Baseball movies are seldom about baseball. For American cinema, baseball is a metaphor for something about the human condition: manhood, mortality, love, justice, reconciliation, second chances, dignity in defeat, the mystery of compassion, the value of friendship, simple grace, and impossible dreams.
Perhaps that's because baseball appeals to some deep structure in the imagination. Football, basketball, soccer, and hockey are reenactments of war, of violating other people's sanctuaries. But baseball is about life: You venture out into the world -- all the while seeking temporary haven against hostile forces -- and, at long last, return safely home.
Though baseball movies are as old as the motion picture industry, the first to be important in its own right is the 1942 classic The Pride of the Yankees. A sentimental biography of Lou Gehrig, the slugging first-baseman for the New York Yankees during the 1920s and 1930s, it remains the benchmark for all subsequent baseball movies. As a World War II-era morale-booster, The Pride of the Yankees gushes with appreciation for American institutions and the American way of life. The story opens with picturesque glimpses of New York, circa 1913, with its trolleys and horse wagons, tenements and clothes lines. Gehrig's German-immigrant parents don't understand their son's passion for baseball, but they recognize that "In zis country you can be anysing you vant."
Teresa Wright plays Gehrig's wife Eleanor as a proper, wholesome heroine, but with a sexual edge that gives the film a real lift, and Gary Cooper is perfectly cast as the awkward, humble, and lovable hero. He brings a convincing masculine presence to the role, even if he never quite mastered a ballplayer's movements. (Lefty O'Doul, a big leaguer brought in to coach the actor, thought he "threw the ball like an old woman tossing a hot biscuit.") The baseball action is helped along by headline montages and newsreel footage, and several of Gehrig's real-life Yankee teammates -- including Babe Ruth and Bill Dickey -- make cameo appearances.
The Pride of the Yankees is essentially the story of how a boy becomes a man, and, in Lou Gehrig's case, a leader of men. The essence of baseball -- venturing out into the world, completing a series of required passages, and coming back home -- is beautifully mirrored in the life of one man. To follow his dream of playing Major League baseball, Lou must overcome obstacles: his parents' resistance, for instance, and, later, his own discomfort around rough, profane companions. Despite Lou's reputation as "the Iron Horse" -- a reference to his courage and durability -- he remains something of a mama's boy (repeatedly addressing his domineering mother as "my best girl"). But when he does finally leave his parents' house and cleave unto his wife, his manhood is completed, and the love story between Eleanor and Lou becomes the real center of the movie.
In the end, the seemingly vital thirty-six-year-old is diagnosed with a fatal neuro-muscular illness (now commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease). He had lived well, and now he is called upon to die well. "All the arguing in the world can't change the umpire's call," he says to his doctor. Gehrig's famous farewell address at Yankee Stadium is recreated as a classic moment in American cinema: "Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."
Curiously, there has never been a decent film about Babe Ruth, the man who -- as both player and icon -- overshadowed Gehrig. His biography could not be told as an exemplary life. Ruth was an outrageous man-child, a wild dionysian in Yankee pinstripes, a glutton, drunk, vulgarian, and sexual predator. At the same time, he was a kind and generous soul with an affection for children (even if he couldn't be trusted with their older sisters). Making sense of this complicated life would have been a cinematic triumph. Unfortunately, The Babe Ruth Story, a 1948 production starring William Bendix, is widely regarded as the worst baseball movie ever made. It distorts the Babe's life by presenting him as a cardboard saint with a Brooklyn accent. (Ruth, of course, grew up in Baltimore, but Bendix was very much from Brooklyn.) Just weeks before he died of cancer in 1948, Ruth attended a screening of this silly, untruthful hagiography and was unable to watch it all the way through.
