The best baseball movies, “Historically” speaking

December 2, 2010

The Pride of the Yankees

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The publishers of American History magazine just came out with 100 Greatest Sports Movies (and you know how I feel about the use of “Greatest” and “Best” in the title).

Extracting just the baseball films, we have, in order:

I would have arranged my list differently, moving up Eight Men Out, The Stratton Story, Sugar, and It Happens Every Spring, and dropping Major League, The Jackie Robinson Story, and the two Ruth pictures (the 1948 release, with William bendix as the Yankee star, has often considered one of the worst movies — period — ever made, so how it scored so high on the AH list amazes me). I would also drop 61* — basically a made for cable TV film — and sub in, higher up, The Winning Team, the 1952 biopic of Grover Cleveland Alexander. Could the fact that Ronald Reagan played the misunderstood pitcher have anything to do with its exclusion?

Just sayin’.

FYI, The non-baseball films in the top ten were Raging Bull (#1), The Hustler (2), Chariots of Fire (3), Slapshot (5), Breaking Away (7), North Dallas Forty (8), Olympia (9), and Pumping Iron (10).

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Tagged as: Grover Cleveland Alexander, Jackie Robinson Story, Lou Gehrig, Pride of the Yankees, The Babe Ruth Story

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