Baseball: The Movie includes a chapter on what I call “baseball-adjacent” films. That is, movies that include baseball but don’t necessarily have the national pastime as the main subject. These include, according to author Noah Gittell, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; City Slickers; Twilight; Good Will Hunting; and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, among a few others.
So I thought it might be fun to dive down a rabbit hole for similar themes on TV shows. This list is by no means complete; I only have so much time before something else captures my attention (oh, look, a squirrel).
Please note: these are TV series that featured Major League players in an episode. None of them are actually about baseball, so no Pitch, Eastbound and Down, Brockmire, Bay City Blues, Ball Four, The Bad News Bears (yes, they tried to make a TV series out of it), or A League of Their Own (either the short-lived CBS series that aired shortly after the movie or the one that appeared on Amazon Prime), etc. Also no documentaries, such as The Captain or Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose.
Not surprisingly, several shows — filmed in Hollywood — took advantage of the proximity of the Dodgers to have them as guest “stars.” Some of them are very clunky, as f the writers wanted to include the national pastime, but didn’t know much about the sport. And as for ther acting by the ballplayers? Well, let’s just say, don’t give up your day (and night) jobs.
Dennis the Menace / Sandy Koufax
The Brady Bunch / Don Drysdale
Mr. Ed / Koufax, Leo Durocher, Willie Davis, Johnny Roseboro, and Moose Skowron
Dragnet / Roseboro
The Munsters / Durocher
Gilligan’s Island / Jim Lefebvre and Al Ferrara
The Donna Reed Show /Willie Mays
Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire (members of the Baltimore Orioles)
Seinfeld (members of the New York Yankees and Keith Hernandez)
The X-Files, “The Unnatural”
Quantum Leap, “Play Ball”
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Take Me Out to the Holodeck,” among other episodes that include baseball references
M*A*S*H (Kilinger is often clad in a cap for the Toledo Mud Hens, although it looks more like a latter-day Texas Rangers hat. Ken Levine, author of It’s Gone!… No, Wait a Minute . .: Talking My Way into the Big Leagues at 40, served as a writer for several episodes.
Here’s a Wikipedia page on actual baseball-themed shows, including documentaries.
is available on Amazon.com,
