Team#2_The Movies

The baseball movie player lineup has been done before, and it will be done again (amazingly, I have seen a character from The Fan appear on more than one list).

Redundancy aside, my truth of it is that baseball movies are like baseball players: success rates are low, but the successes are grand.

When real, live baseball is packed with narrative intrigue and surprise endings, it seems redundant to gather a film crew together, write a script, craft a narrative, etc. etc. And so it's got to be very good or very bad to justify existence.

The successes share a taste for misanthropy and dysfunction (read: yes, so does the rest of art, literature and civilization). Baseball's film characters are better-liked for their deficiencies, their wildness, their gut shots to the belly, mile-wide fastballs, crippling appetites and transience.

The worst bits of the baseball movies that I like are the wins. The best bits are when somebody fucks something up completely.

For the record, my favorite baseball movie is Field of Dreams.