The History of Baseball Films

Only in America could a domestic sporting competition be called 'The World Series'. As baseball winds up for the final innings of a highly unusual season, Cinema Paradiso recalls how Hollywood has captured the sound of leather on ash.

By a curious coincidence, the first recorded references to both cricket and baseball involve the county of Surrey. The earliest mention of 'bass-ball' suggests that the game had royal approval, as Frederick, Prince of Wales reputedly participated in a game in 1749. But it wasn't until the 1830s that the pastime reached Canada, with the first officially recorded match on the North American continent taking place in Beachville, Ontario on 4 June 1838. Another eight years passed before the United States came to the party, when the New York Knickerbockers faced off against the New York Nine at Hoboken, New Jersey on 19 June 1846.

Separated by 25 years, the National and American leagues developed a healthy rivalry that led to the formation of the World Series in 1903. However, the sport remained segregated for decades and it wasn't until 1947 that Jackie Robinson shattered the major league race barrier by turning out for the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field against the Boston Braves on 15 April. The late, great Chadwick Boseman played Robinson in 42 (2013), Brian Helgeland's account of how owner Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) took on the bigots in the boardrooms, press boxes and the bleachers by putting his faith in the winner of the inauguralRookie of the YearAward.

Despite being capable of generating the most compelling sporting drama, neither baseball nor cricket is particularly cinematic. Even in their shortest form, games take several hours to complete and there is often a lot of standing around in between the moments of dynamic action. Moreover, by being largely confined to Anglo-American spheres of geopolitical influence, these sports lack the universal appeal of football, while their adherents revel in statistics and tactical nuances that baffle non-fans.

Yet moviegoers Stateside have long had a love affair with baseball pictures. The spirit of the game is ingrained in the national psyche, while its greatest players have been enshrined American mythology. As a result, baseball films have tended to dwell as much on human nature and universal situations as on the rules pertaining to fly balls in the infield and stealing third base. This means that they have been able to travel to countries with no baseball tradition, such as Britain, and draw audiences into their stories about mavericks and underdogs challenging the system and the sporting gods to overcome the odds.

Diamonds Are Forever

You'll have to bear with us for the first seven innings, sorry, decades of cinema's history, as very few of the baseball movies made in Hollywood before the 1970s have made it to disc anywhere, let alone in this country. Among the earliest recorded examples is the Edison actuality, The Ball Game (1898), which preserved for posterity a game between the Reading Phillies and the Newark Bears. Filmed in 1911, Baseball and Bloomers anticipated Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) by having two Harvard students hideout in an all-women's team. At least there was better team spirit here than in Lambert Hillyer's Girls Can Play (1937), which sees Rita Hayworth being murdered by the owner of her all-female softball team.

This was released two years after the last of the three baseball comedies made by Joe E. Brown, who delivers the classic last line in Wilder's cross-dressing masterpiece. A professional ball player, Brown had turned down a spot with the New York Yankees to follow his star in circus and vaudeville. Well, nobody's perfect. Genuine giants of the game like TyCobb ( Somewhere in Georgia, 1917) and Babe Ruth ( Headin' Home, 1920) also got to try their hand at acting. Conversely, several stars were baseball nuts, with Groucho Marx being a big Dodgers fan. Perhaps that's why Herbert Stothart arranged for the orchestra to switch from the overture to Giuseppe Verdi's Il trovatore to the Jack Nortworth and Albert von Tilzer ditty, 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' in Sam Wood's A Night at the Opera (1935). On being taken to Lord's in 1954, however, Groucho declared the game between the MMC and Cambridge University to be the perfect cure for insomnia.

During the postwar period, baseball biopics frequently did brisk business, after Sam Wood's tribute to Lou Gehrig, The Pride of the Yankees (1942), had earned 11 Oscar nominations, including one for Gary Cooper as Best Actor. Elsewhere, William Bendix took the title role in Roy Del Ruth's The Babe Ruth Story (1948), James Stewart essayed pitcher Monty Stratton in Sam Wood's The Stratton Story (1949), African-American pioneer Jackie Robinson played himself in Alfred E. Green's The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), Dan Dailey stepped in for Dizzy Dean in Harmon Jones's The Pride of St Louis (1952), and Ronald Reagan pitched woo to Doris Day as Grover Cleveland Alexander in Lewis Seiler's The Winning Team (1953).

