It’s always bad when you’re watching a film and you see something that completely takes you out of the movie. It can be a bad special effect, bad acting, something nonsensical, or something unintentionally funny during a dramatic moment. I think sports movies are the ultimate when it comes to this because people haven’t seen a black hole or a ship barreling through space to know if that’s what it would look like, but a lot of people have watched sports their whole lives.
They know what that looks like, they know the rules, they know what to expect. And if a sports movie doesn’t deliver on that look or feel, it can easily take you out of the film. For example, in the 1986 movie Lucas starring Corey Haim, near the end of the movie they have a pivotal football scene that’s the whole climax of the movie.
In that scene they have two forward passes on the same play, a kid taking his helmet off in the middle of the play, which would be a penalty, and an incomplete pass which is then treated like a live ball for some reason. As someone who’s played and watched football for much of my life, I was scratching my head and I spent the next 10 minutes, which is the finale of the movie, wondering how a movie with a $6 million budget and a cast and crew of over 125 people got it this wrong.
Nobody on set ever went, “Hey, isn’t that an incomplete pass?” I’m supposed to be invested in the movie, but I feel more like this guy at the end of the film. And that’s what we’re going to look at for baseball movies. In this video, I don’t care if the movie’s good or not. I’m going to rank every baseball movie released in my lifetime since 1984 based on if the baseball looks like baseball in that movie.
I know the video title says I’m ranking them based on if the actors can play baseball, but that’s just one aspect I’m looking at. I’m going to be looking at the atmosphere, the stadiums, the crowd, if the situations in a game make sense or even just follow the basic rules of baseball. If they film the scenes in a way so you can actually tell what’s going on.
And in case of historical baseball movies, if they’re historically accurate. Anything that is important to portraying that this is a real baseball game, that’s what I’ll be looking at. And it’s hard to fit all that into a YouTube title. So, that’s what we’re going to be doing, counting down the best baseball movies in terms of if they actually got baseball to look like baseball after the intro.
Small number of notes before we start. I had to make some decisions on what movies to include. If a movie is listed as a baseball movie, but in the entire film they only have 10 to 15 seconds of actual baseball, I’m not going to include it on this list. So, films like The Open Road, How Do You Know, and The Phenom will not make an appearance.
I’m also not going to be tearing into kids. So, any Little League movies like Bad News Bears or Bad News Bears or Bad News Bears aren’t going to be included, either. I went with college baseball or summer wood bat leagues as the cutoff. It has to have that level or higher, like the minor leagues, foreign leagues, or even Major League Baseball to be included in this list.
That brings the number of movies down to 40 in total. Also, in analyzing it, I have to take the premise of the movie at face value. I’m not going to be ripping into Rookie of the Year because it has a 13-year-old on the Cubs. That’s the central premise of the movie and I’ll accept that as reality.
Same goes for a chimp playing third base. It’s the premise of the movie, so I’m not going to criticize that. I’m only going to look at if outside that main premise, does the baseball still look good? With that out of the way, here we go. Number 40, A Mile in His Shoes. We’re starting off with a doozy. I’m going to show you one sequence to illustrate how there was no care put into this film at all.
We cut to a game and it shows the scoreboard. Tulsa is beating the RiverRats 4 to 1 with two outs in the ninth inning. I’m going to keep that scoreboard shot in the corner for reference. Then we cut to a RiverRats pitcher pitching to someone with Fargo on their jersey, not Tulsa. So, that’s already wrong.
We get this amazingly athletic pitch with a great follow-through and the announcer says, Not the ninth with two outs. Then the amazing tactician Dean Cain decides to take the pitcher out and the pitcher says, So, going back to the scoreboard shot, the team they’re playing is wrong, the score is wrong, the inning is wrong, the number of outs is wrong.
The only accurate thing is that there’s a team called the RiverRats. So, new pitcher comes in and it’s clear they just sped up the footage to make the pitch look fast because the camera was actively panning and sped up when the ball was in the air. Then we get this amazing swing, but the batter rebounds and hits this hanging CGI ball into the scoreboard which now says one to nothing Fargo and goes to two to nothing Fargo.
So, that other guy wasn’t pitching a shutout according to this scoreboard, either. Also, it was a three-run home run, so none of this makes any sense. Even after they announce it’s a three-run home run, they cut to the scoreboard again and it’s still two to nothing. But he gets out of the inning. Everything I just showed happens in a 4-minute span and the only way you get that many basic continuity errors is you just don’t give a crap.
Now, I haven’t even gone into what this movie is about, which is a big yikes. It’s about Dean Cain seeing an 18-year-old kid with Asperger’s throwing an apple really hard and decides to make him a pitcher and puts him in a professional minor league game right away where he throws pitches that shatter wooden bats on contact, which that’s not how physics works.
I know I said I have to take each movie on its premise at face value, but in Rookie of the Year, the kid breaks his arm, it heals weird, so now he throws 100 mph. butt loving Did he say funky butt loving? There’s a cause and effect going on to lead to that premise. In this movie, it’s he has Asperger’s, so he throws 100 mph naturally.
Now, it takes a lot of work to throw 100 mph. People just don’t naturally do it. If this kid gets bit by a radioactive spider, then I can go with the premise that he can all of a sudden throw that fast. But he throws that fast because he has Asperger’s? This movie falls into that Hollywood trap of if there’s someone with some sort of autism, they must have superpowers or be some type of savant, which is very backwards thinking and not how that actually works.
And I think Hollywood’s been getting away from that in recent years. And what’s worse about this movie, it’s not trying to present some fantastical tale, but instead tries to stay grounded and say it’s actually pushing for the acceptance of those with autism. The movie’s Wikipedia page, which totally wasn’t written by someone involved with the movie, states, “The movie portrays the importance of giving people with autism a chance and treating them with respect.
” A couple of IMDb reviews show how that’s not the case. Mickey has Asperger’s syndrome, which is a form of high-functioning autism, and they couldn’t have missed the mark any worse than they did. As someone who has worked with kids with Asperger’s syndrome, it was actually kind of difficult to watch. Kids with Asperger’s are generally very intelligent and often very poor in social skills.
Mickey was quite the opposite on multiple fronts. The biggest problem with this movie for me, it’s the depiction of Asperger’s syndrome. The main character is shown as a Forrest Gump type character with emotional issues. In reality, Asperger’s people usually have normal or even above-average intelligence.
I’ve known a number of people with this syndrome and none of them have been as dim as the kid in this movie. So, yeah, yikes. To add to that, I don’t think a single actor in this movie has ever set foot on a baseball diamond. They’re really, really, really bad at baseball. I don’t know what else to say about this one.
I don’t recommend it unless you’re having a bad movie night and want to heckle the crap out of it. 39, Major League: Back to the Minors. To borrow a quote from Roger Ebert, I hated, hated, hated this movie. This 1998 movie was the third installment of the Major League franchise and by far the worst.
Right off the bat, bad first impression. There’s a runner on first, but he’s pitching from a full windup. He steps way in front of the rubber, which is both a balk and an illegal pitch. What’s weird is he throws from the stretch later and then you see it, one of the worst implementations of CGI ball. I remember seeing this at a young age and that stood out to me.
The ball kind of floats awkwardly and doesn’t look anything like how a baseball looks. Then you have this weird green screen that pops up from time to time when they’re playing in the Metrodome. I’m assuming they only had limited time to film, so they tried to overlay different footage, but this is honestly terrible.
I’m a really crappy video editor that spends way more time researching and doing scripts instead of polishing my cropping and learning how to keyframe, but somehow my intro still looks better than what this $18 million movie did here. Now, I’ll give some credit. Every once in a while they have a scene that looks okay.
You go, “Yeah, that looks like baseball.” But then the jarring CGI pops up again. It doesn’t really make sense because sometimes they don’t do CGI and it looks fine. But then most of the time it’s just bad and makes everything look weird. Like this instance, you can completely tell the actor has nothing in their hand and is just miming a pitch, which will never look convincing.
Then there’s the baseball itself. The movie is filled with baffling situation after baffling situation. Like you have a shortstop and second baseman get into a fight over the ball allowing the runner to score on a routine grounder. You have a player that charges the mound three different times and never gets tossed, which if you take one step towards that mound in real life, you’re out of the game.
