Top Five (and Three-quarters) Baseball Films

Does anyone remember “Wheel of Fortune” in the old days – say the early 1990s? A contestant would got to the final round, in which he or she had to solve a short puzzle in thirty seconds to guess the final word or phrase. To assist in the codebreaking, the player was allowed to choose five consonants and one vowel which would be revealed on the board.

Well, somewhere along the way in the last decade, the show’s producers oddly felt that going through the ritual of choosing “L, N, R, S and T” as everyone did was unnecessary and made it a point to merely give the would-be word sleuth these five letters while still allowing him or her to guess the vowel, which is ultimately always “E.”

The situation is akin to polling movie fans, sports fans and sports movie fans about the top five baseball movies ever made. The first four are named without hesitation, enumerated as some combination of Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, The Natural, and Gary Cooper’s Lou Gehrig biopic tearjerker Pride of Yankees. Position five is probably occupied by Eight Men Out or, if in a lighter mood, either the not-for-kids Little League flick The Bad News Bears or screwball comedy Major League. And soon, Red Sox and Mets fans will doubt add the new Michael Keaton film Game 6 to their lists.

This is all fine and good. All of the above-mentioned (well, except one) are quality films populated with the likable, zany and/or dramatic characters every American loves in a baseball movie. All have edge-of-your-seat plotline, all shoot the red, white and blue game in loving fashion. It would therefore be pointless to pump up or tear down any of these venerated classics – even The Natural, in which every time Roy Hobbs steps to the plate he strikes out or homers (oops) – and so this critic would like to offer an alternative Top Five (and Three-Quarters) Baseball Movies, a series of reels perhaps passed by the first time ‘round. In homage to “Wheel,” the list will be presented in alphabetical order.