Ernest Thayer's poem, 'Casey at the Bat', had inspired a couple of films (including a 1927 silent with Wallace Beery) before Walt Disney included a rendition by Jerry Colonna in Make Mine Music (1946). A heckle bellowed by one of the handsome batter's female admirers became the title of Lloyd Bacon's 1950 comedy, Kill the Umpire, at the start of a decent decade for baseball pics. In addition to a pair of marvellous musicals - Busby Berkeley's Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, and George Abbott and Stanley Donen's Damn Yankees (1958), both of which really should be on disc in the UK - there were also a pair of amusing comedies. A cat found itself owning a baseball team in Arthur Lubin's Rhubarb, while manager Paul Douglas gets a little celestial support in Clarence Brown's Angels in the Outfield (both 1951). Disney reworked the latter for younger audiences, as Christopher Lloyd leads the winged brigade abetting coach Danny Glover in William Dear's Angels in the Outfield (1994).

Another film available is Edward Sedgwick's The Cameraman (1928), which sees Buster Keaton play both pitcher and batter in an empty Yankee Stadium. The reason this iconic venue is empty is that Buster didn't know the New York side was playing away at St Louis and it was the Cardinals whose fielding line-up provided Bud Abbott and Lou Costello with a chunk of comedy gold. The duo performed an abridged version of the famous 'Who's on First' sketch in A. Edward Sutherland's One Night in the Tropics (1940). But they returned with a fuller rendition in Jean Yarbrough's The Naughty Nineties (1945). Altogether now, 'Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know's on third.'

In 1930, Spencer Tracy had played a character named St Louis in John Ford's Up the River, who does a flit to help former cellmate Humphrey Bogart before getting back to prison in time for the annual baseball game against the warders. Twelve years later, Tracy's sports reporter is so intrigued by Katharine Hepburn's radio rant about banning baseball for the duration of the war that he takes her on a date to the stadium press box in George Stevens's screwball gem, Woman of the Year (1942). On Hepburn's death in 2003, humorist Miles Kington wrote a lovely spoof about Hepburn's secret passion for cricket, which included her efforts to get games going during the filming of George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940) and John Huston's The African Queen (1953).

Stepping Up to the Plate

After superstars Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris played themselves in Walter Doniger's Safe At Home! (1962), baseball vanished from American movie screens for over a decade. It returned with one of its most sensitive depictions, as city slicking pitcher Michael Moriarty forges a friendship with Robert De Niro's terminally ill country boy catcher in John D. Hancock's Bang the Drum Slowly (1973). The excitement mounts on a different kind of hospital ward in Miloš Forman's multi-Oscar-winning adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), as Randle P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) commentates on Sandy Koufax pitching to Mickey Mantle after Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) has refused to let him watch the ball game on television.

The sport got its first franchise after Walter Matthau had excelled as the coach of an appalling Little League team in Michael Ritchie's The Bad News Bears (1976), which was followed by Michael Pressman's The Bad News Bearsin Breaking Training (1977) and John Berry's The Bad News BearsGo to Japan (1978). In the same year as the original entry, James Earl Jones, Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor kick against the segregation ofMajor LeagueBaseball in the 1930s in John Badham's rollicking version of William Brashler's novel, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976).

Pryor would return as minor league player Montgomery Brewster, who has to spend $30 million in a month in order to inherit ten times that amount from his eccentric uncle (Hume Cronyn) in Walter Hill's left-field take on George Barr McCutcheon's much-filmed 1902 novel, Brewster's Millions (1985). There are also plenty of laughs, albeit of the risquér kind in Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz's Troma romp, Squeeze Play! (1979), which follows Jennifer Hetrick and her New Jersey galpals after they form a softball team to take on their sports-obsessed boyfriends.

But the chuckles are of a more family friendly kind in David Zucker's The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), as Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) protects Queen Elizabeth II (Jeannette Charles) when she agrees to throw the first pitch at a Los Angeles Angels game; as teacher Rosie O'Donnell uses her love of the Philadelphia Phillies to inspire her pupils in M. Night Shyamalan Wide Awake (1988); and as Gil (Steve Martin) looks on in trepidation as a steepler heads out to his unsporty son, Kevin (Jasen Fisher), in Ron Howard Parenthood (1989).

In fact, the 1980s could be called the golden decade for the Hollywood baseball picture, as it brought us four classics and the first part of a cult comic trilogy. As Roy Hobbs, Robert Redford hits the most explosive shot the screen has ever seen with his old oak tree bat for the Newark Knights in Barry Levinson's air-punchingly satisfying underdog drama, The Natural (1984).