I could go on, but you get the point. That’s what you get with this movie. It doesn’t look good at times, it doesn’t make any sense at other times, and I’m not even talking about the movie itself, which frankly sucks. A line from Billy Madison sums up my feelings towards this one. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.
Number 38, The Babe. This one they go for the larger-than-life Babe Ruth story, literally. John Goodman looks nothing like Babe Ruth in his prime, who came in around 215 lb, not the over 300 lb that Goodman is rocking. On top of that, they have him buying hot dogs on the field and hitting a home run while completely drunk and with his belt undone.
His pitching motion also looks bad and everyone seems to be swinging out of their shoes. From a historical accuracy point, this movie is one of the worst. I’m going to rattle a few off. They mention Ruth striking out Ty Cobb twice in one game, which never happened. Although, he did strike out Cobb seven times in his career.
They have Ruth hitting an infield home run that doesn’t land until he’s rounded third, which needless to say, that never actually happened. They say this statement about Gehrig’s rookie season. You got lucky. That’s the seventh home run for young Lou Gehrig, who thus far leads the Yanks in round trippers. When he hit his seventh home run that year, Ruth already had eight, and in fact, was on base for Gehrig’s seventh home run.
They say Ruth was suspended five times in 1925, which wasn’t true at all. They show him batting right-handed and hitting a single, but getting thrown out at second. He did bat right-handed twice in his career, but he walked both times. They have Ruth hitting home runs 22 and 23 in the same game in Boston in 1927, which he did hit his 23rd and 24th in the same game in Boston in 1927.
So, this one is about as close as they got to historically accurate. Gehrig then says he’s going to hit number 30, which he was at 18 when Ruth hit his 24th in real life. It was more surprising when the movie had something in it that was actually somewhat documented. The whole movie was bad and embarrassing and easily John Goodman’s worst if you ignore Blues Brothers 2000.
That girl’s get your game up tight. We’re going to have a wingdingdoodle tonight. Number 37, Angels in the Infield. Angels in the Infield is the sequel to 1994’s Angels in the Outfield, and you can tell it’s a low-budget made-for-TV sequel. At the time, when Disney was just churning those out on an assembly line.
The jankiest of janky CGI balls and lots and lots of stock baseball flying in the air graphics. We’ll see these again in another movie coming up later. Other than the angels, they didn’t have the rights to real Major League Baseball teams and are stuck playing the devils the whole movie. Unlike A Mile in His Shoes or Major League Back to the Minors, this is clearly a kids film, and for that reason it doesn’t get the bottom spot.
But as we’ll see later in this list, plenty of kids films like Rookie of the Year, Angels in the Outfield, and especially Little Big League look way better than this one. Obviously, the movie’s not supposed to be a realistic representation of baseball, but at some points they don’t even try. Near the end of the movie, it’s mostly an announcer telling you what is happening while it cuts to a cab ride where two people are reacting to the radio, so they don’t even need to show the action.
Patrick Warburton does not look like he plays baseball with his throws. Some of the extras have decent swings, but that could also be the excessive use of Dutch angles and CGI balls helping them out. One thing that kind of cracked me up is the final play of the movie where Warburton makes a slick fielding play, casually throws to first, and then you see the ball was completely in the dirt.
It’s also funny that this movie was filmed in the Skydome with the roof clearly closed due to the even lighting. But not only is there a rain delay at one point in the movie, but they constantly show cutaway shots with a bright blue sky. I didn’t really pick up on why I felt this way until later, but in my first watch through, the contrast between the lighting made it feel subconsciously off during the whole movie.
Now, do I feel bad about picking apart a low-budget kids film? A little. But then I remember it was one of those Disney cash grabs direct-to-TV video sequels that they churned out with almost no consideration for quality that even as a kid at the time I picked up that they were pretty crappy. And then I don’t feel nearly as bad. Number 36, Joe Torre: Curveballs Along the Way.
I almost considered not including this one because they kind of cheat. They just use real game footage instead of trying to recreate everything, but I ended up deciding to include it because the constant transition from blurry 1996 baseball footage to crisp studio-created footage was very jarring. I’ll just show you the end of Dwight Gooden’s no-hitter in the movie to highlight this. Oh, Gooden’s.
He popped them up. He’s going to do it. He’s going to do it. And center field, Jeter back on the grass, back on the outfield grass waiting, looking. Jeter makes the catch. Gooden puts down his glove there. Number 35, Ed. Ed is a 1996 film starring Matt LeBlanc, which probably single-handedly derailed his potential movie career.
Since I said from the get-go I would take the movies at their premise, I’m fully going to accept that a chimp is playing third base. In fact, there’s really nothing that crazy that Ed does. He does make some defensive plays, takes a walk due to being short Eddie Gaedel style, and the only thing that’s a okay that’s not feasible is when he sets a first baseman’s glove on fire with how hard he throws.
I’m going to focus on everything else. And the problem with everything else is you can’t see anything. There’s always a close-up on the pitcher, close-up on the batter, and then close-up on whoever catches the ball. Also, Matt LeBlanc apparently throws 125 mph, which again, ignoring the whole chimp playing baseball thing, doesn’t make sense on its own.
One thing I did find funny though is one player on Ed’s team sees someone they don’t like in the stands and manages to direct a foul ball to take off the guy’s toupee. Seems like this guy can hit it wherever he wants. Then on the very next pitch, he grounds into a double play. Outside of that, this movie does what a lot of low-budget films do when it comes to baseball.
Rely heavily on reactions of fans or the radio announcer instead of just showing what happens. Why is this ahead of the other movies on this list? Well, yeah, it’s a dumb premise and a terrible movie with the rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, but if you accept that a chimp can play third, the other baseball stuff in the movie may make no sense at times and isn’t filmed well, but I don’t think it reaches the level of terribleness as the previously mentioned movies on this list.
Number 34, The Fan. The Fan is a 1996 film starring Wesley Snipes and Robert De Niro, and it’s definitely a ’90s movie. It’s edited in the most ’90s extreme style possible. There’s Dutch angles, cuts every half second, music and sound effects that are leveled way too loud and overly saturated. When having to edit the footage from this movie into this video, I legit got a headache from sensory overload.
They also continuously use a similar stock flying baseball special effect that we saw in Angels in the Infield, so that should tell you a lot about the care put into this. I’m going to go on a tangent here on sound mixing because this movie does it terribly, and it’s aggravating, and I want to explain what’s going on here. Let’s say you have my voice.
You want to level that voice properly with the microphone placement, speakers, and mixing software so it sounds crisp and clear. The levels are too high, what happens is the waveform gets cut off and you get what’s called distortion. There’s also an audio effect called saturation. Basically, you have your waveform, and saturation brings up the level of the harmonics, or the parts of the wave that aren’t the peak, closer to the peak.
The ’90s and early 2000s had a thing called the loudness wars in music where everything was overly saturated and distorted. So, how does that apply to this movie? Listen to the crowd noise that is constantly in the background. And the pitch to Myers is driven deep towards the gap. Oh, he crushed it. That doesn’t sound like a crowd. That sounds like a jet engine.
Even just simple sound effects like the crowd noise is overly saturated and brought up to the highest level possible causing distortion. I can’t even grade how well the actors are at baseball in this movie because of the quick cuts, close-ups, stock effects, and disorienting crowd noise. Here’s a 20-second clip of a strikeout.
I’m going to have a counter of how many cuts and close-ups they have as we go. Strike Strike Strike three! The entire movie is like this, and it’s exhausting. I’m so glad that this style of editing has mostly gone by the wayside. On the bright side, this movie does have John Kruk, although De Niro does stab him to death. Number 33, Home Run.
This movie provided a lot of insight on how they frame their shots because you can see the film crew in the main character’s reflective glasses most of the time. Funny enough, they did fix it on this one shot, but every other shot they let it be. It’s also nice that this movie showed a proper appeal, which means the filmmakers at least know the rules of baseball.
