My 5 Favorite Scenes from Baseball Movies

A couple weeks ago on his blog, er, Substack, Joe Posnanski fielded a question from a brilliant reader, as he deems them, asking after his five favorite scenes from baseball movies. Posnanski, however, let his own brilliant reader’s five favorite scenes from baseball movies – one from “Field of Dreams,” one from “The Natural,” one from “League of their Own,” two from “Eight Men Out” – settle the matter and gave his five favorite baseball references from the celebrated FX show “The Bear,” including the scene from the lost 90s indie holiday movie “Fishes” where baseball cards are discussed and some guys are literally remembered. One of the guys, it should be noted, was Jay Buhner, meaning both “The Bear” and “Seinfeld” include references to Jay Buhner, apparently the hallmark of a truly great TV show. Anyway. Posnanski said the rest of his brilliant readers could hash out their favorite baseball scenes in the comments, and though I suppose I pay to read his blog, er, Substack for that privilege, I don’t do really do comment sections, and besides, I’ve got my own blog, I thought, I could just do my five favorite baseball scenes here. Ergo, a list that I feel confident AI could not have hatched.   

My 5 Favorite Scenes from Baseball Movies

5. Bull Durham. It might be more of a moment, really, than a scene, but Kevin Costner’s introduction as Minor League journeyman Crash Davis is iconic, not merely one of the best character intros in movie genre but in movies in general, bringing to life an arcane bit of baseball terminology in the most colorfully droll way possible. 

4. Field of Dreams. This is not a baseball scene, but it is a scene in a baseball movie, which as far as I am concerned, still counts. And whatever you think of the pie in the sky belief system, deliberately hokey storytelling, or the left-handed Shoeless Joe Jackson batting right-handed, as events concerning book banning in my native state have demonstrated, that scene in the high school gymnasium where Amy Madigan indulges her inner-60s radical is essentially a documentary.

3. Sugar. On the other hand, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Sugar,” which has emerged over the years as my favorite baseball movie, is also partially set in rural Iowa where a Dominican baseball product named Miguel “Sugar” Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) comes to play in the minor leagues. There is a recurring joke in which he orders French toast because he does not know how to order anything else, like eggs, because he can’t specify what kind of egg. So, the server (Marla Finn) brings him a plate with all the egg options and explains what each one is, a recurring joke transforming into an olive branch. In my considerable experience, the phrase Iowa nice is not as overall in accordance with reality as its proponents would suggest, but neither is it entirely mythological, and this moment taken in tandem with the previous one demonstrates the flip side to Iowa. 

2. Major League. A winning team is fun, that goes without saying, but as I have aged and become fonder of regular season baseball’s feeling and rhythm than the postseason’s, I have also become more intrigued by losing baseball teams, the ones that have to muster up just enough to slog through August and September when they are 25 games out of first place. And so more than Rick Vaughn (Charlie Sheen) getting the climactic strikeout post “Wild Thing” walkout, the sequence that I have always loved most in David S. Ward’s 1989 comedy is Rick Vaughn’s first appearance on the mound in which he walks the bases loaded on 12 pitches, surrenders a grand slam, plunks a guy, and triggers a brawl. It is a virtual comic symphony courtesy of editor Dennis M. Hill in which each cut maximizes the humor and Bob Uecker ties the whole thing together by riffing on the local announcer’s duty to try and maintain a little optimism in the face of certain defeat.

1. The Naked Gun. Uh oh. Real existential question here. Is “The Naked Gun” a baseball movie, or is it merely a movie that ends with a baseball sequence? Well, if the Major League Baseball Network is any guide, which re-runs “The Naked Gun,” like, every weekend, then it absolutely is. Besides, I would argue the concluding baseball sequence is so overpowering that in real time it remolds “The Naked Gun” into a baseball movie, sort of like how Taylor Swift remolded every Kansas City Chief game last year into a platform for her own stardom. If humor is truth then the climax of “The Naked Gun” proves it, getting to the truth of baseball in a way no callow drama ever could by ribbing on things as small as spitting and TV’s penchant for filling booths with too many talking heads and as big as insistence on regimental pageantry (see above), umpires who make themselves the star of the show, and good old fashioned American bloodlust by way of a brawl (if not also a few sports bloopers), its status as America’s Pastime enlarged by having it all play out in front of Queen Elizabeth II (Jeannette Charles), take it or leave it, Your Majesty.

