Baseball movies, damn it, BASEBALL MOVIES!

Also, I thought Crash's thing was that he GOT his cup of coffee, and spilled it all over himself.

i don't think i used the phrase 'coming of age' as it's intended and i'm really not sure about 'seminal' but oh well.

i will type for you the classic lines, when i recall them.

Field of Dreams is great, 'about baseball' or not.

The best scene in Bull Durham, without question, is the "DO YOU WANT ME TO CALL YOU A COCKSUCKER" scene.

The Bad News Bears is the best. Apart from the Kelly / Amanda deus ex machinas, which never would have happened in MY little league, it was about as true to life as any baseball movie I've ever seen. And funny and awesome and memorable too.

I've never read the book, but Eight Men Out was awesome.

"The Scout"
"The Fan"
"The Slugger's Wife"

"The Fan" deserves a very special place in cinema hell for this quadruple crown --- horrible performances by DeNiro, Snipes, Del Torro and SMASH YOU OVER THE SKULL direction from hackmeister Tony Scott.

"The Scout" almost gets a half star because Albert Brooks went on Letterman the day of release and claimed he promised a dying boy the film would be number 1 at the box office that weekend.

I guess the kid died.

you're right, i had a crush on her when i was 10, too.

was there REALLY a need to remake the king of comedy as a baseball movie?

you've got to hand it to jerry lewis, though...

Chickenshit Reagan-zeitgeist trashing of a good book.

There's a great sequence in Gregg Araki's new "Mysterious Skin" of teen hustler Joseph Gordon Levitt getting 'service' under the table while he does PA at the local smalltown Kansas beer league games. (And then there's the Little League pedophilia.)

A critic wants to destroy his play
his marriage is ending
and tonight...
His Team is One Game Away.

-> GAME 6

Starring Michael Keaton, Griffin Dunne, Ari Graynor,
Shalom Harlow, Bebe Neuwirth, Catherine O'Hara,
and Robert Downey, Jr.

Directed by Michael Hoffman

Written by Don DeLillo

Produced by Amy Robinson, Griffin Dunne,
Leslie Urdang, Christina Weiss Lurie.
Executive Producers: Michael Nozik,
David Skinner, Bryn Iler

http://moma.org/exhibitions/film_media/2006/Baseball.html

I HAVE seen Headin' Home with Ruth, albeit a crappy print.

http://www.thebasesareloaded.com

Oliver Platt as Steinbrenner
John Turturro (in latex ears) as Billy Martin
Daniel Sunjata (from Broadway's Take Me Out, and way too gorgeous for this role) as Reggie.

I won't paste the whole Times story, but Graig Nettles says Turturro as Martin is "scary."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/sports/baseball/26bronx.html

HARRISON FORD AS THURMAN MUNSON, I DEMAND IT

oh hell no -- Liz Smith via CSTB:

The life story of Dodgers’ manager Tommy Lasorda is reported on the “fast track for development” at Miramax. Al Pacino has “expressed interest” in playing the famously irascible Lasorda with Michelle Pfeiffer a “possibility” as his wife. Translation–don’t dress for the premiere. There’s many a slip twixt the “fast track” and the first day of shooting. Still and all, for the life of me I can’t imagine Al Pacino on a baseball field. But, that’s why they call it acting!

A Ballplayer Seeks a Hit, a Hit Film

By JOHN ANDERSON

WHEN Anna Boden stepped up to introduce her new movie, “Sugar,” to the opening-night crowd of the Dominican Republic Global Film Festival in November, she felt like a rookie reliever staring down at an All-Star lineup. “It was totally nerve racking,” she said. “I was introducing the film and looking out at these huge stars. Sammy Sosa. Pedro Martinez. Big Papi.”

“And the president of the country,” added Ryan Fleck, her co-writer and director.

But even the country’s president, Leonel Fernández, would defer to the star power of his island nation’s leading export: big-time baseball players. Since Ozzie Virgil joined the New York Giants in 1956, the Dominican Republic has provided the American major leagues with talent like the Hall of Famer Juan Marichal, the Alou brothers, Rico Carty, Manny Mota and present-day stars like the aforementioned David Ortiz (Big Papi) of the Boston Red Sox, Manny Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Robinson Canó of the New York Yankees and José Reyes of the New York Mets. Like the N.B.A. in urban centers across America, beisbol for Dominicans is seen as the quickest, most glamorous route out of poverty, which in the Dominican Republic is as hard to ignore as the Caribbean Sea.