It’s also a nice touch that they created a realistic, albeit bare-bones, broadcast overlay. They also have a few pitches where you see the whole pitch. But this movie is very light on baseball action and falls victim to not showing you any of it. They have an inside-the-park home run, and the only time you see the ball is in the background on TV briefly.
You have no idea where he hit it, how it bounced around enough for it to be an inside-the-parker, or anything of that sense. I even think the catcher mimes catching the ball at one point. They have a home run at the end, and all you see is a swing and a smile. No ball, no pitch, doesn’t show the stands with the ball landing, just swing, smile, and trot.
Number 32, Brewster’s Millions. Brewster’s Millions is a Richard Pryor comedy about a minor league baseball player given 30 days to spend 30 million dollars in order to inherit 300 million dollars. Perfectly good movie, but there’s a few things in the baseball scenes that are kind of weird. First, the foley artists went a little crazy with the bat-on-ball sounds.
Next, the ball in flight kind of darts all over the place. Now, I could be wrong, but I think they’re just putting a clear film with a speck on it on top of the movie film. You can see some artifacts from them doing that, and that’s why the ball darts over the place, similar to me doing my intro and not using a keyframe.
They also have an overly enthusiastic crowd at times. I’m sorry, but I’ve never been at a game where everyone just claps the whole time in between pitches. And I think because they didn’t want the audio to pick it up, these guys are all doing phantom claps, which looks kind of weird. This looks kind of funny, too.
It looks weird because in slowing it down, the ball is clearly past his glove before they cut to him catching it. I also don’t know how they pull off having this camera angle on TV. Is the camera just in the outfield? They are accurate a little with the umpire calling this pitch about 2 ft off the plate a strike.
I’m being a little harsh though. There’s a couple okay-looking scenes, and this is a perfectly fine comedy, and the baseball’s a minor aspect of it, not too distracting to the movie, but it comes off as a little goofy. Number 31, Cobb. This is another tough one to rate. There’s really only one baseball scene, and it’s about 5 minutes long that consist of Cobb being a jackass, hitting a double, being a jackass, stealing third while being a jackass, and then stealing home while, again, being a jackass, which is a thing we do have a
picture of, so that actually happened. There’s also some focus put on how Cobb held his bat and his stance, which is another thing we have a picture of. I don’t really know where to put this one based on all that, so I’ll instead go into the accuracy of the overall story. This movie is heavily based on the books written by Al Stump about Cobb, My Life in Baseball, A True Record, and Cobb, The Life and Times of the Meanest Player Who Ever Played Baseball.
And because of that, it paints Cobb in a terrible light. Cobb is a racist, sexist, misogynistic, toxic, and bitter person, and the writer and director Ron Shelton embraced that depiction of Cobb in the book. When questioned about some of the scenes in the movie and their accuracy, Shelton admitted to fabricating scenes along with Al Stump because they believe it was something the real Cobb could have plausibly done in real life.
There’s a lot of questions surrounding how accurate Stump’s books are to begin with. He had been previously banned from publication in multiple newspapers and magazines for making things up. In peer reviews of his book, Stump was accused of extensive forgeries of Cobb-related baseball and personal memorabilia, including personal documents and diaries.
Stump even falsely claimed to possess a shotgun used by Cobb’s mother to kill his father, which newspapers at the time clearly stated it was a pistol. Stump was also accused of numerous false statements about Cobb, not only during and immediately after their 1961 collaboration, but also in Stump’s later years, most of which were sensationalistic in nature and intended to cast Cobb in an unflattering light.
Cobb’s peer-reviewed research indicates that all of Stump’s work, print, and memorabilia surrounding Ty Cobb are at the very best called into question, and at worst should be dismissed out of hand as untrue. So, what’s true? How bad of a person is Cobb? I have no idea, but the controversy surrounding this and how this movie fully leans into those controversies, treating them as undeniable fact, does sour me on it a bit. Number 30, Undrafted.
Knowing the story of this movie, I really wanted to like it. First-time director Joseph Mazzello, who you may remember as the kid in Jurassic Park, wrote this movie, produced it, directed it, and it’s a personal story to him based on his brother going undrafted after college, but still having to play in a summer league game after finding out.
That story and premise might make a pretty good 8 to 10 minute short film, as those parts in the movie are its strongest, but this 100 minute film gets tedious. Expect to see lots of this, and this, and this, and a lot of really annoying characters trying to be funny, I guess. Get low. Get low. Get low.
Now, dodge and weave and get it on. Get it on. It’s borderline unwatchable on how annoying most of the movie is. With it being exactly 100 minutes, and the quality at the beginning and ending of the movie being much better than the rest, it feels like Mazzello was given a quota to make this movie at least 100 minutes long, and he went full high schooler trying to meet the word count of an essay and patting it out.
The rest of the movie also undercuts the main story they’re trying to tell. During the whole movie, nobody cares about the game they’re playing, and they’re making a whole joke of it, but in the bottom of the ninth inning, it’s all of a sudden supposed to be this dramatic situation where he can win the game with dramatic music playing and a montage, which was a joke of a game for the previous 90 minutes.
That was an aside, but how does the baseball look? Parts look good. The montage of the main character’s life at the climax of the film is clearly the best part and had a lot of care put into it. Some of the actors are good. They look like they know how to play baseball, while others, not so much. The biggest problem with the baseball scenes in this movie is you can’t really see what’s going on or where the ball is.
Everything is a tight shot. Tight shot of the pitcher pitching. Tight shot of the hitter swinging. Tight shot of a fielder going after the ball with cuts to the crowd reacting. Tight shot of the ball landing. We don’t know where on the field, only that it’s close to the fence. Most of the movie is like this.
Once they did show a pitch from delivery to getting hit without a cut, but then everything in the field is really close up. It’s hard to get a sense of the orientation of everything or the size of the field because everything is so close up and quick cuts. Just as a tip to directors trying to do baseball footage, if you have actors that can play baseball, which it looks like they do here in parts, widen it up a bit and show us everything happening.
Number 29, Baseball Girl. This one is one of the more recent movies, as it came out in Korea in 2019. It’s about a woman trying to make a professional baseball team, and all the baseball action is scrimmage games during her tryouts. No fans or stadium atmosphere. The movie doesn’t look bad from a baseball standpoint, and a few of the extras look like they have baseball experience, but the movie almost entirely relies on quick cuts and never really showing the ball in flight, other than this 300-esque slow-mo shot.
Got to say, this looks like a terribly unsafe place to stand during a live game. And since she only throws 60 mph in the movie, they take the smart route and make her a knuckleball pitcher. Overall, not much to say about this one. The baseball action isn’t done terribly, but it also isn’t done well. 28, The Scout.
The Scout is a 1994 film starring Brendan Fraser and is another film where I have to take the premise at face value that there’s a guy who can throw over 110 mph and hit a home run in every at bat. I don’t think a 110 mph pitch can knock a catcher back like that due to, you know, physics, but they do capture the effect of him throwing that fast well with some quick camera pans and sound effects.
The biggest issue I have with this film is the ending. The last 5 minutes of the movie is just Bob Costas telling us what’s happening. It’s always been a pet peeve of mine when a sports movie relies completely on the broadcaster to tell you what’s going on with no other dialogue, and to do that for your finale just seems really lazy.
Him throwing a perfect game with 81 pitches, all of them strikes, is also stupid. To really amp up the drama at the end, they have the last batter be Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith, which this is game one of the World Series in the mid-90s. At that time, Ozzie Smith would be batting second every game, not ninth. He has never started a game batting ninth in his career.
Now, there was no DH in his career, but in any World Series games he played in American League stadiums, he batted second. Having him bat ninth makes no sense. Brendan Fraser being good at baseball wasn’t the central focus for most of the movie. It’s about him getting over past trauma and fears in order to be able to make a baseball debut.
How the movie ended with him making his debut and then showing him pitch the most ridiculous game in the history of baseball just seems cheap. In my mind, a much better ending to this movie is to not even show the game. Show him finally come to grips and decide to pitch in the game. Show his windup with him with a grin on his face showing he’s finally happy, and when he releases the ball, cut to black and you hear the ump say strike one. Credits roll.
