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The Sporting News ranked the top 30 hardball flicks of all time. Discuss.
galaxy27
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Field of Dreams
Major League
Bad News Bears
Fever Pitch
Out of that entire list I've only seen the above
Crazy I know
@perkdog
you must watch Bull Durham sometime. it's 2 on this list, but it's 1 on mine.
Bad News Bears is number 1 by a margin so enormous it is an insult to that movie to even be on a list. Bad News Bears is THE baseball movie. There are some OK movies elsewhere in the list, but some of them, even some in the top 10, are just terrible movies. (I won't name the terrible ones: I am not here to pick fights, I am here to bear witness to the majesty that is Bad News Bears, one of the greatest movies of any kind ever made.)
Major league 1 Bull Durham 2 both great movies and I did that for a bit with what it depicted. I wouldnt argue either order.
Moneyball WAY to high. That movie was entertaining but wildly inaccurate. 3 Cy Young caliber starter, 2 MVPs and other all stars but thats just ignored yea no.
A few on there Ive never seen. Natural always bored me. Id put the Rookie higher too
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I will always have a place in my soul for Bang The Drum Slowly. It was the first "baseball" film I ever saw and to this day it still wrings the emotion out of my eyes.
I’m going to have to say Major League. Maybe not the best but my favorite.
@dallasactuary is that ironic or nostalgic or what?
I have seen parts of it but not the entire thing
Not a fan of ranking films. If you change this to 30 Hardball Flicks worthy of watching in no particular order, I would not have a problem. I would rather not argue about whether Pride of the Yankees or The Bad News Bears is a better film. Both have unique qualities that define the times. Walter Matthau’s character and his broken down Cadillac convertible is just comical.
Experience the World through Numismatics...it's more than you can imagine.
it's an exercise in subjectivity, which i why i said discuss. i was genuinely curious as to which baseball movies people liked more than others. no harm, no foul.
that said, you are not fond of ranking films. i respect that, too.
i have never seen Pride of the Yankees, but it appears as if i need to.
I'm fine with the Bad News Bears being the GOAT but Field of Dreams was pretty damn close, Major League was a classic as well
I actually really enjoyed Fever Pitch
The Bad News Bears brings me back to when I was a kid, just an absolute classic
I used to watch Bad News Bears right after Kids Incorporated and right before Starman on HBO. If you know you know. I think Critters is on tonight.
Moneyball way too high. The inaccuracies, the key player omissions from that team...and I hate that they only focus on OB% and forget to mention the other half of the equation(SLG%).
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe was terrible, from his stubby stocky looks down to his portrayal. I'm sure Howe had to have hated it. But at least Hatteberg was great in Guardians of The Galaxy,
I would bump Moneyball completely off the list and replace it with Long Gone.
For the Love of The Game too low. Yeh a little sappy and the love story that kinda interfered, but Vin Scully's role in that movie should put it ten spots higher alone.... in spite of the vocalized "clear the mechanism" line.
....But even with that 'clear the mechanism' line, the flashback to his dad catching him when he calmed him as a kid, and also calmed him in the current game, more than makes up for it.
Long Gone an underrated movie that many have never seen from 1987, replaces Moneyball, and is also better than the silly kid movies at the bottom of the list.
Pride of the Yankees is worth seeing because Babe Ruth plays himself and it’s cool seeing him in high quality movie film. I remember being surprised at the sound of his voice, I thought it would be lower.
Cool scene on a train where he’s joking around with teammates.
Pride of the Yankees was filmed and released during WWII. Other prominent Yankees play themselves including Bill Dickey. The film is a must see for Baseball... but one has to appreciate the backdrop and what was going on at the time. I suspect a remake- if undertaken today- would be much different.
The Pride of St. Louis (1952) and The Winning Team (1952) did not make the list.
edited to add- Does not look as if Fear Strikes Out made it either
Experience the World through Numismatics...it's more than you can imagine.
^^^^
This. I was gonna post about Babe starring as Babe, but you beat me to it. He was such a great personality.
As a kid's movie, it is fantastic. As a movie for adults it is also fantastic. That's what makes it a masterpiece. The scene near the end of the movie when Vic Morrow slaps his son (Brandon Cruz), and the fallout from that over the next few minutes is just a masterpiece of movie-making. Making a movie starring children is risky, because 9 out of 10 of them are terrible actors and have ruined many a movie, but BNB, despite needing to cast a dozen or so, didn't cast one bad actor.
And Tatum O'Neal is the female John Cazale: she didn't make many movies, but Paper Moon and Bad News Bears are both among the greatest movies ever made, and she is a big part of the reason why.
For Love Of the Game definitely underrated. Trouble with the curve also better than gets credit for. Moneyball is basically unwatchable to me
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Agree. In fact, upon first watching Moneyball my initial thought was that there was simply not enough of a compelling story there to make a movie. After checking it out again more recently I realized my initial thought was correct.
Mulder, Zito, and Hudson were the reasons why the A's won. Their staff led the league in ERA that year. Then Tejada and Chavez were the main position players as to why the won. So five home grown talents...all omitted from the reason for success for that team from the movie. Then the cartoonish Howe portrayal. I can't get over that.
Lol yea; 3 perennial Cy Young Candidates, a 4th starter who would be a 2 or a 3 on any other team in Lidle, one of the best closers in baseball, 2 perennial MVP candidates, and Jermaine Dye but somehow the kinda okay Hatteburg was the key.
