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Top Ten Baseball Movies
By admin2 | May 5, 2008
10.Major League
A guilty pleasure for me, because I saw it when I was young and loved it.
9.Bang the Drum Slowly
“Brian’s Song,” for baseball. With Michael Moriarty as the star pitcher and Robert DeNiro as the dying catcher- which helped launch both careers. A truly touching film.
8.A League of Their Own
A great crowd pleaser and an important part of baseball history. It also gets extra credit for adding the line “There’s no crying in baseball” to the vernacular.
7.The Natural
Too sentimental a view of a slugger and the game for some, but it works for me. Based on the novel by Bernard Malamud and starring Robert Redford.
6.The Bad News Bears
The best baseball comedy, the perfect picture of Little League. Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal were perfect in their roles, and all of the foul-mouthed kids fit together beautifully.
5.The Rookie
The touching true story of Jim Morris (played very well by Dennis Quaid) who at the age of 35 realized his childhood dream of pitching in the Major Leagues. A very inspirational story and great family movie
4. Eight Men Out
John Sayles wrote and directed this movie, based on a book by Eliot Asinof, and does a great job of bringing the story’s complexity to the screen. A great cast lends well to a classic true story.
3.Pride of the Yankees
True story of New York Yankee Lou Gehrig who died too young after contracting Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis now known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.A real tear-jerker. You don’t have to be a Yankee fan to like this one.
2. Field of Dreams
Kevin Costner and company are great in this adaptation of W.P. Kinsella’s novel “Shoeless Joe.” It seems that everyone latches on to something different as their favorite part or as the message of the film. Like the game itself, this is a simple movie that also manages to be wonderfully complex.
1. Bull Durham
One thing about Kevin Costner, he sure gets the baseball movies right. He plays Crash Davis, a career minor leaguer sent to the Carolina League to teach golden boy Nuke LaLoosh (in a great performance by Tim Robbins) how to act like a ball player. Susan Sarandon plays love interest Annie Savoy.
Topics: Baseball Movies, Lists |
May 5th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Very good list…every movie on the list is a classic. Have seen all ten of the movies at some point in time.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
“Field of Dreams” shouldn’t techniclaly count as a baseball film becauset here’s hardly any baseball in it whatsoever - and the main character doesn’t even play or coach. Baseball THEMED, but not a baseball MOVIE.
I am somewhat upset that “61*” is not on there because that is based on a true story as well, and is far more important in baseball history than the enjoyable “A League of Their Own”.