From the category archives:

Baseball movies

As I mention in the Conversation, when I went to Yankee Fantasy Camp in 2009, I found out the coach of my team would be Ron Shelton. How cool was that? But when I asked him about Bull Durham, he told me he wasn’t that Ron Shelton. I hope my disappointment wasn’t too evident. Readers of […]

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If this is on the level, I’m in, since my surgery recovery incarceration puts me in a great position to put the time to good use. Shane Co., a jewelry company, has announced a promotion in which some lucky cinephile will get $1,000 for “binge watching” 10 baseball movies, according to this piece from CNBC.com’s […]

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A reminder: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast […]

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A reminder: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast […]

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Trailer trash?

July 22, 2022

Reading Ron Shelton’s wonderful book, The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit — which I reviewed for an upcoming post on Bookreporter.com — I was interested in seeing the trailer again. I wondered if it was “true to the final product.” Many […]

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A reminder: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast […]

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A reminder: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast […]

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Meant to post this a while back. The actor famed for, among other roles, his rendition of Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams died last week at the age of 67. There have been complaints about the casting of and portrayal by Liotta as the shamed Black Sox outfielder. For one thing, there was […]

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Continuing on the cinematic theme… The next sub-genre is “best baseball movies based on a true story.” And the entries are A League of Their Own (1992) 42 (2013) The Rookie (2002) Eight Men Out (1988) Note that in general, you won’t find anything older than the 1970s, so in this instance there’s no The […]

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Getting closer (hopefully) to pitchers and catchers reporting but there’s still time to catch a good baseball movie. Or a bad one, depending on your point of view. The folks at MLB’s website are offering their choices on various themes. In this entry, they seek to answer the question, “Which baseball film has the best […]

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when articles like appear: Which baseball movie has the greatest Hollywood ending? Where to begin? How about the choice of three films for this panel discussion between Ian Browne, Anthony Castrovince, Alyson Footer (who served as the piece’s writer and moderator), Adam McCalvy, and Manny Randhawa. In what appears to be a series of such […]

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Lest We Forget: Art LaFleur

November 26, 2021

The character actor who played Chick Gandil in the classic baseball flick Field of Dreams  died Nov. 17 at the age of 78 after a long battle with Parkinson’s. Gandil — a notorious member of the Black Sox — was not the only baseball figure LaFleur portrayed: he also appeared as Babe Ruth in The Sandlot. […]

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I was looking for a baseball movie to watch the other day and came across It Happened in Flatbush, (1942) which I confused with one of my favorites, It Happens Every Spring (1947). Amazingly, I had never seen Flatbush before so I gave it a shot, especially since it featured Lloyd Nolan, one of my […]

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Lest we forget: David Lander

December 9, 2020

Don’t bother looking for him on Baseball-Reference; instead, check him out on IMDB. David Lander was probably — unfortunately — best know as part of the moronic duo of Lenny and Squiggy (his character) on the inexplicably popular I Love Lucy knockoff, Laverne and Shirley (all due respect, of course). But his baseball connection was his […]

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Once in a while at work, we have some fun by going around with our favorite fill-in-the-blank at the end of our pre-opening meeting. Last Friday — Aug. 28 — we were asked to name our favorite childhood and current movies. I couldn’t recall a flick from my youth at the time (The Wizard of […]

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Would have posted this sooner if not for power outages caused by the latest storm. While neither of these latest casualties were professional ballplayers, they both had a cultural impact on the game. Wilford Brimley, who passed away August 1 at the age of 85, appeared as Pop Fisher, manager of the woebegotten New York […]

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Bookshelf Review: Rawhide

April 21, 2020

I’m am the poster child when it comes to falling down the rabbit hole. Whenever a book by a writer I especially respect refers to additional material, I will seek it out more often than not. While going through The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, Keith […]

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Hold the butter

April 17, 2020

After the previous post, I decided to do a “baseball movie” search on Netflix to see what I could stream on my computer. Here are the results in the order they appear in the results, with some comments where warranted. Note that this was the exact search phrase used for these results. There are other […]

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At the Movies…

February 27, 2020

Sometimes I get grief when I complain about the quality of baseball films. My friends say I’m being too hard because I know and expect too much. In the words of that great philosopher, Steve Martin But I came across this on Youtube and thought it was pretty cool: Joc Pederson, Justin Turner, and Ferris, […]

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Redemption Song

December 10, 2019

I was at work the other day when a thought came to me as I was looking at codes for various articles of produce. Some background: Trader Joe’s has a wonderful policy of donating food that might not be up to “selective customers’ standards” (my term, not the store’s). Hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars […]

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