A better but still disappointing effort at capturing Ruth's life is The Babe (1992), starring John Goodman. Though sympathetic, it does show at least some of Ruth's misbehavior, with special emphasis on his vulgarity, giving the audience more belching and flatulence than necessary. The Babe takes far too much liberty with the facts to be a serious biographical interpretation, and, though it tries hard, it never approximates the fun and excitement that Ruth always generated. (Also, the real Babe Ruth, even when he developed his trademark beer belly, was never as corpulent as John Goodman, who looks more like Ralph Kramden than the Bambino as he chugs around the bases.)
The Babe hints that Ruth's wild lifestyle began to calm down by the 1930s, thanks in large measure to the influence of his second wife, Claire. The importance of a good woman is a critical motif in almost every baseball movie. Without the woman who sets boundaries, offers companionship, and completes his incompleteness, a man is unfit for the game of life. A moving, if conventional, illustration of this theme occurs in The Winning Team, a 1952 production claiming to be "the true story of Grover Cleveland Alexander," pitching superstar of the 1910s and 1920s. Ronald Reagan as Alexander provides a model of manly grace under pressure, cool and confident in the most trying circumstances, chewing gum and rubbing up a baseball. A young, wholesome Doris Day got top billing as Aimee, the devoted wife. After his initial triumphs, Alexander has a mid-career slide and turns to the bottle. Aimee rescues him from skid row, and he delivers by pitching the Cardinals to victory in the 1926 World Series. In gratitude he tells her, "I've been stealing strength from you all season -- every game, every pitch. . . . Without you I'm just half a man, waiting to black out. God sure must think a lot of me, for giving me you."
Unfortunately, the real life of Grover Cleveland Alexander was not so happy: His deep plunge into drunkenness and destitution occurred not in mid-career, but after his World Series heroics and supposed reconciliation with Aimee, and he died a lonely alcoholic in a rooming house in 1950. ( For the Love of the Game, a 1999 film starring Kevin Costner and Kelly Preston, plays a similar theme in contemporary settings and with greater realism; the Costner character, however, is not a drunk but a recovering egomaniac. Another good overcoming-a-handicap movie is the 1957 Fear Strikes Out, the story of Boston Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall and his struggle with mental illness. It's overwrought, of course, in the way all 1950s psychological dramas are, but still interesting.)
The Pride of St. Louis (1952) stars Dan Dailey as Jerome "Dizzy" Dean, the gangly, wisecracking huckleberry from the Ozarks who becomes the St. Louis Cardinals' pitching ace during the 1930s. He too depends heavily on his wife's stabilizing influence when an injury forces him into early retirement. Unlike the laconic Alexander, Diz is blessed with the gift of gab, and so he becomes a broadcaster, offering such colorful observations as, "He mighta scored if he'd a slud." A group of school teachers force him to resign because he's corrupting the youth with bad grammar. In his radio farewell, Dizzy urges children to get as much schooling as they can, because "The thing for you to do is talk educated." Moved by his sincerity, the old biddies regret their meddling and ask the great man to return. "We'll keep teaching them English," says the head teacher, "and you keep on learning 'em baseball."
After The Pride of the Yankees, the best baseball movie in the historical-biographical mode is probably Eight Men Out, John Sayles's 1988 film about the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, in which eight Chicago White Sox players threw the World Series after receiving $ 10,000 apiece from gamblers. Eight Men Out gets a lot of things right, stylishly giving a sense of the time and the place with ragtime music, Model-T's, straw hats and high collars, realistic baseball action, and period uniforms and ball-parks. It also debunks the myth of baseball's pastoral innocence by revealing the economic and social context of the newly emerging world of professional sports on a national scale.
Yet Eight Men Out utterly lacks dramatic tension. Once the fix is in, the story unfolds with no interesting plot turns or surprises. Players take money, everybody suspects something, players blow the Series anyway, investigations follow, players are banned from baseball for life. Though it's clear that the eight were horribly underpaid and underappreciated by White Sox owner Charlie Comiskey, the movie never makes a convincing case that they were driven by desperate economic need. What succeeds in terms of history fails in terms of drama.
