EVEN WITHOUT THE OLD ONES, SO MANY GREAT BASEBALL MOVIES

This is a reprint with some revisions of something I wrote eight years ago for another website.

I was watching two baseball movies — one I’d seen before — and it got me thinking. There are at least six or eight different movies I have heard different people calling the best ever and there are at least three I’ve had at the top of my own list at one time or another.

The most recent one on the list — from 2012 — is one I find myself enjoying more and more every time I watch it. As impressive as Geena Davis was in “A League of Their Own,” Amy Adams looks great on the receiving end of the young phenom’s pitches.

So I figured I would put together a top 10 list and maybe five honorable mentions. I decided to take only movies made from 1970 on, and I decided that with one exception, I was not going to include movies made about kids. I also have one additional “special” mention that isn’t a good movie, but that I love anyway.

We’ll start with that one:

“FOR LOVE OF THE GAME” — 1999 — Kevin Costner’s last baseball movie. He’s a 40-year-old pitcher making the final start of a Hall of Fame career against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium at the same time his personal life is falling apart.

There’s the drama of a very special game, and the beauty of hearing the greatest of all the broadcasters, Vin Scully, narrate the action. I saw it with my son Virgile, who was 14 at the time. His review: “I liked it, but it’s not really about baseball, is it?”

Well, enough. Call it a baseball rom-com.

That was the special mention. Now let’s move on to the five we’ll call honorable mention.

5. “THE BAD NEWS BEARS” — 1976 — One of Michael Ritchie’s classics about ’70s California, following his wonderful and all but forgotten “Smile.” Walter Matthau as the alcoholic coach and a young Tatum O’Neal as the girl phenom pitcher. The beginning of an entire genre of youth sports movies, and maybe the best of them all because the underdog team actually failed to win the big game.

Remade with Billy Bob Thornton a generation later. Also very good, but in a different way.

“Baseball’s hard, guys. I mean, it really is. You can love it but, believe me, it don’t always love you back. It’s kind of like dating a German chick, you know?”

4. “PASTIME” — 1990 — A veteran minor league pitcher in 1957 finds himself mentoring a young black pitcher. A wonderful movie made on a tiny budget that was seen by almost no one. This movie has been described as “Bull Durham” without the jokes. Cameos by at least six different Hall of Famers.

3. “THE NATURAL” — 1984 — There are quite a few people, including some I respect, who consider this the best baseball movie ever. That’s the only reason it’s on this list at all, because it isn’t a movie I like. In my opinion, they completely ruined a great story by Bernard Malamud by changing the ending.

Malamud’s point was that no matter how good you are, no matter how hard you try, in baseball you will fail more often than you succeed. But Roy Hobbs as played by Bob Redford never fails, and that’s why the movie was such a disappointment to me.

2. “MONEYBALL” — 2011 –– I never read the book and I had the DVD for two years before I got around to watching it despite being told how good it was.

I just couldn’t see the drama in a movie about the way a team’s front office operates, but I was completely wrong. It was a really good movie, and Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill were both terrific.

1. “LONG GONE” — 1987 — This was “Bull Durham” before “Bull Durham,” a comedy made for HBO about life in the low minor leagues in the old days of the Deep South. Future stars William Petersen, Virginia Madsen and Dermot Mulroney all shine in a movie that didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved.

So that’s the honorable mention. Now it’s time to take a look at my top 10 baseball movies of the last 52 years:

10. “THE BINGO LONG TRAVELING ALL-STARS AND MOTOR KINGS” — 1976 — A wonderful movie about life in the old Negro Leagues, with wonderful performance after wonderful performance, with Billy Dee Williams and James Earl Jones as the stars, Richard Pryor as comic relief and Stan Shaw as the wonderfully talented young outfielder who will break baseball’s color barrier.

It isn’t the games that matter, and the only white players we ever see are small-town lunkheads who can’t compete. But seeing the love for the game these guys have against every sort of obstacle you can imagine makes for a very entertaining two hours.

9. “42” — 2013 — A surprisingly well-done movie about the year Jackie Robinson came to the major leagues and broke the color barrier. It was 1947, and he was No. 42. The movie does a great job of capturing the feel of post-war America and of the racial mood in baseball itself.

Harrison Ford was wonderful as General Manager Branch Rickey and Chadwick Boseman shines as Jackie Robinson. The ending is slightly Disneyfied a la “Remember the Titans,” but at least in this movie it  doesn’t distract from the real story.

8. “MAJOR LEAGUE” — 1989 — One of the best baseball comedies ever, based on the haplessness of the Cleveland Indians. So many great characters — Wild Thing, Serrano, Dorn, Willie Mays Hayes. The story is far more fantasy than reality, a last-place team simply making the decision to start winning, but it’s a good-hearted movie, so who cares?

