best baseball movie of all time

Bull Durham

Tim Robbins throws like a girl.

Maybe that's why the movie appeals to both sexes...

yes but the Bad News Bears appeals to alcoholic pool cleaners and pre-teen miscreants (both of which I have been)

Erm... ok, I'm gonna get shot down mercilessly here, but I think The Natural is the best baseball movie of all time.

Bad News Bears is awesome (only the original, please), as it deals with so many issues that movies now-a-days just ignore (like alcoholism, deadbeat dads, differing economic backgrounds of the kids/teams). And, of course, it's funny as hell. Tatum is hot (too bad she turned to crack) and Walter Matthau is perfect as the grizzled old, flawed manager.

But The Natural just has the epic scope, not to mention the olde tyme setting that just seems to make it even more authentic. Is it overblown, maudlin, manipulative, unrealistic? Yes, but so is your face.

The Natural does a great job of toeing that line between fantasy and reality that the game of baseball encompasses. It's not a "real-life" movie, but instead the relation of a myth, just as the Greeks told their little Greek children thousands of years ago about tales of brave Ulysses (or, more accurately, Odysseus, but I wanted to work in the Cream reference).

When I watch The Natural, I feel like I'm connecting with something that is eternal and beyond this mortal tapestry. When I watch Bull Durham, I just want to connect with Susan Sarandon's tits.

Major League.

I like Major League better than Bad News Bears too.

I love Major League. I haven't seen Mr. Baseball in 20 years, but I remember liking it when I saw it as a younger human being.

I didn't like the Natural because it was unnatural. I hate when baseball (or sports) stray from reality, it loses me. My love for Albert Brooks is deep, and he is awesome in The Scout, but that movie is so painfully unrealistic that it loses me.

Oh there's no doubt that "The Natural" was hyping it up a ton (especially with the unwinding ball silliness and the ball hitting the lights and causing them all to explode on the final home run), but the meat of the movie was a lot more gritty. Guy does bad when his head ain't on right and he does good when it is. Failed prospect tries to make it one last time. The past only holds us down if we let it. I liked the simplicity and broad brushstrokes of the various themes in the movie.

Also, I really enjoyed the portrayals of the evil owner (with his penchant for dark rooms) and his gambler crony (with his glinting glass eye). I thought it was a nice touch adding a moral aspect to the story and having the main character face a real dilemma as to which road to choose.

What really sealed it for me though was that life eventually imitated art, as the fake Roy Hobbes heroics were upstaged by the real-life Kirk Gibson home run heroics in the 1988 World Series off Eckersley (and this is painful for me to admit, since I'm an A's fan). Seeing the gimpy Gibson hobble into the batting box and look somewhat over-matched, then suddenly hit it out on a 3-2 count, certainly echoed Hobbes final at-bat in the movie.

"The Natural" gave us a standard to look to and to compare real life against. THIS is what a baseball hero looks like, it said. THIS is the great drama that baseball can deliver. Yeah, it got a little carried away with the whistles and bells, but I forgive it because at its heart, it was honest about the most important thing: the value and the power of this wonderful game we call baseball.

[end soapboxing! ]