What makes a great baseball movie?  Is it the details inimical to our nation’s pastime?  The passing comments – ‘Who the hell are you?  I'm the player to be named later.’ – that sum up the greatest of all sports in the subtlest of ways?  Or, perhaps, is it the movie that gets it all right, the one that never misses a note, the film that – at its heart – exists only because of the love of the game.  A movie that despite the requisite cinematic diversions of movie stars, plot lines, and the proverbial climax, simply embodies the game that captured our childhood and continues to define who we have grown into years later.              

In due deference to The Natural, Bull Durham, and A League of Their Own, only three films make this final cut.  What sets Major League, Field of Dreams, and Eight Men Out apart from their peers is their seamless ability to combine the beauty – and complexity – of the game with other, separate, storylines that simultaneously validate the greatness of America’s national pastime.      

For starters, take Major League, the funniest sports movie ever made.  Its premise of a recently widowed ex-showgirl owner attempting to assemble a worthless bunch of ballplayers – then led by a career minor league coach, one only mediocre at selling tires – to finish so poorly that she can move the team from Cleveland to Miami (obviously this movie was made pre-Florida Marlins) is downright amusing in its own right.  Add to that recipe the popular ingredients of the verisimilitude of the team, the Indians baseball club, the ballpark – Milwaukee County Stadium, may it rest in peace – and the play-by-play announcer Bob Ueck – er, Harry Doyle, and you have a delicious, cinematic treat.  The misfits that ultimately make up the squad include the aging prima donna, Roger Dorn; the slimy rum-loving sinkerballer Eddie Harris; the voodoo-worshiping, no curveball hitting Pedro Cerrano; California Penal League’s own Ricky ‘Wild Thing’ Vaughn; and – my personal favorite – Willie Mays Hayes, who by season’s end, finally learned from all of those push-ups in Spring Training to hit the ball on the ground.

The first third of the movie, of course, centers on baseball, taking great pride in showing its lighter side: ‘Are you trying to say Jesus Christ can't hit a curveball?’  But on the eve of Opening Day, it changes focus.  The story switches to Jake Taylor (played by Tom Berenger) and his relationship with Lynn Westland, Rene Russo in her first film role.  From this point until the movie’s climactic game, various machinations including Moby Dick, adultery, and an attempt to sacrifice a live chicken, all play critical roles in building up the clubhouse camaraderie requisite to all great teams.  With that firmly established and the cutout-of-the-wicked-owner nearly unclothed, the film’s final act ties it all together in a most enjoyable ending. 

The humor is not the secret to Major League; instead, it is its ability to catch baseball’s redemptive – what sport gives so many second (and third) chances? – powers of healing and pure unadulterated benevolence.  The magical game that, at its heart, is simply a game of numbers (usually multiples of three) where a spectator who attended every game in a season would never see one unfold the same way as another, yet always see something new occur – a game that changes its entire complexion with every solitary pitch.  The film’s final half-inning provides a perfect illustration. 

After Willie Mays Hayes beats out an infield single in the bottom of the ninth, everyone in the stadium knows he is stealing second.  (Sound familiar Red Sox Nation?) After Jake Taylor intentionally swung through a strike to protect this stolen base attempt, he now faced an 0-1 count, with a runner on second and two outs.  Despite these unfavorable circumstances, he has the audacity to signal to the dugout for a hit-and-run . . . bunt!  In a wonderful feint reeking of Hollywood drama, baseball history, and brilliant gamesmanship, the aging catcher – in pellucid Ruthian fashion – points to the bleachers, proclaiming where the next pitch will land. 