Some Drivel On...Baseball

Meet this year’s Major League Baseball playoffs, the same as last year’s Major League Baseball playoffs. In 2022, the 111-win Los Angeles Dodgers and 101-win Atlanta Braves were eliminated from the postseason by teams with inferior records who only qualified as wildcards. in 2023, the 100-win Los Angeles Dodgers and 104-win Atlanta Braves and 101-win Baltimore Orioles were all eliminated from the postseason by teams with inferior records who only qualified as wildcards. If once upon a time, the Dodgers and Braves and Orioles and Astros might have met in respective best-of-seven series to determine who won the pennant and advanced to the World Series, MLB’s decision to remake the game with three divisions rather than one and thus add a single wild card team to a 4-team playoff put us on the road to where we are now. That is, a 12-team playoff with 6 wild cards, transforming the hallowed Fall Classic from a certification of regular season results, so to speak, into the finale of the MLB October Jamboree.

The reasons for this are clear. TV revenue, of course, which is as much the Spirit of the Game as anything these days, and TV revenue correlates directly to entertainment. “Are you not entertained?” Joe Posnanski asked of this new playoff format on his blog without necessarily criticizing that format even as his repurposing of the famous “Gladiator” quote made clear the format’s point. Really, it’s March Madness for baseball, and who wouldn’t want that? March Madness is fun! But then, the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Division I Basketball Tournaments are manifestly not designed to determine the best teams over the course of a four-month season but, merely, reveal which teams are left standing at the end of a three-week tournament. “Purdue’s the heavy preseason favorite,” went a recent laugh out loud Athletic headline, “but postseason is the real question,” virtually betraying college basketball’s entire four-month regular season as preliminary. But baseball, as Posnanski has written elsewhere, “is America’s only every-day game.” “Each inning of baseball's slow, searching time span,” Roger Angell wrote famously in The Interior Stadium, “each game of its long season is essential to the disclosure of its truths.”

Now you could interpret Angell’s encapsulation as David Roth did for Defector in attempting to put the gatekeepers in their place, that “the randomness built into the game…the weird hops and hot streaks and fluke caroms” essentially epitomize what baseball turns into in the month of October. “The regular season is the orderly part, October is the opposite; both are important, and the story of the season would not be complete without either,” Roth writes. It is not dissimilar to the argument mounted by Robert O’Connell for The Atlantic, that “After the slowness of the summer, (the wildcard) reintroduces everyone to the craziness of the fall. Time quickens; desperation festers.” O’Connell, though, is more apt to admit the contrived nature of the current playoff system, which Roth elides, never mentioning that for well over 100 years of its existence, the baseball season was in so many ways an “anticlimax,” to borrow another Posnanski word. In fact, in The Interior Stadium, Angell essentially proffers the same argument as Roth, though he notes how such manic swings and terrible reversals are built into the game itself regardless of postseason or regular season, the two closer in spirit than all this radical restructuring would otherwise suggest. 

Indeed, I am not necessarily arguing against baseball’s postseason as it has come to exist so much as I am explaining how I have come to the realization that what I appreciate most about baseball, nay, why I enjoy it at all has metamorphosed over the years as much as the sport’s playoff format. When I was a kid, only the playoffs really interested me, the regular season too much of a slog. That makes a sort of scientific sense, I suppose, because when you’re younger, your attention span tends to be shorter, and the immediacy of playoff baseball naturally lends itself to hyperactive mindset more than what O’Connell deemed the “drowsy daily pace” of the regular season. In writing about his Opening Day experience as an 11-year-old, when he was convinced one game of his beloved hometown Cleveland club would provide the key to the whole season, Posnanski noted that he was too young “to appreciate the length of a baseball season, the drone of 162 games, the numbing effects of tomorrow after tomorrow.” 

I live in Chicago where the Northside Cubs spent this season locked in a playoff chase while the Southside White Sox spent their season going from bad to worse to miserable. I found the latter more compelling. Maybe that’s because in entering middle age and discovering it’s where life truly becomes a grind, all about metaphorically, if not literally on occasion, putting one foot in front of the other, I have developed a newfound appreciation for the grind of the baseball season, of those numbing effects of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, where the old axiom of having something to play for becomes less practical than existential. If every burgeoning baseball player dreams of stepping to the plate in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7 with the bases loaded and two outs, what burgeoning baseball player dreams of rolling out of bed in a Ramada in Kansas City on a Wednesday in September to wrap up a three game road series you’ve already technically lost during a season that long ago went to the birds? Out, out, brief candle!

