Redemption Song

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 worth of merchandise is donated to local food pantries and the like. But we have to account for everything so when it comes to produce, we have to catalogue the number of items which are identified by those PLU codes (for example, 4011 is regular bananas while any number that begins with a “9” means it’s organic).

So the aforementioned thought that came to me was, of course, a baseball movie.

A few years ago, I posted a review of Where Hope Grows, descried by IMDB as dealing with

A baseball player whose professional career was cut short due to his personal problems is suddenly awakened and invigorated by a young-man with Down syndrome who works at the local grocery store.

In other words, a redemption story.

So that got me to wondering, how many baseball films fall into this category, whether confronting substance abuse, physical infirmity, or some other crisis?

In one way or another, many of those movies that aren’t outright comedies seem to apply. For example, in The Monty Stratton Story, the true-life subject of this bio-pic, overcomes what would have been a career-destroying injury. In The Winning Team, another movie based on a real player, Ronald Regan plays Grover Cleveland Alexander as a recovering alcoholic (which wasn’t actually the problem but we’ll not go into that here). Even Bull Durham takes the case of a minor leaguer lifer whose redemption comes in the form of mentoring an up-and-coming pitcher. And doesn’t Morris Buttermaker get a second chance to become a better human being in The Bad News Bears?

Then there’s one of my all-time worst baseball flics, The Yankles, in which a washed-up ballplayer accused to betting on games leads that cliched rag-tag band of nominal athletes, in these case a bunch of orthodox Jews; let the stereotypes commence, to unexpected success.

I know there are other films that fall into this category, but I let you all have the fun of discovery. Please drop me a line or post a comment when you come up with some.