Top 50 Baseball Movies: #45-41
In advance of the publication of my book Baseball: The Movie, we’re counting down the Top 50 Baseball Films of All Time. Last week, we did the first quintet of films. This week, things improve slightly.
45. Blue Skies Again (1983)
Good luck finding a way to legally watch this forgotten film. It’s not on any streaming service, nor will you find it on any physical media. How come? It was a complete bomb, and it’s not very good, but it’s important in other ways. It’s the story of a woman who tries to break into the major leagues by showing up to spring training and pleading her way into a tryout. Yes, it got to the idea of a woman playing baseball before A League of Their Own (although after The Bad News Bears), but that doesn’t make it great. Its artistry and commercial appeal leave much to be desired. With its TV movie aesthetic and anemic box-office gross (under $100,000), Blue Skies Again was destined to be forgotten.
It does get a few things right, though. Robyn Barto, who never acted before or since Blue Skies Again, is convincing as the determined Paula, especially when it comes to the baseball action. Andy Garcia also appears, in his film debut, as one of the team’s nicer players. The movie is also pretty unvarnished about what life would be for a woman in Paula’s cleats. Her potential teammates are merciless. One tells her he’d like to take a shower with her. When she’s at the plate, an infielder yells, “The bitch can’t hit.” It’s gross. Kudos to the filmmakers for not whitewashing the misogyny in the sport, but that’s about all they deserve credit for.
44. No No: A Dockumentary (2014)
I’m never quite sure what to do with documentaries. Do they count as baseball films? Some of them do, and some of them don’t. What’s the difference? I wish I could tell you. Some just feel like cinema, like No No, the story of Dock Ellis, who is most famous for having pitched a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. His life has been condensed by history down to a single moment, but the documentary fills in the picture, conveying his struggles with addiction and his post-recovery life, as well as his activism as a politically-minded Black ballplayer. That’s cinema.
We’ll cover the subject of race in baseball later on in this list. The story of Jackie Robinson has been told and retold several times—usually well—because it’s a story about baseball (and America) that fans (and citizens) want to hear. The story of Dock is a little more complicated. It reminds me more of Colin Kapernick than Jackie Robinson. You’ll have to see the film to get the whole picture.
43. Million Dollar Arm (2014)
A great example of how low the bar is for a baseball movie. This Disney film is (very) loosely based on the true story of two Indian cricket players who won a reality show that earned them a tryout with a major league baseball team. Sounds fun, right? I’d love to see a movie about their experiences. The problem is that Million Dollar Arm is more about the White guy problem of J.B. Bernstein (Jon Hamm), the sports agent who, in a desperate act to save his career, put the whole thing together.
With MLB working overtime to expand the sport into international areas, Million Dollar Arm could have been a slam dunk, but centering a rich white guy is a poor choice. Hamm is charming, but Bernstein is the least interesting character in the film. The framing feels wrong the whole way through. Plus, the film condescends horribly to the players, including one scene where they get drunk at dinner and vomit in the agent’s Porsche. Lame jokes and white saviorism are a bad combination, but Million Dollar Arm has its moments, mostly on the field. At its best, the film taps into that fundamental thing about baseball: that we all think, if we ever got our shot, we might be able to make it to the majors.
42. Rhubarb (1951)
You won’t see the chimp movie (Ed) or the dog movie (Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch) on this list, but you should see Rhubarb, a screwball comedy about a cat who owns a baseball team. The premise is pretty simple: The wealthy owner of the Brooklyn “Baseball Team” (I guess Branch Rickey didn’t agree to this particular humiliation) dies and leaves the team and his entire fortune to Rhubarb, a feral cat he recently caught and domesticated. His daughter is steamed, and she schemes to take the cat out of commission. The owner’s second-in-command (a game Ray Milland) is tasked with protecting him.
Shockingly, Rhubarb did not win any awards, but it’s a perfectly competent sports comedy for its time. I got a kick out of the players, who begin faking injuries to get out of playing for a feline owner, but become big softies when they start winning and surmise Rhubarb is a good-luck charm. It’s better than I’m making it sound.
41. American Pastime (2007)
Remember what I said in my last post? A baseball movie doesn’t have to be great. It just has to nail the ending. American Pastime is a prime example. I’ll also give it credit for this: It portrays the internment of Japanese citizens in the U.S. during World War II, which almost no Hollywood films have ever dared to do.
The film is set at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah, and it even features snippets of footage from the camps. In this fictional story, a former Japanese player, now a prisoner of the U.S. government, organizes a team in the camp and eventually takes on a team of guards led by a former minor leaguer (Gary Cole) who is bitter at his lot in life. A great concept with middling execution. Much of it is movie-of-the-week stuff. It takes a long time for a story to emerge, and the characters are thinly-drawn. But it’s a valuable history lesson—baseball actually was played in internment camps—and the climactic game against a team of racists has real stakes. If you make it to the end, you’ll be glad you did.