The Black Sox receive their drama, if not their history, in Field of Dreams, the 1989 screen adaptation of W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe. Kevin Costner stars as Ray, a burnt-out 1960s type, about to enter middle age, who has implausibly become a farmer in Iowa. One day while he's out in the fields he hears a strange voice commanding him, "Build it and he will come." This turns out to mean he should plow under part of his cornfield and construct a regulation-size baseball park so that "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, the greatest star among the banished players, can return. Joe is followed by other Black Sox, and later by an all-star team of deceased diamond heroes, who drop in to play ball, then disappear into the tall corn at the edge of the outfield. Their games seem to be played for the sheer joy of play, combining childlike innocence with adult excellence. The salty old-timers sometimes give Ray a bit of ribbing, but for the most part, they're nice fellas; they always stop cursing, for instance, when Ray's wife and daughter are present. The family takes it all in stride. "This is very interesting," says Ray, in one of many hilarious understatements.
Ray's magical field provides a second chance for the old players and for the various strays whom Ray gathers along the way. But in the end, they really pre-figure a more important second chance. One evening, after a ballgame, Ray's father turns up, resurrected as a young man. He is no longer the cranky authoritarian who was his son's constant nemesis. Father and son play catch on the perfect field -- for the first time as friends rather than antagonists. The perfect reciprocity of the throwing and catching symbolizes communication and reconciliation -- but in a distinctly masculine doing-things-together way rather than a tearful heart-to-heart conversation. The perfect field on the family farm is really any old backyard where such father-son bonding occurs.
Much closer to earth is Bull Durham, Ron Shelton's 1988 tour de force about life in the minor leagues: the bandbox stadiums piping out corny organ music, the long bus rides from one gritty city to the next, the cheap motels, the shabby locker rooms where players hang their clothes on a nail. Those who inhabit this strange little world are sustained by the dream of someday getting into "The Show," as they call the Major Leagues. But behind Bull Durham's veneer of unsentimental realism is an idealistic message about salvaging honor despite failure and disappointment.
Crash Davis (Kevin Costner, again) is an aging catcher who has spent his entire career in the minors, save for three weeks when he was called up "for a cup of coffee" -- a short stay in the Majors. Now he has been acquired by the Durham Bulls for the sole purpose of mentoring a hot new pitching prospect, Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh (Tim Robbins). Nuke has a Major League fastball but he is an arrogant young man who pitches -- and lives -- with self-defeating wildness. Rounding out the cast of characters is Annie Savoy, a part-time English teacher and full-time baseball groupie, played by Susan Sarandon at her sultry best. Each spring she selects one Durham Bull as her lover and protege for the duration of the season: She cheers him at home games, advises him about baseball and life, ties him to the bed naked and reads him Walt Whitman by candlelight.
Both Crash and Annie know they will become superfluous once Nuke moves up to the Majors, but they remain true to their function as surrogate parents for the young hotshot. Things don't quite unfold in a storybook manner (much non-family viewing follows as the two outcasts give in to the sexual tension that has been building between them), but there is hope even in these very broken lives -- and that, finally, may be the idealistic core behind Bull Durham's seemingly comfortless realism.
If Bull Durham redefines the second chance as saving the pieces of a dream, The Natural, released in 1984, is the ultimate second-chance fantasy. It easily wins the triple crown for most cliches, stereotyped images, and predictable plot devices packed into one baseball movie. It also provides early examples of now-familiar cinematic techniques: the overuse of soft golden lighting and the lush, overwhelming background music that tells you precisely what emotion you're supposed to feel at any given moment. The Natural is a compendium of tropes and archetypes from America's collective baseball unconscious.
The title and the plot are taken from a 1952 Bernard Malamud novel. The old popular baseball narratives always told a story in which a pure-hearted country boy leaves his family farm and childhood sweetheart to play ball in the big city; is tempted by gamblers, greedy team owners, evil sportswriters, and femmes fatales; comes to his senses, defies the bad guys, hits the winning home run, recovers the purity of the game, and returns triumphantly to the farm and the girl next door. Malamud had read those old narratives closely, and in The Natural, he constructed a cruel parody of them in which the protagonist gets a second chance -- only to repeat his mistakes and end up a ruined man.