Up next is a Kevin Costner double-header. First, he plays veteran minor league catcher Lawrence 'Crash' Davies, who is transferred to the Durham Bulls and finds himself competing with rookie pitcher 'Nuke' Laloosh (Tim Robbins) for the affections of superfan Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) in Ron Shelton's Bull Durham (1988). Then, Costner essays Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella in Phil Alden Robinson's Field of Dreams (1989), as he gets help creating a baseball diamond on his land from Archibald 'Moonlight' Graham (Burt Lancaster), the 1920s baseball wannabe who became a doctor after he realised he was never going to make the grade.

This heartwarming tale ('If you build it, he will come') was based on WP Kinsella's magic realist novel, Shoeless Joe, which reflects on the 1919 Black Sox Scandal that rocked America when the Chicago White Sox lost the World Series in suspicious circumstances to the Cincinnati Reds. John Sayles relives these momentous events with typical grit and compassion in Eight Men Out (1988), which stars John Cusack as Buck Weaver and DB Sweeney asShoeless JoeJackson.

The following year saw the mood lighten in David S. Ward's Major League (1989), as new owner Margaret Whitton threatens to relocate the misfiring Cleveland Indians to Florida unless they up their game. Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen and Corbin Bernson returned for the same director's Major LeagueII (1994), but only the latter remained in the line-up for John Warren's Major League: Back to the Minors (1998).

The success of this triptych prompted a run of basebell comedies that saw James Belushi headline James Orr's Mr Destiny and Arthur Hiller's Taking Care of Business (both 1990), Tom Selleck take the title role in Fred Schepisi's Mr Baseball (1992), Albert Brooks nurture fragile talent Brendan Fraser in Michael Ritchie's The Scout, Trey Parker and Matt Stone invent a new sport and bring glory to the Milwaukee Beers in David Zucker's BASEketball (both 1994), and Matt LeBlanc pal up with a chimpanzee to take a tilt at the championship pennant with the Santa Rosa Rockets in Bill Couturié's Ed (1996).

Firmly aimed at younger viewers, the latter appeared in the wake of Daniel Stern's Rookie of the Year, in which 12 year-old Thomas Ian Nicholas becomes a pitching sensation for the Chicago Cubs, and David Mickey Evans's rite of passage, The Sandlot Kids (both 1993), which sees fifth grader Tom Guiry move to a new town in the early 1960s and impress his new pals with his baseball skills and his readiness to face down a giant mastiff nicknamed, 'The Beast'. Evans also directed The Sandlot Kids2 (2005), which takes the story on a decade and shows a new gang discovering the power of teamwork in conquering their dread of mean neighbour James Earl Jones and another monster mutt dubbed, 'The Great Fear'.

The decade's standout baseball film, however, was Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own (1992), a fictional spin on the actual All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that gave American fans something to cheer during the Second World War. Under the tutelage of alcoholic coach Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis), 'All the Way' Mae Mordabito (Madonna), Kit Keller (Lori Petty) and Doris Murphy (Rosie O'Donnell) bring their A-games, as the Rockford Peaches look to pip the Racine Belles, Kenosha Comets and South Bend Blue Sox to the World Series.

As Dugan avers, 'There's no crying in baseball'. But both Babe Ruth and TyCobbhad their share of hardships to overcome, as is revealed by Arthur Hiller in The Babe (1992) and Ron Shelton in Cobb (1994). The former sees John Goodman struggle to subsist on his glory days with the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, while the latter sees the journalist hired to write a biography of the first player to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame discover that his ailing Detroit Tigers idol (Tommy Lee Jones) is an egotistical, bullying bigot.

By contrast, California Angels scout Edward James Olmos refuses to feel sorry for himself in Robert M. Young's Talent For the Game (1991), as he keeps searching for the next big hope, even though the teams's owner wants to disband the club's academy system. Some people are never satisfied, as San Francisco Giants batter Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes) discovers in Tony Scott's thriller, The Fan (1996), as Candlestick Park die-hard Gil Renard (Robert De Niro) goes to extreme lengths to demonstrate his devotion to his hero.

The Giants seem to be the likely destination for Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner), as the pitcher discovers that the new owners of the Detroit Tigers plan to trade him after 19 years. Having just discovered that girlfriend Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston) is planning to relocate to London, Chapel has a lot riding on his last game, as he steps on to the Yankee Stadium mound in New York in Sam Raimi's adaptation of Michael Schaara's novel, For Love of the Game (1999).