A talented player, a genuine prospect, is burdened not just with his own future but also that of his entire family. That desperate desire to escape, against almost impossible odds, exposes him to cultural discombobulation and the seamier aspects of the business of baseball. The psychic dislocation that results for the vast majority of those strivers, those that don’t make it, is the focus of “Sugar.”

The choice of “Sugar,” which opens April 3, seems an odd one for Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden. Their previous film together, “Half Nelson,” which earned an Academy Award nomination for its star, Ryan Gosling, was about a drug-addicted New York City teacher. And Ms. Boden was only vaguely interested in baseball. (“My parents were basketball people,” she said.)

Though Mr. Fleck, who grew up in Oakland, Calif., remains an Athletics fan (and still watch games online), it wasn’t the sport that hooked them. It was discovering, after reading an article that referenced the Mets’ Dominican camp, that every major league team save the Milwaukee Brewers runs an academy in the country.

“We thought: ‘There are so many guys who go through this process every year. What happens to the guys who go through the process, and don’t make it?’ ” he said.

The stories informing “Sugar” initially came from places like Roberto Clemente Park in the Bronx, where players who have fallen short of the Dream still play a high level of amateur ball. Many of them, according to Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden, were very open about their “failures.” Others were not.

“A lot of young guys we talked to hadn’t really come to terms with it at all,” Mr. Fleck said. “They tell us, ‘I’m going to go for a tryout with the Yankees,’ you know, some kind of open tryout in Staten Island. They were still optimistic they were going to make it.”

All signs in “Sugar” say the hero is going to make it too. Played by the newcomer (and nonactor) Algenis Perez Soto, the talented Miguel Santos, nicknamed Sugar, survives the player mill of a Dominican baseball academy and is drafted by a professional team. As a result he’s sent to a minor-league team in Iowa, where the non-English-speaking Sugar is given a crash course in Middle American: the members of his host family are older, conservative baseball nuts; the granddaughter is born-again and tries to orchestrate Sugar’s religious conversion. The combination of a new world and a new level of competition disorients the once-grounded player.

Casting an unknown as Sugar “was pretty much a requirement of the role,” Mr. Fleck said. “How many 20-year-old Dominican baseball player-actors could we find?”

But they were out there, on the field.

“My brother told me about some auditions,” Mr. Perez Soto said during a visit to New York from Boston, where he now lives. “But I didn’t go to the casting, because there was a baseball game at the same time.” It was only after the casting call was over, and Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden came to the nearby field where Mr. Perez Soto was playing, that the young man was invited to audition.

“They asked me if I wanted to be an actor,” he said, “and I said yes, but only because I thought that’s what they wanted to hear. ‘Yeah, I want to be an actor.’ But no, not really.”

He has since changed his mind.

“Of course everyone in the Dominican Republic has a plan to come here, even if it’s just to see New York,” Mr. Perez Soto said. “I had a plan to come here, but it was supposed to be because of the baseball, you know? I thought I’d be signed by a team and come here to play, and become a star like the others, but it didn’t happen to me.”

By making the movie he did get to meet some of his idols, as well as the former pitcher José Rijo, who was a consultant on the film. And that connection brought the filmmakers a little closer to the problems bedeviling Dominican baseball than they would have liked.

Last month Mr. Rijo was fired from his job as a special assistant to Jim Bowden, the general manager of the Washington Nationals, amid a continuing federal investigation into whether scouts and executives took kickbacks from signing bonuses promised to Dominican players. Mr. Bowden resigned soon afterward, denying what he called false allegations by the press.

But the high-profile departures have spotlighted the unsavory practices of local talent brokers known as buscones, who sign players as young as 10. (Dominican players are not subject to the major league draft and can be signed by any team when they turn 16.) The brokers have been accused of feeding players steroids, altering players’ birth certificates to make them appear younger (and thus more attractive to teams) and grabbing an exorbitant share of signing bonuses.

In an early scene in “Sugar” one of Miguel’s teammates talks about his own deal, and with a sigh says his manager will be taking 40 percent.

“Thirty to 40 percent is pretty standard,” Mr. Fleck said. “Any industry where there’s a lot of money to be made and there are poor people involved, there’s going to be some exploitation on some level. But we really didn’t want to focus on that.”

Nor did they want to focus on drugs, principally steroids, the use of which is commonplace in the Dominican Republic. What the filmmakers were after was a new way of telling an age-old story, of hopes, dreams and what happens when life throws you a change-up. “I’ve been improving my English,” said Mr. Perez Soto. “I’ve been practicing and improving every day, because I want to be ready when this movie comes out. I want to be ready in case something else is coming.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

no one else seen Sugar?

Seeing it tonight.

what'd u think?

It was sold out! I'm seeing it Saturday night now!

