It’s baseball season again. That means spending gorgeous summer afternoons in grass-covered sporting cathedrals, enjoying hot dogs and peanuts, watching your favorite athletes perform at their peak condition, wasting 45 minutes finding your car in the parking lot and, most likely, lamenting your team being out of the race by the All-Star break. And yet, how matter how your boys fare this season, we can all agree that there’s no limit to what Hollywood can do with America’s national pastime.
Baseball is filled with heroes and villains, triumphs and scandals, last-minute victories and agonizing defeats. And so are baseball films. So whether it’s a crass team of Little Leaguers, a magical bat forged by lightning, a baseball groupie and her ditzy boyfriend, or an Iowa cornfield that conjures up the sport’s glorious past, baseball is perfect subject for a film because it’s the perfect analogy for life itself. Here are 21 essential baseball movies that hit it out of the park.