Slugging Those Curve Balls

Although it didn't acquire its name until 1925, softball was invented in Chicago in 1887 as an indoor game to help baseball fiends make it through the winter. Ironically, it was the bats that were initially made out of soft material, but the sport soon came to follow rounders in using wood. While the fast pitch form of the game is taken very seriously - indeed, the women's version was due to have returned to the Olympics in Tokyo before coronavirus intervened - softball is also a social sport, whose bonding potential is explored by Greg Berlanti in The Broken Hearts Club (2000). Inspired by Barry Levinson's Diner (1982), the story centres on the West Hollywood restaurant owned by Jack (John Mahoney), who mentors the gay softball team whose core players are Dennis (Timothy Olyphant), Cole (Dean Cain), Benji (Zach Braff), Patrick (Ben Weber), Taylor (Billy Porter) and Howie (Matt McGrath).

Engendering team spirit in the face of adversity teaches inveterate gambler Conor O'Neill (Keanu Reeves) a few valuable life lessons in Brian Robbins's Hardball, as he agrees to coach a bunch of street kids from a tough Chicago housing project. Having emerged as an unlikely role model, O'Neill takes his charges to see the Cubs at Wrigley Field, where they run into Dominican legend, Sammy Sosa. Making it into the big time with the Philadelphia Phillies is the aim of Ryan Dunne (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) and Billy Brubaker (Matthew Lillard), when they are selected for the Cape Cod Baseball League in the debuting Michael Tollin's Summer Catch (both 2001). However, Ryan takes his eye off the ball when he falls for chic rich girl, Tenley Parrish (Jessica Biel).

Pitcher Jim Morris (Dennis Quaid) wouldn't stand for such shenanigans from the members of the Big Lake Owls in John Lee Hancock's The Rookie (2002), a Disney biopic that sees a talented pitcher lose his chance of playing for the Milwaukee Brewers through a shoulder injury. As he develops his team of high-school no-hopers, however, he gets a second chance with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The Brewers feature in another comeback saga, Charles Stone III's Mr 3000 (2004), as self-centred slugger Stan Ross (Bernie Mac) seeks to return to the plate at the age of 47 after a clerical error leaves him three short of his 3000 home runs.

Reliving old glories is also the theme of John Kent Harrison's The Winning Season (2004), which draws on a Dan Guttman novel for its story about young Joe Stoshack (Mark Rendall), who is whisked back in time from 1985 to 1909 in order to get an autograph from his hero, Honus Wagner (Matthew Modine), whose Pittsburgh Pirates are locked in a titanic struggle for the World Series with TyCobb (William Lee Scott) and the Detroit Tigers. There's also a bit of revisiting old ground in Richard Linklater's Bad News Bears (2005), a remake that stars Billy Bob Thornton as Morris Buttermaker, the washed-up Seattle Mariners pitcher who forges a fierce rivalry with Yankees coach Ray Bullock (Greg Kinnear) after he signs on to guide a hopeless Little League team.

Having sucked at sports as kids, David Spade, Rob Schneider and Jon Heder form their own team to compete in a tournament run by the father of their childhood nemesis (Jon Lovitz) in Dennis Dugan's underdog comedy, The Benchwarmers, Yankee Irving (Jake T. Austin) knows all about being picked last, even though his father is the custodian of the New York stadium after which he was named. But, with the Depression biting in 1932, the 10 year-old baseball fanatic gets the chance to save the day when Babe Ruth's bat is stolen in Everyone's Hero (both 2006), a CGI animation made by Daniel St. Pierre, Colin Brady and Christopher Reeve, the tragic former Superman actor who was making his last movie.

Learning to deal with life's curve balls is the theme of first-timer James Ponsoldt's Off the Black, which sees high-school baseball star Trevor Morgan challenge drunken umpire Nick Nolte over a questionable call that had ruined his team's season, only for him to agree to pose as the cantankerous sixtysomething's son at his class reunion. Playing under the influence also puts Arte Lange at a disadvantage in Frank Sebastiano's Beer League (both 2006), as the Ed's Bar and Swill team prepares for a softball grudge match against Manganelli Fitness.

The drink has reduced Bostonian Desmond McKay (Brendan Gleeson) to a shadow of his former self and junkie son Terry (Tom Guiry) seems to have inherited his addictive personality in Brad Gann's drama, Black Irish (2007). But, as mother Margaret (Melissa Leo) prepares to pack pregnant daughter Kathleen (Emily VanCamp) off to a home for unmarried mothers, 16 year-old Cole (Michael Angarano) practices his pitches in the hope that he'll be able to rescue his family from the doldrums. It's a baseball card that offers forgetful newspaper editor Cooper Zerbs (Matthew Broderick) a shot at redemption in Terry Kinney's comedy, Diminished Capacity (2008). It belongs to Alzheimer-suffering Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda) and depicts Frank Schulte, who played right field for the Chicago Cubs in the pennant-winning 1908 season. But in getting it valued at a memorabilia convention, Cooper runs into his old flame, Charlotte (Virginia Madsen).

