Top 50 Baseball Movies: #25-21

Another aging vet, another pioneer, some forgotten men, bad journalists, and a corrupt system

In advance of the publication of my book Baseball: The Movie, we’re counting down the Top 50 baseball movies of all time. The book comes out in 11 days, so we’re going to have to increase our pace. Let’s go.

25. Pastime (1990)

This forgotten film, which played at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival under the title One Cup of Coffee, feels for most of its run time like a carbon copy of better films about aging veterans in the minor leagues, namely Bull Durham and Long Gone. The veteran is Roy Dean Bream (William Russ), a 41-year-old pitcher living off of a memory in which Stan Musial homered off him. Only in a baseball movie can getting beat be a fond memory. As his career careens to a close, he begins mentoring a young, Black rocket-armed pitcher (Glenn Plummer), who suffers racial abuse in this small 1957 California town. It’s all fairly cliched, but what separates Pastime is a third-act twist that leans so hard into its baseball movie conventions that it somehow surpasses them. The ending won’t work for everyone. It worked hard for me, as perhaps more than any other film, Pastime refuses to sugarcoat the realities of a life committed to this silly, beautiful game.

24. 42 (2013)

The last baseball movie to be an unqualified hit, 42 is a competent work of commercial art, but it’s a little troubling how it refuses to update The Jackie Robinson Story. Our understanding of race in America had changed since 1950, but 42 pretends it hasn’t. The film still centers Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) to an alarming degree and paints Robinson as preternaturally restrained, as if he never was tempted towards lashing back against his racist harassers. But it does all of this a lot better than the older film did. The film was our introduction to Chadwick Boseman, whose grace and bottled rage serve him well in the role. Ford is magnificent as Rickey, providing both comic relief and the film’s moral grounding. If 42 came out in the fall instead of around Opening day, Ford would have surely gotten an Oscar nomination. Best of all, 42 shows us just how electric Robinson was on the field. Watching him take huge leads off of first base and discombobulate the opposing pitchers is a neat metaphor for how his presence on the national stage disrupted the status quo. 42 has its flaws, but it comes alive on the field.

23. Soul of the Game (1996)

This heavily fictionalized account of last days of the pre-integration Negro Leagues serves as a welcome corrective to the failures of earlier attempts (and later ones, see above) to discuss race in the game. Mainly, it shows, through the stories of Satchel Paige (Delroy Lindo) and Josh Gibson (Mykelti Williamson), how integration was a bitter pill for those players who were past their prime by the time Robinson hit the majors. There’s also a crucial scene in which we learn that New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia is planning on integrating baseball himself, which inspires Rickey to jump the gun so that he can get there first. In this telling, Ricky is an opportunist rather than a brave pioneer (in reality, he was both). That’s a significant change from every other film about Robinson and Rickey, making Soul of the Game the most honest film about race in baseball that has ever been produced.

22. 61* (2001)

It was a sign of the times that this Billy Crystal-directed film about the home run race between Yankees Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle went straight to HBO, instead of earning a theatrical release. By 2001, the baseball movie boom was over. It’s a shame because 61* deserved a bigger audience and a place in the canon. Crystal, a lifelong Yankee fan, gets much right here, most of all his casting. Thomas Jane looks like the Mick and captures his cocky charm, while Barry Pepper’s wide eyes and chiseled jaw reflects the wholesome charisma of Maris. On a personal note, I’m not thrilled with how 61* portrays journalists, implying that their intrusions put so much pressure on Mantle and Maris that they couldn’t enjoy their historic seasons. But that’s standard for baseball movies, which often—just look at The Natural or the original Angels in the Outfield—creates antagonists out of newspapermen. I’m pretty sure this is how most players actually feel, so I guess it’s honest.

21. Ballplayer: Pelotero

Like a Hoop Dreams for baseball, this bracing documentary follows two young athletes in the Dominican Republic as they go through the process of being signed by major league clubs. Corruption in the signing process runs very deep, but we didn’t really know that until this film (and a terrific article by Dave Zirin, who I quote heavily in the book). With unprecedented access to the training facilities run by major league clubs, Ballplayer: Pelotero shows with perfect clarity how the process incentivizes young players to lie about their ages, risk permanent damage to their bodies, and forgo their education in the slim hopes of making the majors. In the film’s most harrowing sequence, they even show how the scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates invents a controversy about one player in order to depress his signing bonus. It’s so messed up it might make you want to give up on baseball altogether, especially since few of these issues have really been rectified to this day. Luckily, most other baseball films will make you forget all that.