Much better ending to the movie. Actor Albert Brooks agrees with me. He helped with a few rewrites of the script and said the version he worked on did not end like Rocky with that bull big ending, but according to Brooks, the studio forced them to change the ending. Also explains why they put Ozzie Smith as the last batter.
The studio just wanted a more fantastic ending and didn’t give a crap about showing something close to real baseball. Number 27, Eight Men Out. I hope you like ragtime music because it’s playing throughout this entire movie. Nonstop. It’s the kind of thing some lazy YouTuber that just wants to use non-intrusive public domain music over their video essays would do.
Actually, check that. It’s not nonstop. I didn’t realize until this last watch-through that the ragtime music is indicator that they aren’t throwing the game. Anytime they’re playing normal baseball, ragtime music starts playing. Anytime they’re throwing the game, silence. Interesting little thematic thing there.
Anyway, this movie is really dusty. I mean, really dusty. They really need to wet the dirt on the infield. Now, I didn’t want to ding the movie for that because I honestly don’t know if they wet the dirt back in 1919, which would make an exceptionally dusty game. Going down this rabbit hole trying to find the answer, actually found footage from the 1919 World Series after the last game when they had some cars driving slowly on the field to celebrate the Reds win, and there’s a considerable amount of dust. Although, there’s also footage of
a player sliding into third, and there isn’t that much dust. So, maybe they wet the field during the game, and the postgame celebration it got dusty only because they hadn’t wet it in a while. Look at me. Now I’m on a tangent on whether they wet the infield in 1919 to see if the movie Eight Men Out is dust accurate. I can’t find a good answer.
So, if you know about MLB groundskeeping procedures in 1919, fill me in on it in the comments. I hate to say it, but for a movie that relies heavily on baseball scenes, about 20 minutes of baseball action overall, it’s not that impressive. It’s not terrible, but it sure ain’t good. This swing made me laugh.
He was about a second late and 3 ft away from the ball. And no, that’s not supposed to be a Black Sox player throwing the game. Some of the pitchers look like they’re throwing about 60 mph. This movie does have a few moments that are decent, but again, for a movie that relies so heavily on it looking like a real 1919 baseball game, it ain’t doing it for me.
Number 26, Angels in the Outfield. Okay, I can already hear some of you saying, “How can this movie be this high? It looks terrible and nothing like a real baseball game.” I’ll admit, I struggled on this one as well as the next entry in this list, but remember, I need to take the movie’s premise at face value.
And because of that, it’s really tough to rate. When the actors look bad in the field, they’re supposed to look bad because in the movie’s logic, they suck. Whenever they do well, while it looks goofy, it’s literally a heavenly angel interfering, so it looking odd plays into the premise. That said, the scenes where the angels aren’t interfering and they’re just playing well are surprisingly decent.
The uniforms are on point for the time period. The stadium and lighting looks like a real baseball game. Some of the plays look okay. If I omit all of the scenes where the players are supposed to be bad or the angels are interfering, it’s fine. That’s going to be a running theme for the next slew of films. They’re all perfectly fine in their presentation and not much to say other than that.
So, fair warning, I’m going to go off on a few more tangents that have less to do with the baseball action. Speaking of tangents, my god, the star power in this movie. Past Academy Award winners Brenda Fricker and Ben Johnson, as well as future Academy Award winners Danny Glover, Adrien Brody, and Matthew McConaughey.
Emmy Award winner Christopher Lloyd and future Emmy Award winner Joseph Gordon Levitt, as well as Emmy nominated actor Tony Danza. I don’t know how this goofy kids comedy pulled in so many past iconic actors as well as future iconic actors, but it’s incredible. Tony Danza does short-arm it a bit and Tim Kurkjian does correctly point out that every game was a home game.
Another weird thing about that season is it seemed like they never played a road game. And if this wasn’t a kids movie where they’re really playing up to the wackiness, I would probably rate it much harsher. But taking everything into account, I’ll rate it as all right. All right, all right, all right. Number 25, Rookie of the Year.
Another one that’s tough to rate because it’s also a goofy kids movie. I said it from the outset, I got to go with the movie’s premise, so I’m going to completely overlook a 12-year-old throwing 100 mph and ignore the legal and CBA issues behind a major league team signing a 12-year-old American to a contract. But this one is really similar to Angels in the Outfield with an older actor with a really unconvincing windup.
At least this movie cuts to a body double and shows the whole pitch. It does get bonus points for having some real players at the time like Bobby Bonilla, Pedro Guerrero, and a really, really skinny Barry Bonds. As well as at least has more than one stadium. And compared to Angels in the Outfield, the goofiness is toned down slightly, but it’s still really goofy.
This is another one where for what it is, it’s fine. Number 24, The Rookie. Dennis Quaid looks passable as a pitcher. Not great, but not terrible. It doesn’t feel like he’d be throwing 90s with that form, but they use enough camera trickery, cuts, and adding a little sizzle sound effect to try at least make it not look embarrassing.
There isn’t a lot of other actors playing baseball, but from the little there is, it looks good. They do kind of cheat in the final game. Since the only action they have to show is him striking out one batter, the rest of it is just actual game footage. They set up a camera at the ballpark in Arlington at a Rangers and Rays game and just used that footage.
Was actually able to find what game they used, and almost all the footage comes from the bottom of the third at a Rays-Rangers game on July 27th, 2001. If you look at the play-by-play of that game and compare it to the movie, you can figure out who’s up to bat, who’s on base, and who’s pitching. Fun fact about that, that inning had Rafael Palmeiro and Ivan Rodriguez at bat and on base, and they’re both visible in the movie.
And they also played themselves as Texas Rangers in Little Big League, which makes them the first teammates that played themselves in two different movies while on the same team since Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, who were both in Safe at Home and That Touch of Mink in 1962. Also, because they used game footage from 2001, that means they had to use the same uniforms in the movie.
But that doesn’t match what Jim Morris would have worn in his debut in 1999, which is the Devil Rays uniform that had turquoise green in it. Not a major error, but just kind of annoying. Overall, for the story they’re telling, using the real footage works and doesn’t take away from the story. They do a good job of matching the lighting in their scenes to the real footage, so it isn’t jarring when they go back and forth.
And I’m willing to bet most people watching the movie didn’t even notice. Still, using real footage is a bit of a cheat to get around recreating actual baseball, so docks this movie on the list a little. Number 23, Major League II. Major League II was a 1994 sequel to Major League and like many comedy sequels, it pales in comparison to the first.
While they do some things right just like in the first film, such as extras that can play ball, using a real baseball for all the scenes, and actors that at least look like they’ve played baseball, and it isn’t nearly as bad as Major League III, my biggest gripe with the movie is Isuro Tanaka.
They took a 5-second joke that worked from the first film, a Japanese groundskeeper that says crude things with subtitles, and turned it into an entire character. And all of the worst baseball scenes involve this guy. First, he’s Japanese, his nickname is Kamikaze, and he runs into walls with reckless abandon. I know it’s the ’90s, but that’s a bit on the nose.
Second, every time he’s on screen during the game, it’s doing something dumb that just doesn’t happen in baseball. From punching through Lou Boudreau’s retired number, throwing away his glove and doing a spin move to catch a ball bare-handed, to standing on top of the outfield wall to catch a ball, which I should note that since none of him is above the field of play when he catches it, it shouldn’t count as an out.
So, double negative points for that one. But they also pull some dumb stuff for the other main characters, too. Like Willie Mays Hayes for absolutely no reason stopping at home to dodge a tag in game one of the ALCS. Would have looked real dumb if the catcher didn’t swipe and instead just step forward and tagged him with a straight arm.
Still, most of my complaints revolve around the baseball situations being dumb. But much like the first one, everything else from a baseball standpoint looks good. Honestly, if you cut out Tanaka and some Willie Mays Hayes scenes, my complaints mostly disappear and this would be much higher on the list. Maybe you could argue the scene with Serrano hitting the bird is kind of dumb, but it’s happened a couple times before in the majors.
22, The Naked Gun. Okay, so this movie’s obviously slapstick. So, on first glance, it’s going to be pretty goofy and unrealistic. But I give the movie points for making the slapstick very baseball relevant. Making fun of ridiculous ump punch-out calls, corked bats, everyone spitting and scratching, coaches giving signals, ump cleaning home plate, baseball arguments, and the always timeless pitcher putting a foreign substance on the baseball.
