Originally posted January 29, 2010, this post has been viewed more than any other: more than 23,000 times. “J.D. Salinger, Terence Mann, and Field of Dreams.” Let’s keep those comments coming in, folks.
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From the category archives:
Baseball movies
The Vulture, a component of New York Magazine, recently published this list by Tim Griersen and Will Leitch of “The 50 Greatest Sports Movies of All Time.” Needless to say, they’re not all about baseball. Can’t say I have any real arguments with what they came up with. I was getting ready to complain that […]
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Sad news about the passing of Robert Redford, who died this morning at the age of 89. Here’s the obituary from The New York Times. Of course, for baseball fans, Redford was best remembered for his role as Roy Hobbs in the screen version of The Natural. He also served as the narrator for The Glove, a […]
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The Native American actor know for his roles in Dances with Wolves and The Green Mile passed away September 1 at the age of 73. Here’s his obituary in The New York Times. His baseball connection? He appeared as the ghost of a ballplayer in the 1993 TV movie Cooperstown, written by Lee Blessing and directed […]
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A couple of days ago was the anniversary of Cal Ripken Jr. beginning his iron man streak. Today it’s Lou Gehrig, who played the first of 2,130 straight in 1925 when he flied out as a pinch-hitter against Walter Johnson in a 5-3 loss to the Washington Senators. Lou Gehrig, Pride of the Yankees, by […]
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Those who have been following this blog for any length of time know about my love of the movies. So it was almost with a squeal of delight that I found this post on nofilmschool.com, “Read the Best baseball Movie: Inspire your sports movie with some of these wonderful scripts,” by Jason Hellerman. Included in […]
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See below for an update. A post on Facebook reminded me that Moe Berg, one of the most interesting characters to ever don spikes, died on this date in 1972. The number of languages Berg could speak varied. Casey Stengel once supposedly, “He can speak seven languages but can’t hit in any of ’em.” […]
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A reminder: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes (see my piece on “Why Amazon’s search engine sucks“). In addition, occasionally […]
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It was a shocker to see the breaking news on CNN on Monday that James Earl Jones had passed away. The tributes that followed seemed to highlight two roles: Darth Vader from the Star Wars universe and Terrence Mann from Field of Dreams. But Jones, who died at the age of 93, was also in […]
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I don’t have a whole lot of hobbies, so when I see a book that combines any of them on my periodic “Coming down the pike” stories, I get extra pumped. Baseball: The Movie covers two of them. Now that I no longer have Turner Classic Movies, since they went to a subscription platform, I […]
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I was flipping through the dial (as it were) yesterday — Memorial Day — and came across the final episode of Band of Brothers. In the final scene, the men of Easy Company are playing baseball. Having watched BoB dozens of times, I knew the actor playing catcher was Neal McDonough, who played Buck Compton. […]
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The things one finds wandering down the rabbit hole. I was doing some research and just happened to come across the new film, Fielding Dreams: A Celebration of Baseball Scouts. It’s a fascinating look at an under-reported part of the game. The first thing I thought of was the scene in Moneyball in which Billy […]
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♦ The Baseball Hall of Fame will hold a screening of Fielding Dreams: A Celebration of Baseball Scouts on Thursday, Jan. 18. “[T]his new documentary goes beyond moneyball [sic] and features dozens of interviews with some of the scouting legends of the game, including 5 scouts who helped build the 2023 World Series Champion Texas […]
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♦ Interesting piece on “20 facts you might not know about ‘Moneyball’” from Yardbarker.com. But, sorry, leading off with “The movie is based on a book?” Maybe I’m being overcritical, but come on, this is something you might not know? ♦ Another Yardbarker piece includes Cliff Murdoch Rookie of the Year), Teddy Cullinane (Bull Durham), […]
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My, how times have changed. When A League of Their Own came out in 1992, it did so without much reference to “coming out.” While the vastly popular film did bring much deserved yet overlooked attention to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, one of the contemporary complaints is that it did not address the […]
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♦ It’s been a very long time since I wrote about the Baseball Project, “a supergroup that includes several former members of R.E.M. and makes music exclusively about the sport,” according to this new article from The New Yorker. ♦ Hot on the heels of the new Netflx documentary The Saint of Second Chances this […]
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is available on Amazon.com,