The movie version of The Natural simply restores the happy ending -- in spades. Robert Redford is Roy Hobbs, the Nebraska farmboy who wants to "reach for the best that's in me" and to become "the best there ever was." Glenn Close is Iris, the eternally patient and forgiving girl he leaves behind. On his way to a Major League tryout, Roy is shot, apparently to death, by a mysterious lady in black (Barbara Hershey). He returns sixteen years later, in 1939, seemingly brought back from the dead. As a thirty-six-year-old, he seems in fact to be the greatest player ever, hitting with such power that he breaks the scoreboard and even knocks the cover off the ball. "Anything he wants to do, he does," someone says. "How can somebody play that well who came from nowhere?" (We are teased with the idea that there might be super-natural forces involved in Roy's return.)
Of course, Roy is nearly ruined by the team's crooked owner, the gambler, and a new vamp (Kim Basinger). But then Iris returns, resplendent in white dress, white hat, and backlighting. She comes to the crucial games and her aura restores Roy to championship form. It's hard to speak of this humorless, cliche-ridden film with a straight face. But it is a feast for the eyes, and Robert Redford, already well into his forties, still manages to appear boyish, looking as much like a real ballplayer as any actor has.
Bang the Drum Slowly, a 1973 screen adaptation of Mark Harris's novel, is, like The Pride of the Yankees, about confronting mortality. But here imminent death is the occasion not for stoic fortitude but for reflection on the source of human sympathy and fellowship. The main character is Henry Wiggen, ace pitcher and writer of a book on baseball, whose teammates have nicknamed him "Author." Played by Michael Moriarty with glib insouciance, Author unexpectedly ends up befriending Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro), a marginal young catcher whose value to the team consists mainly of being an easy target for ridicule. Except for Author, no one knows that Pearson, a dim-witted yokel from Georgia, is dying of Hodgkin's disease. When the team moves to release him, Author intervenes, negotiating a lower salary in exchange for a contract clause "saying that I and Bruce Pearson must stay with the club together."
De Niro, as Bruce Pearson, delivers what might be his best performance as a character who is not a tightly coiled psycho waiting to explode. He brings real poignancy to Pearson's bewilderment and agony. Unlike Lou Gehrig, Pearson has no adoring wife to comfort and sustain him through his trial, only the gold-digging madam of an escort service, who pretends to love him in hopes of becoming the beneficiary of his life insurance policy.
When the players finally learn of Pearson's condition, they stop ragging him. As Author explains: "Everybody knows everybody's dying. That's why people are as good as they are." The players rally around their sick comrade and begin to play better: "It was a club like it shoulda been all season, but never was, but all of a sudden become." They go on to win the pennant and the World Series, a happy ending except for the fact that Pearson dies. Author has finally arrived at what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called "the tragic sense of life." He realizes that if suffering and death are the primary facts of human existence, then all that really matters is compassion and kindness, the only proper responses for beings laboring under what Unamuno labeled "the common yoke of a common grief."
Of course, not every good baseball movie has a deep message to convey. The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976) never does for the old Negro Leagues what the excellent A League of Their Own (1992) does for the women's leagues of the 1940s, but as a fantasy set in those pre-Jackie Robinson times, it is good entertainment. A group of Negro League players, excluded from the all-white Major Leagues and exploited by their own black bosses, decide to form an independent, player-owned team.
Led by pitcher Bingo Long (Billy Dee Williams) and catcher Leon Carter (James Earl Jones), the All-Stars barnstorm the country in gaudy, colorful uniforms, playing whatever local talent will take them on. Richard Pryor, with little more than a cameo role, nearly steals the show as a black player who wants to reach the Majors by posing as a Cuban -- but his efforts to learn Spanish are as futile as his many attempts to calculate his own batting average.