After predictably being knocked down with the next pitch – and refusing to dust himself off – Taylor had evened the count at a ball and a strike.  This leveling of the count thereby forced the infielders to stay back (for with only one strike, he needn’t take any power off of his swing to protect the plate) thus, with the fleet-footed Hayes aboard, providing the perfect, if nonetheless surprising, position to lay down a bunt.  Given his history of bad knees, on full display just two innings before after coming up lame after legging out a ground ball, this decision was even more risky, not to mention unlikely.  Such is the beauty of baseball.  And Major League gets it just right.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think baseball should be taken too seriously.  I also, however, am of the firm belief that its importance goes far beyond pure naïve enjoyment.  Baseball more than any other sport – or activity for that matter – defines the American epoch; it always provides a reliable reference point for this country’s history.  Field of Dreams and Eight Men Out masterly depict this pervasive power.

Accepting its plot as a bit hokey is the first step in embracing Field of Dreams, the fine film based on W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe.  Despite making a gross error of fact – Joe Jackson hits from the left side not the right as depicted in the movie – I have little problem with the movie substituting authors, replacing Catcher in the Rye writer J.D. Salinger with the fictional Terrance Mann, presumably to facilitate the casting of the sage James Earl Jones in this grand role. 

For it is his character which best sums up the greatness of baseball – it is he who links the history of the United States to his writing and, by transitive property, to baseball.

‘The one constant through all the years has been baseball,’ Jones opines near the end of the film.  ‘America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers.  It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.  But baseball has marked the time.  This field, this game, its part of our past.  It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again.’

This last line is what the movie is about: the father-son relationship.  In plowing over his corn fields to build this field of dreams, Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella ultimately is ‘going the distance’ to ‘ease his pain.’  Until the final catch with his father, though, he doesn’t realize that the pain he is easing is his own.  Throughout the entirety of the movie’s dramatic arc, the healing power of America’s national pastime rescues a score of actual people in need of salvation.  Shoeless Joe Jackson, and his so-called Black Sox teammates, have the most to gain from this field, but Moonlight Graham – a real player who finally gets to fulfill his lifelong dream of having an at-bat in the major leagues before giving it all up to save the life of Ray’s daughter – and Mann regaining his will to write, also find emancipation on the field.  Even Kinsella’s brother-in-law Mark, the only real villain in the story, sees the proverbial light when the baseball players suddenly become visible to him after his niece’s near-death experience.

For helping all of these real people, the majority of which he has never met before, reclaim baseball – their loss of innocence – Ray Kinsella expects nothing for himself until very late in the movie.  Yet in the end he is the biggest winner.  Besides enjoying the good will and karma of bettering so many lives (not to mention saving a few souls), he now owns an über-popular and prosperous attraction, and – having fully broken the paternal mold by doing something so daring and brash – Kinsella can finally put right the wrongs of the last decade and a half, foremost among them introducing his wife and daughter to his dad.  In having this catch with his father – a perfect symbol of the redemptive and timeless appeal of baseball – Kinsella assuaged all the latent guilt and remorse he felt about his dad; seeing him on this field as the youthful and talented catcher (a clever homage to J.D. Salinger’s work in the book) brought both the realization of his own fallibility and the appreciation of the sacrifices fathers make for their sons.  In explicating these complicated equations of humanity, these worldly riddles are solved.  Baseball – the ultimate variable – is the perfect solution.

What, then, occurs when the variables change, the equation compromised?  In wrestling with this confounding didactic, John Sayles’ Eight Men Out rightfully asserts itself as the finest movie about baseball ever made.  Starring John Cusack, Charlie Sheen,   Christopher Lloyd, D.B. Sweeney as Shoeless Joe, and the always solid John Mahoney as the Sox skipper, Kid Gleason, it documents the throwing of the 1919 World Series which – in the process of blackening the White Sox – permanently banned eight players from baseball for life, including two who played exceptionally well in that Fall Classic: Buck Weaver and Joe Jackson. 

