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Baseball season is here. The crack of the bat. The (muted) roar of the crowd. The guys chewing a ton of sunflower seeds and spitting constantly. Baseball is America’s pastime, but maybe because of this fact it is the sport that has gotten the most silly, high-concept films that I can think of. Or maybe baseball just lacks the kinetic nature of, say, football or basketball.
Actually, I’m going to push back on that last point, even though I’m the one who made it. I love football and basketball, but I feel like it’s easier to capture baseball on the screen, at least in a plausible way. Think of how many football movies or TV shows features an abundance of insane plays. Baseball is a dude on the mound and a dude at the plate. It’s like a Wild West showdown with a bat and a ball.
That being said, there are definitely a bunch of ridiculous baseball movies. It’s the sport where angels come to help, well, the Angels win the pennant so Joseph Gordon-Levitt can have his family back together. Matt LeBlanc was teammates with an ape in Ed. What a generic name for a movie about a baseball-playing ape. A kid becomes an ace pitcher. Another kid takes over the Minnesota Twins. Did Air Bud ever play baseball? You bet! Shout out to Seven Inning Fetch! That’s not even including Field of Dreams, which is a different thing in my mind. It’s not a good thing, but it’s a different thing.
That’s not to say that other sports don’t have their unusual films. Michael Jordan played basketball with the Looney Tunes, and now LeBron James is going to do the same. Still, baseball has given us an abundance of high-concept films. Some of the can be fun, but none of them are really on the same level of, say, a Major League or Bull Durham. Those movies are just about baseball. And yet, they work. Sure, none of them involve a doctor saying “Funky butt loving” after a kid hits him in the face, but they have their positives. When the ump yells “Play ball!” ideally there is no ape on the field. Or Matt LeBlanc.