The Sox began September by losing 4-2, 10-0, 3-2, 12-1, and 7-6 on an end-of-game, bases-loaded balk. If you lost a game on a walk-off balk in October, it would always be remembered. As it was, the unlikely White Sox balk-off was washed away in the daily baseball tide, which means when they won 6-4 the following day, it wasn’t about redemption. It wasn’t even rememberable; I don’t remember anything about it right now. Like so many of the days of our lives, it was not a game to be remembered, just lived and then forgotten.

What Movie Robots Could Become Baseball Umpires?

On Monday’s episode of the Slate Hang Up & Listen sports podcast, co-host Stefan Fatsis, in discussing the just-started Major League Baseball season, asked guest Ben Lindbergh about the professional, independent Atlantic League’s MLB-funded rule tinkering for the 2019 season. This apparently includes robot umpires, which no doubt is less absurd than it sounds, but nevertheless yielded some comical back & forth about what inherent baseball paradoxes could potentially cause these officiating robots to go haywire, never mind the thought of ex-Baltimore Orioles manager, the late Earl Weaver, hauling himself out of the dugout to go scream at a machine about some horse’s ass of a call.

If we’re making a comedy, where John C. Reilly is the anti-science manager of the Norfolk Tides, then you’d have to draft the “Short Circuit” robot, I suppose, or WALL-E, though Disney would never give up the rights without paying Mike Trout kinda cash. It’s comical to imagine hapless C-3PO getting inadvertently plunked by Rick Vaughn and reacting like Han Solo just threatened to leave him on Hoth. I liked Fatsis’s suggestion of Woody Allen’s robot from “Sleeper”, which isn’t really a robot at all but Allen’s character pretending to be a robot. That would be comedy gold! A real person pretending to be a robot umpire! It’s like Frank Drebin as Enrico Palazzo as a Robot! Imagine John C. Reilly yelling at him!

If we’re making a cautionary tale then HAL 9000’s gotta be the guy, foolproof and incapable of error, going off script during the World Series and seizing control of the game. Then again, you could go the other way and have RoboCop installed as the Robot Umpire, less about getting balls and strikes correct and more about cleaning up a game that takes too long and is rife with PEDs, leading to him laying down the law against greedy owners who fleece taxpayers for new stadiums they don’t actually need. “Make ‘em robots,” guest co-host Mike Pesca said of the umpires, “but don’t tell the players”, an idea suggesting “The Stepford Wives”, where only after the crucial, controversial out of the World Series does the incensed son of Willie Mays Hayes takes his bat to the umpire and discover the truth, or an “Alien”-like behind-the-plate Synthetic revealing sinister motivations at the wrong time.

If we’re making a more action-oriented product then you could have a manager, on the hot seat and on the wrong end of too many robot calls, creating his own automated umpire which inevitably unleashes inadvertent but very destructive chaos, sort of a “Mechagodzilla vs. Robot Umpire.” You could also put the T-1000 behind home plate, eliminating any player and/or manager who dared argue his calls, accruing so much evil power that true baseball believers call up the T-800 umpiring the minor leagues to try and save the day.

If we’re making a heartwarming, “Angels in the Outfield”-ish story perhaps The Iron Giant could begin umpiring in some Independent League though the conservative MLB Commissioner seeks to eradicate him, explaining “robots are no match for human aptitude.” Yet despite the MLB’s attempts to destroy the robot umpiring Iron Giant, he saves the day by stepping in front of a Sidd Finch-level fastball to rescue our youthful co-protagonist. Or, of course, Gort of “The Day The Earth Stood Still” could show up with a humanoid explaining that Gort is the answer to human umpiring’s inexactitude.  When the Commissioner and owners, however, tell the humanoid to buzz off, the humanoid goes undercover as a duplicitous, backstabbing owner to work his way into the game to convince the other owners and the Commissioner to let Gort in. And as umpiring only gets worse and worse, the World Series decided by a series of unspeakable umpiring gaffes causing the public to turn against the game, it becomes clear that if baseball continues on its present course, the sport will die.

In the end, though, I most like the idea of our Robot Umpires being rendered as “Blade Runner” Replicants. Are the umpires real people or are they merely eerily human-like? Is that bad call we all remember from Game 7 of the 1984 World Series real, or is it just a figment of our imagination? And, of course, the Blade Runner tasked with ferreting out these replicants comes to wonder if he too is a Replicant, leading us all to wonder if, in the end, fans and umpires are not really so different.