But here’s the funny thing, if I edit out the slapstick, it ain’t half bad. Everyone can throw and swing and field. It’s not overly impressive, but for what the movie is trying to do, it’s perfect. Number 21, Trouble with the Curve. I have to give a shout-out and congratulations to fellow YouTuber Foolish Baseball for his major motion picture debut.
He knocked it out of the park in this one. There’s really not much to say about this movie in terms of how the baseball looks. It’s a competently made Hollywood production with no glaring issues, but nothing really stands out as impressive. It’s perfectly passable and doesn’t distract from the movie. It’s kind of funny with the timing of this movie, how it’s essentially the anti-Moneyball film.
Released almost exactly 1 year after Moneyball, all of the bad, unlikable guys that are out of touch in the film are the analytics guys, while the old scout that can tell a good fastball just by the sound is the protagonist and knows more than anyone else. It’s the opposite of Moneyball where the scouts are positioned as the out-of-touch folk and the guy that went to Harvard and pours through spreadsheets is one of the protagonists.
Now, I’m not going to comment on which one I agree with more, but it’s just funny how these movies came out around the same time with radically different messages and how scouting and analytics work. Number 20, Summer Catch. Even though this movie has gotten terrible reviews, there’s some effort on the baseball side.
Reportedly, only seven out of the 35 casted baseball roles were filled by actors and the rest were minor league baseball players. You can definitely see in how it’s edited that a lot of the movie is trying to hide the fact that Freddie Prinze Jr. is not as good as baseball as the rest of the cast. For the most part, they did a pretty good job of that, but for how much Freddie pitches in this movie, they really should have worked on his follow-through because it doesn’t look believable.
You’re not throwing anywhere close to 91 with that delivery. But the other actors are all very good. Matthew Lillard is even passable. There’s a couple uses of CGI ball, but the fact that I have to question what’s real and what’s CGI is a great sign that they blended it in well. Having never seen it before and only heard about its reputation, I wasn’t expecting much.
And while I’m not going to comment on if I think it’s a good movie, it does at least look like baseball. Number 19, Soul of the Game. Now, this is a really interesting movie. It’s about the Negro Leagues right before the integration of Major League Baseball. The Dodgers have scouts scouring the leagues trying to find the right player to be the first to cross the color barrier.
At the time, the league was dominated by larger-than-life characters and amazing ballplayers, Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. Guys who should have been the obvious choice, but instead the Dodgers went with the way more understated rookie Jackie Robinson. It’s pretty fascinating everything that went into that decision.
I give the movie props for having the look of 1945 baseball in the Negro Leagues, but the actors do look a little stiff pitching the ball and swinging the bat from time to time, but nothing stands out as very good or very bad. It’s perfectly fine. Number 18, If the Sun Rises in the West. If the Sun Rises in the West is a 1998 South Korean rom-com about an umpire in the KBO.
It’s pretty light on baseball action, which brings it down in the rankings a bit, but everything they do show is perfectly fine. I think they actually use some KBO footage and then spliced in some extras making plays. There’s one instance of noticeable CGI ball, but other than that, the extras all look like baseball players.
The pitchers throw like pitchers, the crowd looks authentic, nothing really detracting from the movie. They even do a KBO-style celebrity first pitch that fits into the plot. Not a whole bunch to say here, again, because it’s very light on actual baseball scenes, but if they made a movie with much more baseball action and this level of execution, it would look pretty good.
Number 17, Everybody Wants Some. This is one where there isn’t any actual games in the movie, so I questioned including it, but it does have an extended college baseball practice sequence, which was enough to see how good the actors were. Some of the pitchers are a little stiff, but most of the actors look really good.
Some good swings, some good fielding, some good throws. I like how in a lot of the shots they show the full pitch without a cut. I’d really like to see another movie with these guys playing in a game to see how Linklater can pull off some actual sports action because what we get here is pretty good.
But since there’s no game footage, it falls a little bit in the rankings from where it could be. Number 16, The Natural. This is going to be the movie that’s going to get me in trouble. Confession time, I don’t really like The Natural that much. It’s way, way too schmaltzy, trophy, and full of cliches for my taste.
I always did find it funny that him breaking his bat is a more dramatic moment than a player literally dying during a game. I know a lot of people out there love The Natural and that’s completely fine. Like what you want, I’m not going to say you’re wrong, but it isn’t for me. But that’s not what this video is about.
How does the actual baseball look? The stadiums, uniforms, and fans look like late 1930s baseball, so that’s a plus. Some of the stadiums look pretty cool, but they do always seem to have the baseball slightly out of frame when someone is pitching or hitting the ball. Some of the fielding is a little clunky. Michael Madsen runs like Albert Pujols playing basketball.
Kind of weird in the scene where the baseball is destroyed how sometimes it’s torrential downpour and sometimes it’s completely dry. Robert Redford’s swing looks good for what we can see, although that is a very unsafe and distracting spot for flash photographers. Overall, this movie does have a pretty fun and compelling late 1930s feel to it and it does make the schmalzy stuff work at times.
While it’s not amazing how it portrays the baseball, for what it’s trying to do it does it pretty well for the most part. Number 15, Moneyball. I already covered this movie in my direct comparison between Moneyball and the real TV broadcast, but the one thing that really stands out in every baseball scene in this movie is just how dark everything is.
It’s going to be like watching World War Z but with, you know, like five pairs of sunglasses on. What? It really gives the feeling that some parts were filmed in a studio or in a highly lit stage because everything in the background is just pitch black. To this movie’s credit, they do absolutely nail recreating a couple pivotal plays, but there’s still some awkwardness.
I don’t know what this is at all. But outside of that outfielder, nothing takes you out of the film. It’s all acceptable enough minus being really, really dark. As a side note, I do find it hilarious that the movie sold its premise about on-base percentage enough to non-baseball fans that during a montage, they just have a player stand there looking at four pitches and it’s understood to be a good thing and a sign of success. Number 14, Mr. 3000.
This movie looks pretty good. It looks like what a baseball game in 2004 would look like. Sometimes the pitcher deliveries do look like a position player pitching with the lack of follow-through, but it mostly gets the look right. I do like the touch how they got the ’90s Brewer uniforms in the ’90s flashback scenes, even if nobody really remembers the Motor Bane logo these days.
But them playing in those uniforms in Miller Park doesn’t compute in my brain too well. There’s also this home run which is clearly hit to left field. The announcer says left field, but then they show it landing in center. I’m thinking the convenience of having Miller Park, now American Family Field, be a retractable roof indoor stadium really helps with the lighting as it looks just like a game at Miller Park.
They even have one game with the roof open and seeing a whole bunch of day games on a Sunday at Miller Park with the roof open in my life, it looks exactly how it should. I also really like this early 2000s ESPN segment with Stuart Scott which looks exactly like an early 2000 SportsCenter clip would look. The fielding by the actors and extras also looks perfectly good for a Major League Baseball game.
It is a good thing the story revolves around Stan Ross being old and out of shape and unable to hit because his swings do look like that. When they do the early scenes where he’s still in his prime, they do enough camera trickery and cuts to make it look acceptable as well.
There’s a noticeable bad CGI ball here, but they avoid that for most of the movie. I do have a gripe not related to how the baseball action looks though. Brewers are my team and I was excited the time there was going to be a movie where the main character was a Brewer. If you look at the movies other teams get, Cubs with Rookie of the Year, Angels with Angels in the Outfield, Indians with Major League and Major League II, A’s with Moneyball, near the end of the movie the teams are all fighting for first place, making the playoffs, or even the World Series. In
the Brewers movie, the goal of the team is to finish in third place. Even in our own film, we get no respect. At least it looks good compared to most of those movies. Number 13, Field of Dreams. This one I was debating included cuz there’s no real games going on, just scrimmages and practice, but there’s enough to be able to rate how well the actors are playing baseball.