Okay I saw it. It was great.

loved his awkward deal w/ the blond Iowa girl

Yeah that was great. Actually the whole family interaction was pretty awesome. Also liked the direction the last 45 minutes goes a lot.

Do you know what minor league ballpark they were playing in (with the bridge in the background)?

Not sure when (or if) I'll get to see this--or if I want to--but I hope it's better than The Bronx Is Burning.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt9045932/

Ah, it's a documentary--thank goodness.

The Yankees and White Sox will play in Iowa near the “Field of Dreams” on August 13, 2020.

Unlike the film, not all the players will be white.

https://www.mlb.com/news/yankees-white-sox-game-at-field-of-dream-site

Knuckleball! is on HBOMax, will try to watch it this weekend.

^is this the Tim Wakefield story?

It's My Turn--Claudia Weill's big mainstream film from 1981; not particularly good--has a 10-minute segment at a Yankees' Old-Timers game, where Jill Clayburgh goes to see recently retired Michael Douglas. Um, putting that aside, a few famous players get some screen time: Mantle, Maris, Elston Howard, Whitey Ford, and Bob Feller. (Do non-Yankees get Old-Timer invites?) Plus a few others the camera just glides by--felt like I should have recognized some of them, but I didn't.

Christgau answering reader e-mail today:

Would you tell us about your opinion of baseball movies? Are they realistic? Writing as an outsider and not knowing but realising that any movie made about soccer is usually pretty s*** makes me wonder do you have the same feeling about your national sport — Hugh, West of Ireland

“Realistic”? Having spent approximately 15 minutes of my life in a major league dugout (profile of underrated Mets shortstop Rafael Santana, 1987 or ’88 I think), I have no way of judging. But I can call to mind many convincing, insightful , and/or entertaining baseball movies. I guess my favorite is the hilarious but also incisive and exciting Moneyball, about assembling a winning Oakland A’s team on a zero budget, based on a book by Michael Lewis, whose The Big Short inspired an even better movie about the 2008 mortgage scam crisis. And just recently Carola and I streamed and enjoyed an impertinent documentary called Battered Bastards of Baseball, about a nutty yet winning minor-league team constructed from scraps when I forget which major league team pulled its franchise from Portland, Oregon. But there are many others: A League of Their Own about a women’s baseball league; The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, about a team of touring ex-Negro League players; Bang the Drum Slowly, starring my once-great Dartmouth downstairs neighbor Michael Moriarty and a young Robert de Niro and based on a Mark Harris novel; the only slightly watered-down Jackie Robinson biopic 42; the much older b&w Fear Strikes Out, about the great bipolar Red Sox centerfielder Jimmy Piersall; the kiddie comedy The Bad News Bears. For some reason I’ve never seen the renowned Field of Dreams, which I suspected and indeed still suspect of pretentious sentimentality, though I’d probably watch it were it to stream free somewhere. I’ve never seen the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees either. Is there a Babe Ruth one I’m forgetting?

Didn't know about Facing Nolan until today, when something turned up on my FB wall--it's on Netflix. I thought it was far from great. The best thing was seeing actual game footage of a story I probably thought was apocryphal: Norm Cash coming to the plate with a sawed-off table leg. He was the last out of one of the early no-hitters (Ron Luciano was behind the plate). As a title card dramatically announces later in the film, "Robin Ventura declined to be interviewed for this film."

Early in the film, Rod Carew says something about "I knew I'd go 0-4" whenever he faced Ryan. For his career (73 AB), Carew hit .301 vs. Ryan. (and slugged .562).

If your lifetime average is .328, maybe .301 feels like 0-4.

I haven't watched this, and probably won't--it's over an hour long--but it does look interesting: baseball movies ranked #1-40 according to how convincingly the actors play baseball.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xeamHyi9u8

https://images.wsj.net/im-738201/?width=600&size=1

so the director of tár basically invented big league chew

Had no idea that Reggie's been sitting there on Prime since March.

About as good as the Yogi doc, although being my era, more personally significant to me. Interviewees: Aaron, Fingers and Rudi, Stewart and Blue, Julius Erving, Jeter (also in the Yogi film--in line to be the next go-to Dave Grohl or Dick Cavett). I think most of the famous moments are there, including the play that forced him to miss the '72 WS, although two from the '78 WS are missing: his non-interference on the basepaths, and his showdown with Bob Welch. His relationship with Munson is glossed over a bit--Reggie says it was Munson who came up with Mr. October; Bill James disputes that, says it was Reggie himself--and he doesn't mention Munson's death. The footage of him getting pulled by Martin on national TV is as jarring as ever--I know players still occasionally get into it in the dugout (I remember Machado and Tatis), but having to get a cop in there to hold back the manager belongs to another world. Very focused on race, both during Jackson's career and later, his disappointment at being shut out from the inner circles of management and being denied two ownership bids.