Zito won the CY that year and Tejada was the MVP. There really wasnt a story there, of course they were going to be good. If youre going to tell the story at least do it mostly accurately. If Moneyball wasnt complete nonsense they would have multiple WS titles
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And they basically shat on Carlos Pena. He had an excellent three year run in Tampa Bay. He ended up with a decent career.
Also from 2002-2004 Pena had a 110 OPS+. with 64 HR
Hatteberg from 2002-2004 had a 105 OPS+
Pena made a total of $800,000 in those three years.
Hatteberg made a total of 5.9 million in those years.
So the correct move would have been to keep Pena. Would rather have the HR driving the OPS than the walks....and they would have saved all that money. It actually goes against the premise in their movie.
They were dumb giving away cheap young power.
Lot of good choices there. I gotta go with The Natural, with Moneyball second.
The Pena trade absolutely dumb but did take him a minute to have those seasons. The part about that thats annoying was it was a 3 team trade for cash and basically Lilly, he wasnt traded for starting like they depicted. They definitely crapped on him in the movie.
The Bradford thing acting like they discovered something when Kim was already the Diamondbacks closer and Bradford was already in the league might be the worst part, certainly one of them
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Moneyball, as all Hollywood movies do based on a true story, often deviate from at least some of the facts. Moneyball had a lot of poetic license in there for sure. That being said, the gist of the movie was entertaining, and that's what Hollywood attempts to do, entertain the viewer.
I totally get that its not going to be that accurate and have to have some dramatic effect and a lot of movies I completely ignore it
They just seemed to have made no attempt and were creating a story that was supposed to be "true". The Cy and MVP winner both on the team not mentioned The other guys basically ignored
Im fine with taking liberties or sprucing things up but that one was really kinda a fictional movie they took so many liberties. It was a good movie for sure if that can be ignored Ive just played and followed baseball so many years of my life Im not able too
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One bigee was Art Howe. I've read his brief interview about it, and Howe wasn't upset at all with the concept of moneyball. He was strongly in favor of whatever it took to help the team win. But of course many Hollywood movies have a hero-villain, good guy-bad guy formula of some sort. The screenwriters figured the movie needed a bad guy and Howe was it.
It was obvious watching the movie that the Peter Brand character was fictional. The premise is too silly to even discuss. Suffice to say "Peter Brand" was simply a compilation of various people and ideas, formulated into one character.
By the time the movie was released baseball had already adopted the OBP > BA concept at its core for 5 or so years. The book focused more on the value unrealized on the margins and it wasn’t promoting building a team from spare parts as much. I didn’t see the movie so I’m trying to judge based on what I’m hearing about it and my memory of the book.
I gotta say that you have an impressive working knowledge of baseball, and of all sports. It is evident you know all these things you post in this thread because you were immersed in the game and know how it works.
I just wanted to throw that compliment out there.
I get that and assume any sports movie will do just that...but Moneyball is at the top of irritating for all the things pointed out in this thread. Maybe they should have waited another 20 years to make it since the actual team was still so fresh in everyone's heads.
One football movie from your back yard that I really like that has an egregious exaggeration, is Invincible....but I will still watch it multiple times despite of that because it was a more compelling and a better story than Moneyball. As much as I like stats, I don't want to watch a movie about On Base Percentage, lol.
The egregious exaggeration in Invincible is that they made Vine Papale(Mark Wahlberg) look like he was only a former HS football player who then only played sandlot bar stool football games, and then went straight into the NFL.
The reality was Papale played two years in the World Football League as a Wide Receiver right before trying out for the Eagles, which is a far cry from the ultimate underdog they portrayed him as.
But since the film was well made and touching, I am able to look past that. Not so much with Moneyball especially with all of the errors and contradictions. Plus Seymore Hoffman playing Art Howe is still terrible any way you slice it(again a lot of us remember Art Howe as an athletic player...not as short dumpy caricature).
How I remember Art Howe:
How I see Phillip Seymour Hoffman when portraying Art Howe:
Thank you I appreciate that. I played sports my whole life, had a career ending injury got into coaching and sports media and its always enjoyable having good sports discussions and enjoy our conversations
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Ive never read the book but heard it was vastly different. I would say watch the movie one time and theres going to be a lot of moments where its just like uh what
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You're welcome.
Fever pitch is so-so but the great thing about that one is they changed the ending to coincide with them winning it all
And everyone should watch 42 at least once
I don't like 42 as much as most it seems. I felt like it was a "feel good" version of his story which I found a little bit distasteful after reading his autobiography. I don't mean to say anything in the movie was seriously misrepresented, but that it was just a more feel-good presentation of a snapshot of his life. 42 is for fun and "I never had it made" is for perspective.
My brother-in-law played for the Durham Bulls. I asked him about the movie one time and he said "it was basically a documentary except there were no Susan Sarandons waiting after the game..."
They built an entire scene around replacing Jason Giambi with his brother Jeremy and other guys. JEREMY WAS ALREADY ON THE TEAM. GRRRRRRR.
My FAVORITE baseball movie "For Love of the Game". I think it's great. I also have a special place for "Eight Men Out" as I felt like they did a good job of portraying the actual baseball.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a "baseball movie" I didn't like. Would have to think long and hard to come up with one.
I think I've seen 17 of the movies on this list. Looks like I've got a few track down. Not "Cobb" though. No reason to watch that joke of a movie based on a nonsense book.
Field of dreams is my favorite by far.
2025 SEC bowl record 4-10
SEC bowl record vs BIG TEN last two years 2-8
"Rhubarb".
Right we all get the Hollywood part but at least make some effort to be somewhat accurate. Great movie if you dont follow sports but we do
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