I always remembered that line drive back at Costner and as a kid I thought they didn’t have a cut. Ray Liotta must be good enough to pull that off in enough takes without killing Costner, but realized on deeper viewing the ball just goes off screen and higher than the ball that flies out, so it’s probably a different ball coming out of a pitching machine and Costner’s just hitting a target off screen.
Still pretty cool that they have Costner actually jumping out of the way of the ball. I guess he does his own stunts. I think they’re doing the same trick here, but you really got to look for it to notice it. For using 1919 gloves, all the actors pulled off fielding pretty well. I also really like the scrimmage scene with Moonlight Graham.
A lot of people say Field of Dreams is schmalzy like The Natural, but this scene really shows how they pull it off in a much more subtle manner. Old Moonlight Graham has a scene where he reminisces about baseball and wishes that he would have been able to get in that bat. I never got to bat in the major leagues.
I’d have liked to have that chance. To stand out a big league pitcher. To stare him down and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn’t. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. Then run the bases, stretch a double into a triple, and flop face first into third.
Wrap your arms around the bag. If this were The Natural, he would have done all those things like he said, winked at the pitcher to some dramatic music, rain starts falling, he hits a double and stretches it into a triple, and everyone watching cheers wildly while lightning strikes a grain silo throwing up sparks.
Instead, what they have is he tried to make it like his speech. He winks at the pitcher and the pitcher throws at him and everybody makes fun of him. They’re all rolling their eyes at this fresh-faced with too much energy. Then his big moment is to hit a relatively shallow sacrifice fly and everyone’s like, “Good job, kid.
” And he gives a subtle nod to Kevin Costner for making his dream come true. It doesn’t beat you over the head with it, but I think there’s more emotion in that nod than I get from any scene in The Natural. Look at me, I’ve gone off on a tangent that has nothing to do with how the baseball looks in the movie.
To summarize, the swings look good, the fielding looks good. I like how they did a few tricks to pull off these impressive shots. It’s solid all around. Number 12, Talent for the Game. This 1991 movie was one I hadn’t even heard of before doing this project. At some points, I was surprised how good the baseball looked and at some points I was flabbergasted at how ridiculous the baseball situations are in the movie. First, the good.
It looks really good. It looks just like a baseball game out of the early ’90s. Uniform is on point, the lighting is good, everyone looks like they can play baseball. For a minute there I was going, “How have I not heard of this movie? It looks like a legit ’90s baseball film.” But then there’s the bad.
The The overall story and situation doesn’t make much sense. Edward James Olmos is a scout on the verge of being fired looking for the next great prospect. He stumbles on a pickup game where he sees a good pitcher and after one tryout, the Angels immediately sign him and put him straight into the major leagues. Before he throws a pitch, he gets hyped up as the next big thing.
And then in his first game, he comes out with the jitters and gets babied to death, including some pretty bad defensive plays. A bunt single to lead off where nobody covers first, a single up the middle to put runners on the corners, a double steal that scores the run and gets no outs, another scene eye single up the middle that scores a second run, then a single that maybe the right fielder could have made a play on, a hit batter, a sac fly to score a third run, a fielder’s choice to short that scores a fourth one that has a terrible
decision by the shortstop. And finally, a double play ball that is nearly botched by the second baseman. Yeah, he didn’t strike anyone out and that isn’t a good inning, but it isn’t terrible by any stretch of the imagination. All the hits were bunts, bloopers, and grounders, but the team is ready to give up on the prospect, pull him out of the game, cut him, and fire Olmos.
The whole time it looks like real baseball on the field, but the situation just makes no sense. Then Edward James Olmos realizes the pitcher just needs to settle down, so he goes near the dugout, sees the catcher go into the bathroom, and somehow convinces him to switch places. So you have a 44-year-old scout in the game with no major league experience and isn’t on the roster.
Olmos settles the kid down who then throws an immaculate inning in the second while Olmos has the most unsettling grin on his face the entire time. It’s honestly a bit off-putting. So how do I rate this? The baseball looks great, honestly one of the best movies out there in that regard, but it also absolutely makes no sense. Number 11, Mr. Baseball.
Looking at Rotten Tomatoes, I may be in the minority here, but I thought this was a fun movie. Also, the baseball action’s pretty good. Every pitcher in the movie has a convincing delivery and even Tom Selleck’s swing looks pretty good. If I had a gripe, it would be definitely whoever did the foley sounds as well as the sound mixing really, really like their loud sound effects.
Add those sound effects with the fact that they’re true to form with the crowd noise in the NPB and you get a very loud and chaotic experience during games, which I think works well in small doses, but for the extended baseball scenes, it can be a bit much. This movie does get bonus points for correctly showing some of the cultural differences when it comes to baseball.
A recent New York Times article in 2022 interviewed American players in the NPB and the players interviewed said the film still accurately portrays the peculiarities of Japanese baseball and is used as a training resource for American players to prepare themselves for those changes. That’s pretty cool. Number 10, A League of Their Own.
A League of Their Own is a 1992 comedy about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League started during World War II. I don’t want to ding this movie too much because it’s a fun movie, but I have historical accuracy as one of my criteria and in that sense, this movie does not look like the inaugural year of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
The first year of this league used softballs, not baseballs, and the mound was 40 ft, not 60 and 1/2 ft, and they threw underhand windmill like in softball, and the bases were 65 ft apart, not 90. If they were going for historical accuracy, the league would look much more like college softball than baseball. Now, the league did change rules in later years and by 1954, they were using a regulation baseball with overhand pitching.
The mound was 60 ft from home and bases were 85 ft apart, so if they’re trying to give the general feel for the whole existence of this league, I can buy it. Outside of that historical inaccuracy, though, the movie absolutely looks great. I honestly think they got better baseball players throughout this movie than most Hollywood baseball films.
Lori Petty legit looks like a pitcher here. Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell can apparently throw a baseball. And it makes a lot of sense cuz in researching I found that every single actor in this movie had to have a baseball or softball background. And if they didn’t, they had to train with a baseball team for months before filming.
Now, they do have things like doing the splits or catching the ball with your hat, which you think I’d complain about like I did with the dumb things in Major League II, but they fully explain it in the plot that they’re trying to drum up interest in the league and are playing like that on purpose.
It makes complete sense. Overall, if you’re a baseball fan and enjoy baseball history, I’d say this one’s a must-watch. Number nine, 61. 61 is a 2001 movie about the home run race between Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. It’s still HBO, but for 2001 movie you can tell the budget’s a little thin at times.
Right off the bat, you’ve got janky CGI baseball, and they made an effort to make it look like 1961 Yankee Stadium, but it does look like actors on a green screen. Fun side note is you have actor Chris Bauer and Domenick Lombardozzi playing Bob Serve and Moose Skowron, but all I see is Frank Sobotka and Herc from The Wire.
HBO really had a stable of character actors they used for multiple projects. Now, I griped about the CGI ball early on, but outside of that, this doesn’t look too off. Barry Pepper and Thomas Jane’s swings look a little stiff at time, but Jane had to do swings both right and left-handed. And the fact that I can’t tell what his natural handedness is based on those swings deserves some respect.
The extras in this film get no complaints for me. They look like ballplayers. They all pitch, catch, throw, and hit convincingly. From a historical perspective, this movie gets a couple minor things wrong like what team they’re playing on a certain day or what pitcher they’re facing, but the broad strokes are historically accurate.
Maris starts the season ice cold while Mantle is raking from the get-go, but then Maris goes off while Mantle is hampered by injury the last month of the year and falls out of the race. They also nailed that on game 154 the Orioles brought in knuckleball pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm specifically to face Maris so he wouldn’t pass Ruth on that day.
Ultimately, you can tell this movie was made by baseball fans. The director was Billy Crystal, who is such a big Yankees fan he actually played in a spring training game at the age of 59 and even managed to foul off a fastball. When someone at the helm of a baseball movie is that big of a fan, it shows in the final product.
They got the look right, they got the feel right, and even though the CGI ball looks janky at times, it doesn’t break the immersion of the film. By the end, you’re fully on board that this is the 1961 baseball season and Barry Pepper’s is Roger Maris. Number eight, Touching Home. This movie really doesn’t contain any actual baseball games, mostly just practice, but I couldn’t leave it out of this list because the two lead actors are by far the best baseball players to lead a movie.
