and you’re left with this feeling of happiness and also loss and sadness. I said that our job was, ‘Don’t do anything to pop the soap bubble.’”

I’m not sure I could come up with anything better to explain this weird and wonderful baseball film.

6. Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)

In 1970, major leaguer Jim Bouton published Ball Four, a tell-all that revealed to readers what ballplayers were really like. They drank, they cursed, they womanized. It blew the lid off of the game. In a sense, Bang the Drum Slowly does the same thing. It’s a sad film about Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro) a backup catcher with a deadly disease, and the star pitcher (Michael Moriarty) who sticks his neck out for him to ensure he has at least one good season before he dies. It portrays its players as selfish jerks who hold out for more money from their cheapskate bosses, have little respect for fans, and bully vulnerable players like Pearson. “How tall are you?” one of them asks Pearson in a recurring bit, and when he responds, they joke, “I didn’t know they piled shit that high.” The only redemption this film offers its players is that, by witnessing Pearson’s decline, they learn to be a little nicer to him and each other. “From here on out, I rag nobody” goes the film’s final line. 

It’s a long journey from the rousing oration that concluded The Pride of the Yankees, but in 1973, America wasn’t ready to be roused. Bang the Drum Slowly reflects the mood of the country at the time, which was reeling from the dual disillusionments of Watergate and Vietnam. Unlike The Pride of the Yankees, another film about the health decline of a New York ballplayer, it doesn’t seek to inspire. It sees death (and, I guess, life and also baseball) as a slow fade-out in which all we can hope for are a few happy moments. In other words, it’s a baseball movie like no other.