Top 50 Baseball Movies: #40-36

This is when you start writing me angry letters.

In honor of my forthcoming book Baseball: The Movie, I’m counting down the Top 50 baseball movies ever made. Yes, 50.

40. Alibi Ike (1935)

Conventional wisdom has it that Kevin Costner is the actor most synonymous with the baseball film, but what about Joe E. Brown? The classic Hollywood comedy star was obsessed with baseball for his entire life, turned down a contract with the Boston Red Sox to make movies, and starred in three beloved baseball comedies…that almost no one has ever heard of today. The most famous—and best—is Alibi Ike, which features the mugging Brown as a major leaguer known for having a fanciful excuse for every misstep. It’s a template for future baseball films in that it features a full roster of cameos by actual major leaguers, although none of them were exactly superstars. The film is good fun but not spectacular, and is mostly remembered (at least by me) as the debut of Olivia de Haviland, who plays the manager’s sister-in-law and Brown’s love interest. Otherwise, it’s Brown’s palpable enthusiasm for the game that keeps the whole thing afloat.

39. For Love of the Game (1999)

If you asked a hundred baseball fans for their favorite movies, I doubt For Love of the Game would be mentioned more than once or twice. If you asked a hundred players (especially pitchers), you’d hear of little else. It came up numerous times in my book interviews with current and former major leaguers. Personally, I think it’s half a good film. The romance between Kevin Costner, as aging starting pitcher Chapel, and Kelly Preston is half-baked at best. It’s all told in flashback, while Chapel flirts with a perfect game at Yankee Stadium in the final start of his career. The baseball scenes are top notch. Costner and director Sam Raimi (yes, the horror/Spider-Man guy) hit all the right notes, including having Vin Scully intone over the proceedings with his unimpeachable sense of poetry. Oh, and why do ballplayers love it? They claim that the “talk-back” Chapel images in on the mound and the way the film visually expresses his ability to tune out distractions perfectly mimics how pro ball players get through a game.

38. The Saint of Second Chances (2023)

As I’ve previously mentioned in this space, I never quite know what to do with baseball documentaries. Some of them feel like cinema. Some feel like TV episodes. This Netflix documentary, which was released to mild fanfare last summer, wonderfully captures the spirit of the baseball underdog—and of baseball itself. The protagonist is Mike Veeck, whose baseball pedigree is unimpeachable, at least for an executive. His grandfather owned the Chicago Cubs from 1919 to 1933. His father worked for the team and came up with groundbreaking ideas like selling hot dogs at the stadium, having Ladies’ Night at the park, and, gasp, putting ivy on the walls. 

Mike inherited the same spirit of showmanship. After a brief career in MLB, he became owner of several minor leagues teams in the 1990s, where he imbued the game with the spirit of silliness that is commonplace in minor league parks today. My favorite of his innovations is the bat dog, a canine who retrieves the bat after the hitter drops it at home plate. The Saint of Second Chances is full of twists and turns so ludicrous (and often tragic) that they would feel contrived in a fictional film, but baseball is full of these stories. Mike Veeck’s life is one of the better ones.

37. Finding Buck McHenry (2000)

It feels like a familiar tale. A kid who’s new in town has no friends and he gets cut from the school baseball team, so he joins forces with some other underachievers and starts his own squad. They need a coach, though, and it turns out the old janitor (Ossie Davis) knows a thing or two about the game. Soon, the kid begins to suspect that he’s an acclaimed former Negro Leaguer who was presumed dead many years earlier. McHenry has a troubled past, and he has been hiding out in this small town, just waiting for some enthusiastic White kid to rejuvenate his love for the sport.

Yes, it’s trite as heck, but Ossie Davis is one of those actors who can make hackneyed dialogue sound like Shakespeare. Whenever he’s onscreen, Finding Buck McHenry sings. Much of the film is movie-of-the-week stuff (I mean, just look at its poster below), but it’s all worth it for the poignant cameo by Hall of Famer Ernie Banks and the late monologue in which Davis regales an audience with stories of the Negro Leagues. Directed by the great independent filmmaker Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), Finding Buck McHenry is a very valuable history lesson, and only a little bit more.

36. The Sandlot (1993)

Start writing your letters, people. I’m not a fan of The Sandlot. The only reason it’s this high on the list is for the July 4th sequence, when writer-director David Mickey Evans films the kids playing a night game under the illumination of holiday fireworks. He drops the dialogue, fills the soundtrack with Ray Charles’ “America the Beautiful,” and somehow captures the exact place where baseball, America, and unbridled hope collide. It’s my favorite sequence in a baseball movie.

After that…meh. I’m not a fan of unexamined nostalgia, and that’s really all that The Sandlot has going for it. By setting the film in 1962, Evans chooses the last gasp of the postwar era as a setting for its vision of an ideal childhood, when kids could run around without monitoring, a female lifeguard could be assaulted by a child and end up falling in love with him, and, as we learn in the film’s climactic scene with James Earl Jones, segregation in baseball never existed. I’ll give the credit for its center of a Latino star in the game at a time when few movies were doing that, although I still question Benny’s decision to steal home with the game on the line at the end.

Still, my main problems with The Sandlot aren’t really political. Unexamined nostalgia just isn’t that interesting. I don’t like A Christmas Story, to which The Sandlot owes much of its tone, either. The whole thing just feels flat to me, like a trip to a time period that never existed. I guess that’s a feature rather than a bug for most. I say a lot more about this in my book. At least we can agree on the Fourth of July.