Baseball has produced an unusually deep collection of movies, from broad comedies and childhood adventures to historical dramas and stories about aging players figuring out what comes next.
The best ones also understand that baseball itself is only part of the equation. The game provides the setting, but the memorable stories usually involve something else: family, ambition, failure, friendship, aging, money, or the realization that even a lifelong career eventually ends.
Naturally, any ranking of baseball movies is going to produce arguments. Leaving The Sandlot out of the top five alone is enough to get some readers reaching for the comment section. But after considering the obvious contenders, a few classics, and some movies that only barely qualify as baseball movies, these five rise to the top.
Starting at No. 5:
5. A League of Their Own (1992)
Directed by Penny Marshall, A League of Their Own follows the creation of a women’s professional baseball league during World War II, when the possibility of Major League Baseball being disrupted creates an opportunity for women to take the field professionally.
At the center of the story are sisters Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) and Kit Keller (Lori Petty), who join the Rockford Peaches. Dottie is the team’s gifted catcher, while Kit pitches and struggles with living in her older sister’s shadow.
Then there is Jimmy Dugan.
Tom Hanks plays the former major leaguer turned manager as a drunken wreck who initially appears to have almost no interest in actually managing the team. His eventual investment in the Peaches provides some of the film’s best material.
The supporting cast is excellent. Jon Lovitz makes a brief but hilarious appearance as scout Ernie Capadino, while Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell have strong comedic chemistry as Mae Mordabito and Doris Murphy.
The movie also wisely avoids turning Dottie and Jimmy into a conventional romantic pairing. Dottie is married, and although the film allows some tension between the characters, it never lets that overwhelm the story.
Dottie herself is more complicated than the typical sports-movie hero. She is extraordinarily talented but emotionally closed off, particularly when dealing with Kit. She also doesn’t fully embrace the idea of women playing professional baseball, even as she becomes one of the league’s biggest stars.
It’s funny, dramatic, and packed with baseball without losing sight of its characters.
4. Major League (1989)
Major League’s setup requires embracing some absurdity.
The owner of the Cleveland Indians wants to move the team to Miami. To make that happen, she assembles a roster designed to lose so badly that attendance collapses and she can justify relocating the franchise.
Naturally, the terrible team turns out to be pretty good.
The roster includes aging catcher Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger), hard-throwing Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn (Charlie Sheen), speedy but raw Willie Mays Hayes (Wesley Snipes), third baseman Roger Dorn (Corbin Bernsen), and powerful slugger Pedro Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert), who can destroy a fastball but has considerably more trouble with breaking pitches.
The baseball is at its best in the Major Leagues.
For Milwaukee Brewers fans, the movie has an additional connection. Although the story is set in Cleveland, much of the film was shot at Milwaukee County Stadium.
More importantly, Bob Uecker plays Cleveland broadcaster Harry Doyle.
Uecker’s performance is one of the movie’s defining features, and several of Doyle’s calls have remained part of baseball culture for decades. Former Brewers pitcher Pete Vuckovich, who won the 1982 American League Cy Young Award, also appears as Yankees slugger Clu Haywood.
The off-field romantic material isn’t nearly as strong as the baseball scenes. The storyline involving Jake and his former girlfriend Lynn, played by Rene Russo, occasionally feels like something the movie has to get through before returning to the ballpark.
Fortunately, it usually doesn’t stay away for long.
3. Field of Dreams (1989)
A mysterious voice tells an Iowa farmer to build a baseball field in the middle of his corn crop.
He does it.
Then dead baseball players start appearing.
That premise shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does. Still, Field of Dreams commits so completely to its strange combination of baseball, fantasy, and family drama that questioning the mechanics eventually becomes beside the point.
Kevin Costner plays Ray Kinsella, a farmer who becomes convinced that building the field will allow Shoeless Joe Jackson to return to play baseball. Ray Liotta plays Jackson, Amy Madigan plays Ray’s wife, Annie, and James Earl Jones appears as reclusive writer Terence Mann. Burt Lancaster, in his final feature-film role, plays Dr. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham.
The movie takes some liberties with baseball history, particularly around Jackson and the Black Sox scandal, but it introduced plenty of viewers to that story for the first time.
Its lasting appeal, however, has less to do with Shoeless Joe than with Ray’s relationship with his late father.
The final game of catch between father and son is one of the most recognizable scenes in any sports movie. There is no championship involved and no dramatic final at-bat. It’s simply a father and son throwing a baseball to each other.
That simplicity makes the ending work.
The field built for the movie still exists in Dyersville, Iowa. It has since hosted professional baseball events, adding another strange chapter to a movie about a fictional field that refuses to disappear.
2. Moneyball (2011)
A movie about statistical analysis, player valuation, and baseball economics sounds like something designed for a very specific audience.
Moneyball turned it into compelling drama.
Directed by Bennett Miller, the movie stars Brad Pitt as Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, who is trying to build a competitive team despite operating with far less money than baseball’s wealthiest clubs.
Jonah Hill plays Peter Brand, a fictional assistant character based in part on former Athletics executive Paul DePodesta. Pitt and Hill both received Academy Award nominations for their performances.
The cast also includes Philip Seymour Hoffman as Athletics manager Art Howe, Chris Pratt as Scott Hatteberg, and Robin Wright as Beane’s former wife.
The movie’s biggest baseball problem is what it leaves out.
The 2002 Athletics won 103 games and featured an outstanding starting rotation built around Tim Hudson, Barry Zito and Mark Mulder. Shortstop Miguel Tejada won the American League MVP Award.