The real backstory of this film explains this. Brothers Logan and Noah Miller both had dreams of making the majors, trained incessantly to try to break into an organization, and Logan Miller was a 24th round draft pick that made it as high as A+ ball. After they didn’t make it in baseball, they decided to go to Hollywood and try to make it as actors, writers, directors, and vowed to make a movie dedicated to their dad about their lives.
Somehow they managed to get Ed Harris on board and essentially played themselves in the film. In making some videos about baseball, sometimes I need to scour YouTube to find some prospect videos. These videos normally include batting practice, fielding drills, and pitchers putting their arsenal on display. This movie looks right at home with those prospect videos regarding the quality of play and talent on display.
Again, there isn’t any actual baseball games in the movie other than a very brief scrimmage in one scene, so that keeps it from competing for the top spot, but it’s very clear these guys are legit ballplayers. Number seven, Sugar. If you’re a baseball fan and have not seen the movie Sugar, you need to fix that.
This movie captures what it’s like for thousands of kids that sign out of the Dominican Republic, get sent to the minors in the middle of nowhere USA, speak essentially no English, and experience massive culture shock with all the weight of the world on their shoulders because if they play well enough and make the majors, they’ll be able to provide for their families back at home, as well as have a completely different standard of living.
While any setbacks or injuries can derail that at a moment’s notice. A few years after this movie came out, I ran into a minor leaguer at a bar in Chicago, and in chit-chatting I asked him if he’d seen this movie. He said it was mandatory viewing for anyone in the minor leagues and captured that life and those struggles better than anything else.
I don’t know if that’s still the case with minor leaguers today, but it’s high praise for a movie when someone who’s living that life says they nail it. You’re probably not going to recognize any of the actors in this movie because they put extreme importance of including people that live this life. The main actor, Algenis Perez Soto, is from the Dominican Republic and played amateur baseball there for 3 years.
He isn’t throwing in the 90s, but it looks like he could legitimately be throwing low to mid-80s, which is still by far better than other movie actors portraying a pitcher. If you were to make a baseball league where the teams are made up of actors from all of these different movies, minus the movies that have MLB player cameos, I would put the cast of this movie as a favorite to win.
So, why don’t I have this movie higher on the list? Mostly because it doesn’t do anything overly impressive regarding the atmosphere or the shots. Some of the baseball scenes can be somewhat sterile and pretty bare-bones in the presentation, which is probably what the movie was going for. It’s not a glamorous look at the minor leagues in any way, but the movies after this have a little more depth in their presentation.
Still, have to reiterate, if you’re a fan of baseball, which if you made it this far into this video, you probably are, and you haven’t seen this film, you need to get yourself a copy and watch it ASAP. Number six, For Love of the Game. This Kevin Costner baseball movie has the worst ERA I’ve ever seen.
Billy Chapel’s stats flash on screen, and he has a 3.55 ERA in 211 innings pitched, which is mathematically impossible. Movie’s ruined. But in all seriousness, as we’ll see later in this list, Kevin Costner has a damn good track record on baseball movies. He clearly loves the game and can play at a decent level.
They show a full distance pitching at the beginning with no CGI ball, and that’s something I absolutely love. Sure, he’s probably only throwing in the 70s, but with a little camera trick and sound effects, it looks like a real pitch from an aging veteran pitcher. You do a side-by-side of Jamie Moyer and Billy Chapel, and there’s not too much of a difference.
Also, this movie is filmed on location at Yankee Stadium. The lighting, crowd, and noise looks and feels like a real baseball game. The uniforms are on point, they got Vin Scully to do the play-by-play, which is a treat. The extras can all play ball. I have no gripes about this movie at all, so let me nitpick a little for the fun of it.
This play would go down as fan interference, not a home run, because the fan reached over the wall to grab the ball. This movie also gets a bit annoying with the guitar riff sound effects pretty early on. Hello, Mike. Strike! Strike! Ball! Augustus he wanted it. Oh, no. and really, really dramatic with the music near the end, but that has nothing to do with the baseball action.
Overall, the baseball on screen looks like baseball. Now, as to whether I like the movie as a movie, it’s okay. It’s kind of a romance movie disguised as a baseball movie, and the beats tend to be very by the book and cliché from having a perfect game, the bright-eyed rookie trying to break it up with a bunt, one player in a slump having the defensive play of the game to save the perfect game, the main pitcher losing his stuff in the last inning and having to power through anyway, and the dramatic retirement announcement. It’s all very
sappy. But this isn’t a list on how much I like these movies. It’s just a ranking on if the baseball looks like baseball, and this movie accomplishes that very well. Number five, Major League. Major League is a classic, and it looks great. Charlie Sheen is one of the most authentic-looking actors playing a pitcher in any movie.
It must be all that tiger blood in his veins. It’s like winning. I don’t know, man. I was banging 7 g rocks and finishing them because that’s how I roll. I have one speed. I have one gear. Go. Cuz I’m me. I’m different. I just have a different constitution. I have a different brain. I have a different heart.
I have a different, you know, I got tiger blood, man. Bob Uecker is great as the announcer, and the stadium in this movie gives me some nostalgia since Milwaukee County Stadium was my childhood home away from home. I saw Robin Yount hit his 3,000th hit there and went to the very last game in the stadium. So, maybe adds a little bias to my ranking.
The extras in the movie are all on point and look like baseball players. The baseball strategy and logic is pretty good. They even have this extra tagging up on a home run ball. I’m going to keep going on for a while if I keep listing the good things about this movie, so let me jump into the nitpick zone.
So, Harris does not look like a pitcher at times. Scoring from second on a bunt where the batter did a fake calling a shot is kind of a hokey ending. And finally, going to get real nitpicky, they messed up the lineup at the end. There’s one out in the bottom of the seventh with Jake Taylor up.
He’s the number two hitter in the lineup and grounds out for out number two. Dorn, the three hitter, comes up and hits a single, and then Cerrano, the four hitter, hits a home run. That leaves the five hitter up with two outs in the seventh. Then we go to one out in the ninth, and they show Tom Amundsen get out number two, and Willie Mays Hayes is up next, who we know was the leadoff hitter.
That means there were six outs we missed. The last out in the seventh, three outs in the eighth, and two outs in the ninth. That’s one lineup spot on account of four. Completely ruins the movie for me. I ju- just kidding. This movie’s great and really captures the feel of 90s baseball. Number four, 42. Going to start with the coolest little detail, this scoreboard.
Most movies you make a prop like this, you don’t really care about the details that much, but this is surprisingly accurate. When Jackie Robinson was batting in the bottom of the fourth on April 22nd, 1947 against the Phillies, there were no outs, the score was zero to zero, each team had one hit. They have another score up there, Cincinnati versus Chicago, and if you look up the games on that day, sure enough, the line score matches that game.
They also have the full lineups listed here. The only things wrong is the right fielder should be number four, not number 12, and the left fielder should be number 22, not six, but everything else is spot-on. But that scoreboard is just a small thing that shows they’re going to get the details right, and it follows for the rest of the movie.
The scoreboard is about 90 to 95% right, and this movie’s about 90 to 95% historically accurate, which as far as Hollywood films go, put it as one of the most historically accurate movies ever made. You can look at any of the situations in the movie, go look at Jackie Robinson’s baseball reference page, and they all match.
You only find some small inaccuracies if you really nitpick, but it’s amazing how many small details they cared about. The timing of his teams that he played on in games in the minor leagues, the debut at home in Brooklyn against the Boston Braves, his first home run at the Polo Grounds against the Giants.
Although the pitcher should be number 31 Dave Koslo and not 23 Clint Hurdle. The game against the Phillies he hits a fly ball to left his first at bat caught by number 14 Del Ennis. He later hits a single on a blooper to right, steals second and gets to third on a bad throw, and scores on a single by left fielder number 22 Gene Hermanski to score the only run of the game.
All of this is accurate. The movie also looks great. The stadiums look awesome. It’s really cool seeing realistic Ebbets Field, Crosley Field, Forbes Field, Sportsman Park, and the Polo Grounds. The atmosphere is really good. It really feels like you’re at a late 1940s baseball game. The only negative is they kind of use CGI ball a lot, but it looks pretty good most of the time.