Although it doesn't last very long, the baseball sequence in Catherine Hardwicke's adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight (2008) has attained cult status. As matriarch Esme Cullen (Elizabeth Reaser) thinks that vampires cheat at baseball, she asks Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) to umpire a game that begins as a thunderstorm cracks and Muse's 'Supermassive Black Hole' cranks up on the soundtrack. Bella's called upon to make a decision when Edward (Robert Pattinson) wings back a throw after Rosalie (Nikki Reed) has smacked a pitch by Alice (Ashley Greene), while she watches in amazement as Edward and his brother, Emmett (Kellan Lutz), collide while competing to field a ball struck by their father, Carlisle (Peter Facinelli). But Emmett saves the best until last, as he runs up a tree to catch a drive by the bat-twiddling Jasper Hale (Jackson Rathbone).

Cuba, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic are the leading baseball nations outside the United States and the focus falls on a player from the latter country in Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's Sugar. Scouted by the minor leagues, 19 year-old Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) travels to Davenport, Iowa to play for the Quad Cities franchise and soon comes to question whether the stress, isolation and bigotry he faces are worth a shot at the majors. Also released in 2008, Logan and Noah Miller's Touching Home was inspired by the relationship between the co-directors and their alcoholic father. Charlie Winston is played byEdHarris, while the brothers play Lane and Clint, who hope to break out of their rundown neighbourhood by playing ball. Starting from scratch, the Millers wrote a book about the shoot entitled, Either You're in or You're in the Way: Two Brothers, Twelve Months, and One Filmmaking Hell-Ride to Keep a Promise to Their Father.

Jeff Bridges plays another errant parent in Michael Meredith's The Open Road (2009), as the onetime baseball superstar agrees to return to Texas from Ohio when he hears that ex-wife Mary Steenburgen is dangerously ill. However, Bridges hasn't spoken to son Justin Timberlake for five years, even though he's playing for the minor outfit, Corpus Christi Hooks. There's more father-son tension in James L. Brooks's How Do You Know (2010), although the mood is considerably lighter, as businessman Paul Rudd finds a welcome distraction from his thorny relationship with Jack Nicholson when he meets Reese Witherspoon, who is enduring a difficult romance with self-obsessed baseball pro, Owen Wilson.

Fact proves stranger than fiction in Bennett Miller's adaptation of Michael Lewis's sporting bestseller, Moneyball (2011), which recalls how general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) responded to a 2001 defeat by the New York Yankees in the American League Division Series to transform the fortunes of the Oakland Athletics by hiring Yale economics graduate Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to use sabermetric analysis to crunch the statistics of potential new signings. A very different approach to identifying up-and-coming players informs Robert Lorenz's Trouble With the Curve (2012), which centres on Gus Lobel (Clint Eastwood), a talent spotter for the Atlanta Braves, who goes on a last scouting trip to North Carolina with his estranged lawyer daughter, Mickey (Amy Adams), who has realised that her father's eyesight is fading. En route to check out a hot prospect, they run into Johnny 'The Flame' Flanagan (Justin Timberlake), who owes his career to Gus, but is now a rival scout for the Boston Red Sox.

A rare example of baseball and cricket coinciding occurs in Craig Gillespie's Million Dollar Arm, a 2014 Disney drama that recounts the true story of how struggling sports agent JB Bernstein (Jon Hamm) travelled to India to organise a reality show in order to unearth cricketers capable of making the transition to baseball. Bill Paxton co-stars as Tom House, the pitching coach who prepares Rinku Singh (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh Patel (Madhur Mittal) for a trial with the Pittsburgh Pirates. There's markedly less sports action in Noah Buschel's Rage (aka The Phenom, 2015), but there's plenty of dramatic intensity, as sports psychologist Dr Mobley (Paul Giamatti) discovers how memories of his overbearing father (Ethan Hawke) are preventing promising prospect Hopper Gibson (Johnny Simmons) from fulfilling his potential.

Completing this youthful trio is Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), which was based on the director's own baseballing experiences at Sam Houston State University. Set in Texas in 1980, there's as much partying as pitching on show, as freshman Jake Bradford (Blake Jenner) moves into an off-campus house with teammates including Billy 'Beuter' Autrey (Will Brittain), who are more interested in impressing girls than their coach. Forming part of a loose trilogy with Dazed and Confused (1993) and Boyhood (2014), this may not be Linklater's finest hour, but the practice session sequence says much about locker-room rivalry.