You know it’s the off-season (movie edition, The Sequel)

Continuing on the cinematic theme…

The next sub-genre is “best baseball movies based on a true story.”

And the entries are

Note that in general, you won’t find anything older than the 1970s, so in this instance there’s no The Pride of the Yankees or Fear Strikes Out (not that the latter was any great shakes).

Just a few of my own takes:

The screenplay by John Sayles (who appears as sports writer Ring Lardner) is practically verbatim from Eliot Asinof’s original. Since that one was published in the 1960s there have been dozens of books on the subject, each more in depth than the last. So EMO might not be the most historically accurate of the lot.
Hard to believe it’s been 20 years since The Rookie hit theaters. I remember taking my daughter and a couple of friends to see it and enjoying the Disney film more than they did. Brian Cox, now instantly recognizable as Logan Roy in Succession, played Jimmy Morris’s dad who never seemed to understand his son’s interest or talents. There’s a line Cox says that I never really understood: “Your grandfather once told me it was ok to think about what you want to do until it was time to start doing what you were meant to do.” Ultimately, it seems Jimmy was meant to play ball; is that what his dad meant? Didn’t seem like it.
ALOTO was the most fun for me and turned on a lot of people to the under-reported All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. From what I hear, it was quite historically accurate. “This honestly might be the least-flawed of all baseball movies,” according to one of the panelists. By the way, this is the 30th (!) anniversary of that release.
Less so for me was 42, which mashed together a lot of incidents in Jackie Robinson’s early professional timeline. Again, from what I hear, liberties were taken to get as much in as possible. But it had Rachel Robinson’s approval and one of the panelists said, “42 is one of the best sports films you will ever find,” so who am I to argue? One thing that makes me roll my eyes every time I see it is a young Ed Charles explaining the rudiments of the game to his mother after witnessing one of Jackie’s daring base running exploits.