Those players receive little attention while the movie concentrates on Beane’s attempts to find undervalued contributors such as Hatteberg, David Justice and Chad Bradford.
Anyone who uses Moneyball as a complete history of the 2002 Athletics will come away with a distorted picture of the team.
As a movie, though, it works remarkably well.
Front-office meetings become confrontations. Trade negotiations become suspense sequences. Scouts sitting around a table discussing players can be as entertaining as anything happening on the field.
And Pitt gives Billy Beane the restless energy necessary to hold the whole thing together.
1. Bull Durham (1988)
Bull Durham manages to be a baseball comedy, a romantic comedy, and a story about getting older without feeling like three different movies stitched together.
Kevin Costner plays Crash Davis, a veteran minor-league catcher brought in to help develop Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, a wildly talented young pitcher played by Tim Robbins.
Nuke has the arm.
Crash has everything else.
Susan Sarandon plays Annie Savoy, a baseball obsessive who becomes involved with both men and completes the movie’s central triangle.
Writer-director Ron Shelton spent time playing minor-league baseball, and that experience is evident throughout the film. The conversations between players feel natural. The mound conferences are ridiculous in exactly the right way. The clubhouse scenes capture the strange mix of boredom, superstition, competition, and camaraderie that surrounds professional baseball.
But the real reason Bull Durham belongs at No. 1 is Crash.
He understands the game better than almost everyone around him. He knows how to handle pitchers, how to talk to reporters, and how to survive professional baseball.
What he doesn’t have anymore is time.
Nuke is headed toward the opportunity Crash wanted. Crash has to help him get there while confronting the possibility that his own playing career is almost finished.
That gives the movie a melancholy streak underneath all the comedy. It isn’t really about whether the Durham Bulls win anything. It’s about what happens when someone who has built his entire life around baseball discovers that baseball is preparing to move on without him.
That would be enough to make Bull Durham one of the better baseball movies ever made.
The fact that it’s also extremely funny puts it at the top.
Honorable Mentions
The most painful omission is The Sandlot.
Released in 1993, the movie is one of the best baseball stories centered on childhood. It follows Scotty Smalls, a kid who knows almost nothing about baseball before falling in with a neighborhood group that spends its summer playing at the local sandlot.
It has baseball, a terrifying dog, a Babe Ruth-signed ball, and one of the more memorable groups of kids assembled for a 1990s movie.
Other children’s baseball movies from the period include Rookie of the Year, Little Big League and Angels in the Outfield, but The Sandlot stands comfortably above that group.
Eight Men Out is another strong candidate. Directed by John Sayles and released in 1988, it tells the story of the 1919 Black Sox scandal and is based on Eliot Asinof’s book of the same name. John Cusack plays Buck Weaver, with the movie presenting a sympathetic portrait of several players involved in the scandal.
For something much older, there is 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees.
Gary Cooper plays Lou Gehrig, while Babe Ruth appears as himself alongside several other Yankees. Released just a year after Gehrig’s death, the movie received 11 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Cooper.
Then there is 1973’s Bang the Drum Slowly, which is less about baseball itself than about two teammates dealing with serious illness. Michael Moriarty plays pitcher Henry Wiggen, while a young Robert De Niro plays catcher Bruce Pearson.
It arrived shortly before Mean Streets, as De Niro was beginning the run that would turn him into one of the defining American actors of his generation.
Ken Burns’ Baseball also deserves mention even though it isn’t a traditional narrative movie. The 1994 documentary series covers the sport’s history through archival footage and interviews with players, historians, journalists, and writers. Buck O’Neil’s appearances became one of the documentary’s most memorable elements.
And Then There Are the Complicated Ones
The Natural is one of the most famous baseball movies ever made, but calling its plot excessive would be an understatement.
Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a gifted player whose career is derailed after a mysterious woman shoots him. Years later, he tries to make a comeback while navigating gambling, an evil owner, a love triangle, a long-lost son, and a pennant race.
It is almost several baseball movies happening simultaneously.
Hardball, released in 2001, stars Keanu Reeves as a gambler who agrees to coach a youth baseball team while attempting to deal with his debts. The cast includes a 14-year-old Michael B. Jordan, shortly before his appearance on HBO’s The Wire.
The Jackie Robinson story received a major Hollywood treatment with 42 in 2013. Chadwick Boseman plays Robinson, while Harrison Ford plays Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey.
Another movie frequently included on baseball lists is The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!.
It certainly contains baseball. A lot of baseball, actually.
The entire climax takes place during a game, with Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin disguising himself as a home-plate umpire. At the same time, a brainwashed Reggie Jackson prepares to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II.
Still, that probably isn’t enough to make The Naked Gun an actual baseball movie.
For an even stranger baseball connection, Blake Edwards’ 1962 thriller Experiment in Terror stages its climax at Candlestick Park during a San Francisco Giants-Los Angeles Dodgers game. Actual game footage includes players such as Don Drysdale, Wally Moon, and John Roseboro.
One significant blind spot remains The Bad News Bears. The original 1976 movie, starring Walter Matthau, has maintained a devoted following for decades and belongs in any serious conversation about baseball movies.
And Brewers fans have Mr. 3000, the 2004 comedy starring Bernie Mac as a retired Milwaukee star who discovers that a statistical error has left him three hits short of the 3,000-hit milestone he built his reputation around.
There are plenty more where those came from, which is precisely why ranking baseball movies inevitably becomes an argument.
But for a five-movie lineup, A League of Their Own, Major League, Field of Dreams, Moneyball and Bull Durham make a difficult group to beat.