The latter – sans shoes – nicely links this film to Field of Dreams, and has emerged as the cause célèbre for baseball conspiracists.  In recent years, his ban from Major League Baseball has been unfairly compared to Pete Rose’s plight – a man who, while managing in the big leagues, gambled on baseball, attacking its intrinsic (and vital) fabric.  Those not convinced of Jackson’s innocence will undoubtedly cry foul, asserting that this is exactly what Jackson himself did.  Of course, by toeing this company line, they forget the undeniable, something made crystal clear in both films: Joe Jackson’s play in the series – .375 average, five runs, 12 hits, three doubles, six runs batted in, 16 putouts, one assist, and turning one double play along with no errors and the series only home run – directly contradicts any off-the-field skullduggery.  Perhaps even more poignantly, Eight Men Out asserts that not only could he not read, but his mental faculties might not have allowed him to fully understand the intricacies of this vast conspiracy.  In any case, Jackson’s situation has no similarities whatever to that of Pete Rose.

Buck Weaver’s pickle, though, while equally noteworthy is vastly underreported.  Portrayed convincingly by Cusack, Weaver is the vehicle that drives the movie – from his clubhouse chatter to private moments with his wife to his philosophical conversations with neighborhood children – and the one, more than any other, that hits the emotional home run.  At no time did he conspire with or take money from the gamblers; he was not awarded a separate trial despite multiple requests in the eight ballplayers’ criminal case (which ultimately ended in a suspect acquittal); and – like Jackson – his play on offense and defense bordered on perfection.  In that World Series, he also didn’t commit an error, playing a great third base.  He handled all 27 of his chances in his 71 innings in the field.  At the plate, he hit .324 (the movie, erroneously, has his average at .327), scoring four runs, amassing 11 hits, four doubles, and a triple for a robust slugging percentage of .500.

Yet when newly christened baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis handed down his summary judgments of banishment, he turned a blind eye toward to such evidence.  Weaver appealed the decision, unsuccessfully, every year until his death in 1956.  This tragedy is the most heart wrenching aspect of a film which portrays the sport flawlessly from every angle – from the owner’s box on down – and excels at encompassing the far-reaching effects of baseball.  The proverbial thrill and agony of these victories and defeats are best encapsulated by the two neighborhood kids: PeeWee and, tellingly, Bucky.  These kids’ spirits rose and fell with the Sox; little PeeWee fell into his own personal abyss after asking his favorite player, Shoeless Joe Jackson, on the steps of the courthouse perhaps the most storied question in sport: ‘Say it ain’t so Joe?  Say it ain’t so?’  In the interlude before the criminal verdict is read, Weaver implores the kids to cut the fellas in the locker room some slack, explaining that as you get older, decisions become less stark, right and wrong less clear.  Continuing, in the movie’s best scene, Weaver extols – much as Mann did in Field of Dreams – the purity, purpose, and perpetual beauty of baseball.

‘I still get such a bang out of it, playing ball.  Same as I did when I first come up.  You get out there and the stands are full and everybody is cheering.  It’s like everybody in the world come to see you.  Inside that there is the players in there – and they are yakking it up – and the pitcher throws and you’re looking for that pill and suddenly there is nothing else in the ballpark but you and him.  Sometimes, when you are feeling right, there is a groove there and the bat just eases into it and meets that ball. When the bat meets that ball you can feel that ball just give and you know it is going to go a long way. Damn, if you don't feel like you’re going to live forever.  I couldn’t give that up.  Not for nothing.’  

This soliloquy powerfully captures the greatness of the game.  Under John Sayles’ meticulous direction, Eight Men Out seamlessly distills the joy and pain, relief and regret, and winning and losing that defines the sport to this day.  By choosing the darkest era in baseball history to do so, Sayles taps into its full emotional scope.  Despite their banishment, these players – especially Jackson and Weaver – continue to live on in our pantheon of great players, and as witnessed by these films, still succeed at captivating our imaginations.  Disdain for the truly guilty, though, still cannot tarnish the game they excelled at or the era they helped define. 

For that game, foibles and all, is timeless – and never better illustrated than by this single film.  Given the sport’s quasi-magical affinity with the number three and its multiples, however, perhaps turning a triple play by watching Major League, Field of Dreams, and Eight Men Out – movies originally released within seven months of each other – is the best way to capture all aspects of the world’s greatest game.