The first sequel wasn’t bad but the second one was pretty much awful. Just how does Roger Dorn end up owning the Minnesota Twins?

7. “61*” — 2001 — Made for HBO, Billy Crystal’s loving homage to Mantle, Maris and the 1961 Yankees. Another movie some people like better than I do, but I was 11 years old in 1961 and I remember the excitement of the chase for Babe Ruth’s record.

Of course, I lived in southwestern Ohio that year. The real excitement for us was that the Cincinnati Reds were winning their first National League pennant since 1940. I was in sixth grade and I cleaned up taking bets against the hometown Reds in the World Series.

The only thing I didn’t particularly like about the movie was the adoration and the attitude that nothing is really major league outside of New York and Yankee Stadium. Ironically, most of the games I saw in person during my first five years as a fan were at Yankee Stadium.

6. “A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN” — 1992 —Director Penny Marshall’s valentine to the women’s professional baseball league started during WWII while the men were off fighting the Nazis and the Japanese. There are so many wonderful roles in this movie, from the little ones like Jon Lovitz as a scout to the big ones like Tom Hanks as a team manager and Geena Davis as the best player in the league.

Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell and Lori Petty were never better, and it’s a pleasant surprise to watch the quality of play. The framing device — a reunion of players at the Baseball Hall of Fame more than 40 years later — brings tears to the eyes. A truly special movie.

5. “BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY” — 1973 —  From Mark Harris’ book of the same name, it’s a story of friendship and dying as much as it is of baseball.

But it’s still a pretty good baseball story, with the fictional New York Mammoths (read Yankees) playing out a championship season at the same time their journeyman catcher is dying from Hodgkin’s Disease.

With the role of the dying catcher and “Mean Streets” later that same year, this was Robert DeNiro’s breakthrough as a star. Michael Moriarty is the star pitcher who befriends the dying man.

4. “TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE” — 2012 — An extremely pleasant surprise, a movie that isn’t about the majors or the minors but instead about the scouts who watch young prospects and pass along their information to help teams draft players.

Clint Eastwood came out of a four-year retirement as an actor to play the role of Gus, a legendary scout who may be reaching the end of the line. He was 80 when he made the movie and looks it, but it fits the role perfectly. Still, the heart of the movie is Amy Adams, who plays his daughter Mickey (yes, named after Mr. Mantle). She’s a successful young lawyer, but she has baseball in her blood just as he does.

A movie that has as much soul as any two movies on this list, and one worth watching again and again. And one more comment: I’ve gotten so that whenever I see that John Goodman is in a movie, it makes me smile.

3. “FIELD OF DREAMS” — 1989 — This one and the two that follow are movies I deeply love, and I have put each of them at one time of another atop this list. If Costner’s second baseball movie ranks here at the present time, it’s because I don’t think it ages quite as well as the other two.

I love all the stuff about what baseball means to America and how it has evolved throughout the years, but I always find myself getting a little annoyed at the maudlin stuff about Ray and his late father. I know that nearly ever male baby boomer is convinced his life would be better if he could just have played catch with his dad more, but ENOUGH.

2. “EIGHT MEN OUT” — 1988 — The fourth movie in the top 10 based on a true story, this is a movie that always fills me with an ineffable sadness. The story of the Black Sox scandal of 1919, a scandal that had a truly horrible effect on baseball, tells us mostly that as much as we love the great players who entertain us on the field, the real game belongs to the owners.

The tragic figures in the story are Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver. Jackson was too uneducated and ignorant to understand what was really going on, and he played well while others were throwing the games. Weaver never agreed to participate in the fix, but was punished the same as the others because he didn’t blow the whistle on them.

John Cusack gave one of the finest performances of his early career as Weaver, and his speech at the end of the movie, when a fan is asking whether the old outfielder in left field in Hoboken, N.J., is in fact Jackson playing under an assumed name.

“I saw him play. … He was the best. Run, hit, throw … he was the best. … Those fellas are all gone now.”

1. “BULL DURHAM” — 1988 — If there’s one thing that strikes me as exceedingly odd, it’s that my three favorite baseball movies were all released within about 10 months of each other. This one was the first one out, and I think it was the best.

It was right at the beginning of stardom for Costner. In 1987 he hit with both “The Untouchables” and “No Way Out,” but I’ve always felt that “Bull Durham” and “Field of Dreams” back to back were what made Costner a star.

There’s no “big game” in this movie and the Durham Bulls aren’t battling for a championship. But it’s Costner as the veteran minor leaguer and Susan Sarandon as Annie Savoy who make the movie wonderful. Both are not only students of the game, they truly love the game.

There are more famous lines in the movie — mostly Costner’s speech about what he believes — but Sarandon’s quote that ends the movie says it all.

“Walt Whitman once said, ‘I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.’ You could look it up.”