Bingo Long has affinities with the baseball "jock comedy," an Animal House-like blend of slapstick, vulgarity, and sex involving a cast of wacky eccentrics and at least one romantic subplot. The best-known, and perhaps best, example of this genre is Major League (1989), an implausible underdogs-come-from-behind-to-beat-the-odds fairy tale. For fans who think that Field of Dreams and The Natural are pretentious, Major League is usually the baseball film of choice. The plot is predictable, the characters are mostly stereotyped clowns, and the laughs are pretty cheap -- but they are real laughs. Of all the has-beens and underachievers who make up this fictional version of the Cleveland Indians, the most memorable is Ricky Vaughn (Charlie Sheen), the ex-con pitcher with a blazing fastball and no control. Former catcher and comic actor Bob Uecker appears as a jaded, cynical broadcaster who observes, for instance, that a player with a big mustache leads the league in nose hairs, and says things like, "Today's postgame is brought to you by . . . I can't find it. . . . Oh, the hell with it." The Bad News Bears (1976), the first movie of any kind to have kids cursing (how adorable!), worked a similar plot at the Little League level. It's not believable in this context, however. This film doesn't wear well.
Another jock comedy is Mr. Baseball (1992), the story of Jack Elliot (Tom Selleck), a veteran ballplayer in such a bad slump that he gets traded to a Japanese team, the Chiunichi Dragons. This can't happen in real life, of course, but it sets up nicely the comic possibilities of an East-West culture clash. Jack eventually becomes a better player and a better man by doing things for the team, taking advice, respecting other people's customs; the Japanese, for their part, become a bit less rigid and, unfortunately, a lot more boorish. The baseball action is especially well presented here (especially the zip of the fastball), and Tom Selleck is very convincing as a professional ballplayer. His willingness to change wins the heart of the beautiful Hiroko (Aya Takanashi) as well as a new contract in the Major Leagues.
There's at least one kind of light-hearted baseball comedy that viewers can take semiseriously: the magical transformation of an unathletic individual into a diamond star. Sure, it's nobler for a hero to raise himself up by his cleats through hard work and will power. But let's face it, some people will never succeed in sports no matter how much effort they put into it, and they deserve their fantasies as much as anyone else. So don't forget It Happens Every Spring (1949), the story of a college professor who invents a substance that repels wood, thus catapulting him to fame as a pitcher (anticipating by more than a decade such films as Flubber). In a similar vein check out Roogie's Bump (1954) and Rookie of the Year (1993), both about young boys who aren't good enough for their own Little League teams -- but after suffering minor arm injuries miraculously become good enough to pitch in the Majors. ( Rookie of the Year is by far the better picture, but Roogie's Bump boasts appearances by a number of real-life Brooklyn Dodgers, the fabled 1950s "Boys of Summer.")
For pure musical fun, nothing beats Damn Yankees!, the 1958 screen adaptation of the Broadway hit, with Tab Hunter as the middle-aged shlub who sells his soul in exchange for the ability to play for the Washington Senators. Some of the saucier musical numbers are left out of the movie (so the kids can watch), though Gwen Verdon's classic "Whatever Lola Wants" is retained. "You Gotta Have Heart" alone makes the movie a must-see.
Last but not least, there is Angels in the Outfield (the 1951 original is much better than the 1990s remake). Real angels from Heaven come to the aid of Pittsburgh Pirates manager Guffy McGovern. They get him to stop his swearing and bullying, they improve the team's fortunes, and they arrange for him to fall in love with a pretty sports-writer and adopt the little orphan girl whose prayers brought about the divine intervention in the first place. "Somebody must've been helping me -- and not just on the field," says Guffy, one arm around each of his girls. "Look what I've got!"
The appreciation for small graces, the one-in-a-million-chance-but-you-still-gotta-believe spirit: It's all true to the game. And, of course, to more than the game -- which is why baseball movies are seldom about baseball.
Matthew Berke is managing editor of First Things.