They do make the pitches ridiculously fast. A normal MLB pitch on 30 frames per second film will take about 12 to 14 frames to reach home. This pitch here, if you count it out, it takes 1 2 3 4 5 6 frames. So this pitch is going close to 200 mph. The movie is also wildly inconsistent when it comes to this. This pitch is 9 frames, this pitch is 12.
But if that’s the movie’s biggest problem, it’s doing a pretty darn good job. And for the most part, the CGI ball looks great and allows them some wide shots when the action is happening, which I really like. They do a really nice mixture of these wide shots and some nice close-ups to really sell the action.
And that’s what this movie does well. It completely sells the action. All the swings, fielding, throws, it looks like real baseball players in a real game. And I already talked about the great atmosphere and historical accuracy, so selling the action on top of that, and this movie is doing everything right. Number three, Little Big League.
This is going to come as a surprise to a lot of people that maybe slept on this film, but Little Big League does baseball action about as well as you can do. Released in 1994, it’s about a kid that inherits the Minnesota Twins and decides to install himself as manager. First thing, the movie gets the stadium right.
It’s about the Twins and filmed in the Metrodome. So many baseball movies around that time were about real teams, but filmed in different locations. They also don’t do what a lot of baseball movies do, which is have every game be a home game, so they only need one filming location.
Here they have Yankee Stadium when they play the Yankees, Comiskey Park when they play the White Sox, and Fenway when they play the Red Sox. But I’m going to show one shot in this film that captures why I think it’s one of the more impressive films from a baseball standpoint. Relay from the warning track, one hop to the first baseman, then a perfect throw home to just barely beat out the runner.
No cuts, one continuous shot. You won’t see anything like this in any other baseball movie. Whenever an outfielder throws the ball in, it’s going to be from a close shot and have a cut right after the throw. Doing it this way is vastly more difficult, and you need people that can actually play baseball to pull it off.
But that’s just one example. The movie is filled with shots like this. Everything is done with the real baseball, and you have realistic swings, realistic throws, and some impressive defensive plays. They must have been incredibly picky on extras to make sure they have some baseball experience. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out most of them played at least a college level.
And in doing some research, sure enough, the team shortstop was Kevin Elster, who was an active Major League Baseball shortstop at the time. The first baseman was Leon Durham, and one relief pitcher was Brad Lesley, who were both former Major League Baseball players. On top of that, you have a ton of real Major Leaguers showing up, mostly in incredibly minor roles and just for a split second, but they’re there.
Mickey Tettleton, Ivan Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro, Sandy Alomar Jr., Carlos Baerga, Paul O’Neill, Tim Raines, Dean Palmer, Wally Joyner, Randy Johnson. They even have Ken Griffey Jr. as the bad guy with his own awesome bad guy theme song. His luck may be running out. Two out, two on, and the always dangerous Ken Griffey Jr.
stepping into the plate. Chris Berman shows up to do a Baseball Tonight interview, which just teleports me back to watching ESPN in the ’90s. There’s a lot of good baseball references as well. For instance, the TV announcer that goes way overboard on splits to the point they’re meaningless. Oh boy, he sure looked bad swinging at that pitch.
Last year though, he was sixth in the American League at hitting right-handers he was facing for the first time after the seventh inning at home. So that’s something to keep in mind. Bonus fact, that announcer was the real Twins radio announcer at the time and was elected to the Twins Hall of Fame after retirement.
Even the actors with spoken parts don’t look out of place, but the movie does a good job of showing them less and resorting to using cuts to hide any inadequacies. The question I haven’t been able to answer though is out of all these ’90s kids baseball movies, Rookie of the Year, Angels in the Outfield, etc.
, why did this one go so hard on being true to baseball? Heck, it goes above and beyond most movies made for adults at the time. I’m guessing the writer or director or someone in the production chain was just a massive baseball fan and wanted to do it right because the care put into doing it right shows in the final product. And for that reason, this movie ranks way high up on my list.
Number two, Bull Durham. I’m going to start with the elephant in the room. Tim Robbins’ delivery is a bit ridiculous, but I will say the writer and director of the movie addressed this in the book The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham, Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit. Tim had to work on his pitching motion, which later received some criticism, though I remain pretty defensive about it.
There are a lot of big league pitchers with hitches and hiccups in their deliveries, and when Tim follows through my big directive, he’s convincing. In retrospect, I offer the pitching deliveries of Dontrelle Willis and Bronson Arroyo and Craig Kimbrel and even the great Clayton Kershaw, whose hesitation tick delivery might not work in a movie, but will get him to Cooperstown.
I think out of all those, Dontrelle Willis is the best comparison because he’s the only one out of the bunch that completely cuts eye contact with the plate during his delivery. But I like that the writer and director addressed this criticism. But the rest of the movie is immaculate as far as portraying minor league baseball on screen.
The sounds, the atmospheres, the players, all of it rings true. Kevin Costner as always pulls off a veteran ball player really well. This movie covers some aspects of baseball you really don’t see much in the other movies. The scene where Crash Davis is going through his thought process while at the plate is so realistic regarding what goes through your head when you step into the box.
It’s one of my favorite baseball movie Quick bat. Quick bat. Quick. Come on! All right, he’s got to throw the deuce now, okay? He’s got to waste one. Stay back and wipe that silly grin off his face. Come on, bring it. Bring it. Hey, Jesus Christ. All right, one and two. You can hit this Relax. Annie. Annie. Annie, who is this Annie? Jesus, get out of the box here.
Where’s your head? Get the broad out of your head. Time out. Time out. Just shorten up, Crash. And bring me the gas, kid. Bring me the gas. Bring me the gas. Quick bat. Quick bat. Quick bat. Quick. Fee! actors and extras in this movie can also play ball. The Church of Baseball also goes through the process of making sure it looked good in regards to casting and training.
Two weeks before shooting, the cast came to Durham for a rehearsal, as well as to put all the actor ball players through a baseball camp that would run throughout filming. The actual manager of the Durham Bulls, Grady Little, was happy to earn a little extra money in the off-season and run these camps.
Little also recruited local players who had finished high school or college. Grady found Jeff Green, Butch Davis, Paul Devlin, and other minor leaguers and college players happy for the gig. We added Lloyd Williams and Tom Salardi, actors out of LA with some baseball experience to round out the Bulls infield. I was lucky to find my Bull’s shortstop, Deek, in the script when a young comic named Danny Gans walked in the door.
He had played some minor league ball. At the end of rehearsal each day, the actors who had roles as players hurried to Durham Athletic Park to be drilled by Little. The baseball camp quickly sorted out who could play from those who said they could play. I saw Billy O’Leary, Jimmy, throwing on the sidelines and was appalled.
I approached him and said he had obviously been lying to me, which he confessed, but said that he could quickly learn. I’m told I was livid, but I don’t remember the moment, and I liked him as an actor, so I just figured we’d never show him throw the ball in the movie. From that moment forward in my other sports movies, I required an athletic audition before the script reading test.
This movie also really gets into the cerebral side of baseball to the point of almost giving legitimate sports psychology lessons like getting out of your head, not overthinking things, something that I always struggled with when I played baseball. There’s also some commentary about how brutal baseball can be. Crash Davis spent nearly his entire career in the minors despite being right on the edge of making the major leagues.
Talking about his 21 days in the show as the 21 greatest days of his life, and he has a speech about the difference between a 250 and 300 hitter and how just one hit a week can make the difference between a scrub and a Hall of Famer. Not only does the baseball in this movie look amazing, but it’s a great movie as well.
One of my favorite baseball films, which is weird because if you really look at the nuts and bolts, it’s basically a rom-com, which I’m not much of a rom-com guy. It just nails everything about baseball, why it’s amazing, why it can be brutal, why it can sometimes be poetic and beautiful. It just hits all the right notes.
Number one, Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch. Here’s the pitch. Ground ball to the second baseman. He might be able to turn two. We tag the bag for one. There’s the throw, and that’s it. The Anaheim Angels have won the World Series. I think this one speaks for itself. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.
