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 ensemble?”
They have narrowed their choices to four films:
Let’s begin with the definition of “ensemble cast.” According to definitions.net, it’s one that’s “made up of cast members in which the principal actors and performers are assigned roughly equal amounts of importance and screen time in a dramatic production.” So by that account, is this really accurate? I don’t have an exact minutes-on-screen count, but in Moneyball, Brad Pitt gets the vast majority of screen time. Similarly, Billy Dee Williams gets the lion’ share in Bingo (and if you want to say that James Earl Jones is up there, too, I would counter, does two make an ensemble?).
In fact, exactly how many actors does it take to constitute an ensemble? Bull Durham features Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins, and Susan Sarandon. They’re pretty much even on the screen time but are three enough?
So going by the spirit of “ensemble cast,” and with no disrespect to the other fine films, I would have to go with Major League. Tom Berenger is the lead, but Charlie Sheen, Wesley Snipes, Dennis Haysbert, James Gannon, and Corbin Bernsen all play major roles (see what I did there?)
As the official scorer here, I would say that only one of the panelists gets it write when they say, “If we’re talking an ensemble, I say “Major League” because there is a wide range of characters seeing screentime, and that’s not the case with every movie in this category. ‘Moneyball’ is the Brad Pitt/Jonah Hill show.” And I would disagree about Hill’s time.
No other spoilers; you have to read the piece to see the “winner.”
is available on Amazon.com,
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