Moneyball is one of the year’s most anticipated films and it will be hitting theaters this Friday. Starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s who lead a team of castoffs to the American League playoffs back in 2003, the film is based on Michael Lewis‘ (“The Blind Side”) bestselling book of the same name, and has been mentioned for awards season kudos.
The film debuted in Toronto at the beginning of this month where it didn’t cement it as the Oscar frontrunner, but it didn’t knock it out of contention either. Most of the reviews coming out of the festival were positive to glowing including Brad’s take on the film (read that here) when he saw it on the first day of the fest.
Hollywood hasn’t made that many baseball movies over the years but the ones they have made have often been terrific. Here, in honor of Moneyball, are my picks for the ten (eleven?) best of all-time.
10. (Tie)
A League of Their Own (1992)
&Major League (1989)
Okay, I know. I said a top ten and I start off with a tie. That means I’m actually including eleven films but when I made my list I just couldn’t make up my mind on number 10.
Major League is on a list of guilty pleasures for almost every friend I have in the world. Is it a great film? Probably not. It tries to be a baseball version of the hockey flick Slap Shot but doesn’t quite pull it off. It’s not quite irreverent enough. Still, the characters are great, the film is entertaining as all get out and sports fans in particular love the film. It’s also a must see just to witness Dennis Haysbert playing Pedro Cerrano, a voodoo practicing power hitter. Presidential he is not.
A League of Their Own, on the other hand, is a seminal film. It’s the kind of film that makes me admire Hollywood when they do things right. A smash hit from a female director, Penny Marshall, about a baseball league that featured all-woman baseball teams with an all-star cast of female actors. You can’t miss the message behind a venture like that, but rather than preaching to the audience and risking turning them off, Marshall and her fine troupe of female leads — Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell — with a little help from Tom Hanks, make their point with a solid, entertaining film. Plus, it contained one of the greatest lines of the last twenty years. “There’s no crying in baseball!” was rated 54th on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest film quotes of all-time.
When it came to picking one of these films over the other I just couldn’t do it. That’s why I included them both.
9.
Fear Strikes Out (1957)
Fear Strikes Out is a film depicting the life and career of American baseball player Jimmy Piersall. It is based on Piersall’s autobiography “Fear Strikes Out: The Jim Piersall Story”. The film stars Anthony Perkins as Piersall and Karl Malden as his father, and was directed by Robert Mulligan.
This was one of the first films to take on mental illness in a realistic manner. Piersall was an up and coming player with the Boston Red Sox when he started having behavioral problems related to a bipolar disorder. He agreed to be admitted to a mental institution on the team’s recommendation and later made it back to the big leagues. An impressive accomplishment at any time, but even more so back in the 1950s.
8.
Bang The Drum Slowly (1973)
Bang The Drum Slowly is one of my personal favorite films and reportedly Al Pacino’s favorite film of all-time. It stars De Niro as the not so bright second string catcher, Bruce Pearson, and Michael Moriarty as an up and coming pitcher, Henry Wiggen. They strike up an unlikely friendship during the middle of the season when Moriarty discovers that Pearson is stricken with a terminal illness. I won’t give the rest of the story away for those who haven’t seen the film, but suffice to say I’ve never been able to make to the end of the film without bawling my eyes out. De Niro starred in Mean Streets three months later and went on to have a pretty decent career after that.
7.
The Natural (1984)
The quintessential Robert Redford flick. The Natural is a film adaptation of Bernard Malamud‘s 1952 baseball novel of the same name, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Redford.
The film wonderfully traces Hobbs from the age of 14 where he fashions his own bat from an oak tree hit by lightning to his career as a major league ball player. Of course, his path isn’t without a few bumps in the road including a mysterious woman (Kim Basinger) and a fleet of talent in and out of the dugout including Glenn Close, Robert Duvall, Wilford Brimley and Michael Madsen. It would eventually be nominated for four Academy Awards, including cinematography, art direction, score (Randy Newman) and a supporting actress nod for Close.
6.
Sugar (2008)
Every once in a while a film comes out and everyone I talk to that saw it recommends it highly yet somehow it doesn’t get seen by that many people. Steve McQueen’s Hunger was one of those films as was the French film A Prophet (Un Prophete) and Sugar is another.
Produced and directed by the team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck who were also responsible for the Ryan Gosling starrer Half Nelson, Sugar is the story of Miguel Santos, aka Sugar (Algenis Perez Soto), a Dominican pitcher struggling to make it to the big leagues and pull himself and his family out of poverty. Miguel gets his big break at age 19 when he advances to MLB’s minor league system and moves to the US but things don’t go all that smoothly when he arrives. Sounds simple but it isn’t. A truly great character study and a must see film in my opinion, and pretty much everyone else I know who has seen the film. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of us.