It's so strange for me to see him as what he is now: a soft-spoken old guy. Has there ever been a signing in sports like his with the Yankees in '77? Probably lots of them in other sports I don't follow, and if Ohtani goes to L.A., that'll be huge. But it was such an incredible intersection of time and place and personalities (Reggie, Steinbrenner, Martin), juiced a little more by the newness of free agency.

His HR in the '71 ASG:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfc9xnZsvZo

Just thought of an odd omission, which you think--thinking about the game today--Reggie would turn into a badge of honour: he still holds the career records for strikeouts. Surprised--and unless Stanton gets a few fulltime seasons in, there's no one on the horizon for at least a decade.

I may have mentioned this upthred but the nolan ryan one is dogshit

I didn't dislike it that much, but I said it was "far from great" upthread. Too worshipful is my general recollection.

i can't imagine it's a classic, but i am definitely intrigued by this one

https://i.imgur.com/oIHaVsz.jpg

omg

joe mantegna??

yup!!

Turned up on one of those YouTube sidebars for me--this is the Reggie that Reggie missed (or, more accurately, stayed clear of).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIUe7XzpiTQ

A two-part Zoomcast I did with Steven Rubio on baseball movies: The Bad News Bears, Bingo Long, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, A League of Their Own, Reggie.

part one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBKIUt6bbbo&t

part two: www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-TnrBFcfTA

Moneyball, too.

Finally caught up with the Dock Ellis documentary (on Prime right now). I can't believe it's been 15 years since he died--I wasn't even thinking that he was dead as I watched. The rare film where I didn't squirm through a little bit of crying; especially great is this letter Ellis reads from Jackie Robinson. The film doesn't shy away from the way he treated his one ex-wife. There's some disbelief from a few ex-teammates about how bad the trade was that sent him to the Yankees in 1976; they're right, but that had a lot more to do with Willie Randolph than with Ellis (who had one good season and moved on). Dock Ellis for Doc Medich--perfect.

skipped around the baseball movie countdown video, he correctly gives props to A League Of Their Own... it's too bad the Amazon series didn't take a cue from the movie, so much painful CGI baseball in that one.

Sitting there at two in the morning last night and got caught up in a couple of episodes of Ken Burns' opus. PBS has evidently been re-running it. I saw it when it debuted and once more a few years later. I know its sentimentality and stylistic tics get mocked a lot, and yes, it's too New-York-centric, but I still think of it as a true epic.

I was right about Brooks Robinson and "Theme from Shaft" (which gives way to some swampy instrumental). Lots of great music in the last two episodes: Santana for Clemente, the Youngbloods for Earl Weaver (my favourite--inspired), Otis Redding for Frank Robinson. The color footage of Jackie Robinson's funeral is amazing (Bill Russell and Don Newcombe among the pallbearers, Campanella in his wheelchair). Sandy Koufax's retirement press conference. Bowie Kuhn with a frozen, fake smile as Robinson calls for a black manager on national TV. Everyone talking about Bob Gibson in an awestruck tone. George Will summarized football with a rehearsed line that made me cringe a little. Dragged myself away around when they got to 1973, but I'm going to watch this again within the next few months. (Gyac, I don't know if you have access, but I'm pretty sure on the whole you would love it.)

(And the kind of thing I love: "Mao Tse Tung, Satchel Paige, and Casey Stengel died.")

As for those stylistic tics:

i can't look at buck o'neil without slowing zooming and panning
― Karl Malone, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 12:25 AM (two years ago)

I don't think I've ever seen even a part of the Burns doc - When It Was A Game was my go-to for old timey footage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VPG-yxB6_E

The one with all the color footage from the '40s and '50s, right? I watched the first one--I believe there was a second.

Three total, I think the last may have come out way later.

Aside from baseball, I was hooked by the look of that home movie Kodachrome once they got into the color era.

Not a movie, but just watched the MLB Network's George Brett documentary/profile. As I've said before, one of the most memorable players I was able to see for the duration of his career, from his playoff heroics against the Yankees in the '70s to the Pine Tar Game to killing the Jays in the '85 ALCS. (Because I was a little bit off baseball from '79 to '82, I followed his pursuit of .400 through the paper but wasn't as caught up in it as I normally would have been.) Had a toxic relationship with his father, who sounded like a true nightmare.

Turned up in a sidebar, first time I've ever seen this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvaZlsi5rLs