Baseball: The Movie: The Newsletter
Noah Gittell takes us out to the ballgame
For the first time since the Obama administration, my hometown Houston Astros are not playing deep into October. But my guest on today’s newsletter,
, is lucky enough to still have his beloved New York Mets still alive in the MLB post-season. He’ll have games to watch where he has skin in the game, and I’ll just be hitting the movies. OK, that’s a lie, I’ve come to love watching the playoffs no matter who’s playing. To quote Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane in Moneyball, “how can you not be romantic about baseball?”
Over the summer, I had the great pleasure of chatting with Noah about his superlative new book, Baseball: The Movie. Moreso than just a comprehensive overview of the sport’s contributions in the genre, it’s a comprehensive cultural history of how both baseball and cinema helped shape the American century. I found this to be the rare book about movie history that genuinely surprised me at each turn, and I’m thankful I had the opportunity to learn from such an eminently readable book. (You should buy it yourself or for a loved one this holiday season.)
I hope you enjoy our conversation, and if you like what you read here, you should give Noah’s substack
a follow as well.
I thought your newsletter update about the book tour was uncommonly vulnerable and honest. So, there's a certain subset that's upset about how race and other forms of identity were foregrounded in the book?
I try to be open and vulnerable about what I'm experiencing in my writing because, to me, otherwise I don't see the point. I knew when I wrote the book that some people would be upset about the race and gender stuff in there because baseball is a conservative sport. It has a lot of conservative fans. And the book is called Baseball: The Movie, it's not called The People's History of Baseball Movies, which would have been an interesting title, too. So people go into it expecting a down-the-middle, vanilla, "here's why we love baseball movies" thing, and I didn't want to write that kind of book. It wouldn't interest me. It's not something I'd want to spend years of my life on.
But, to be honest, like, it still sucks when people read the book and get mad about it. I'm not one of those writers who's like, "Oh, good. People are mad about what I'm writing. I must be doing something right!" I'm an emotional person, and a human being, too. When I read that stuff, I do feel like, "Okay, some of this was inevitable, but if I had more time with the book, maybe I could have made my points a little more elegantly and been able to persuade a few more people over to seeing these movies the way that I see them." I wouldn't change the points I made or soften the arguments that I made. But every author wishes they had more time, and that's what I would have done with mine. That, and fix all of the mistakes that are being pointed out to me by baseball quibblers as well.
You mentioned baseball having a big conservative fan base and maybe being conservative-coded overall. Do you have a theory for why that is?
Yeah, I do. It's been around longer than the other sports, so it has this pre-civil rights, pre-equal rights history that is baked into the game on some level. But I also think it is the most nostalgic sport. Even when it started, it was nostalgic. It was created in cities, played in New York first, and was thought of as a gentleman's sport in its early days. And yet because it is played on grass and dirt in a kind of park space, it feels like a rural, agrarian sport. It reminds us of our agrarian roots as a people, I think. That nostalgia has been a big part of the sport moving all the way through. It's part of what we love about it.
But I think it's actually to its detriment as well. It makes it hard for baseball to move forward and progress because people always want to look back at their childhood and say the game was better back then in every way. Whether it's the game was better because there were only white people playing, or the game was better because there were no DHs, whatever it is, the way you the way you watched it as a child is usually your favorite version of the sport. I think that's baked into it in a way that other sports don't have to contend with.
You point out in the book that so many of these stories are intergenerational or deal with a parent-child relationship. Do the pace of play and the level of physical exertion lend themselves to being a sport that a father and son can still play together?
I think that's definitely true, and I think the pace of play also reminds us of our childhood. It reminds us of those summer days when you have nothing to do and can just go out in the backyard to play wiffleball all day (which is what I did in my childhood). We live such busy lives as adults, and sports like basketball and, to some degree football and hockey, reflect the contemporary rhythms of our lives. Despite the pitch clock — which you probably know I'm not a fan of — baseball doesn't. It reflects the childhood rhythms of our lives. The nostalgia is baked into it on every level, and that does engender a certain conservatism and reinforcement of the status quo. That makes it hard to move the sport forward and to move the minds of the people who love the sport.
I love how you foreground just how much baseball and cinema go hand in hand as an American pastime and art form. Is the team aspect of baseball at all an analog of the collaborative art of filmmaking?
Definitely. We didn't get into it much in the interview I did with Richard Linklater for the book, but he has spoken about how he thinks that his background in sports makes him a good director. He made that documentary about Augie Garrido, the University of Texas [baseball] coach, which we did speak about. And I think that's why he connected to him so much. He really sees himself as a coach as much as a director. I don't know much about managing a team or directing a film, so I can't speak on it personally, but they do seem like similar jobs in a lot of ways. You have to trust people to do their jobs. You have to bring out the best in people. You have to stay focused on your work in the moment but also have an eye towards your larger goal. I guess all collaborative work is like that, to some degree, but these are the two things I love ... so these are the two things I wrote about.
What do you make of the crossover between baseball and Film Twitter? It seems beloved among the film crowd in a way that no other sport is.
I think part of it is just because baseball movies dominate the sports movie canon in a lot of ways. There are good football, basketball, hockey, and boxing movies, but I don't think any of them dominate the canon in the way baseball movies do ... especially when you consider the general age range of the people who are on Film Twitter. People who grew up in the '80s and '90s are the main demographic, although obviously there are a lot of younger people as well. That era of baseball movies is unrivaled in terms of any other kind of sports movie in American history.
Maybe there were a lot of great boxing movies back in the '20s and '30s, but we're not really talking about those much on Film Twitter. That era looms very large. But as I write in the book, I do think baseball lends itself to cinema in a way that these other sports don't. People who love film are going to gravitate towards these movies, even if they're not necessarily big baseball fans. I've definitely run into a lot of those folks on the tour and online.
What do you think is behind the compulsion to put cinematic or narrative frames on sporting events? A story is subjective, but a game (usually) has clear-cut winners and losers.
By the same token, we could ask, "Why do we use so many baseball terms in our regular lives?" I think these are just two things that are such a fundamental part of the American experience of the 20th century. Baseball and cinema were the most important and biggest entertainments for the first 70 years of the 20th century, undoubtedly. Those things creep into our lives, so when we watch baseball, we think about movies, and when we live our lives, we think about baseball. They've just become part of our lexicon.
Is the climactic game as a microcosm for all the film’s stakes an invention of the baseball movie and The Stratton Story?
As far as I can tell. I've watched all the baseball movies, and The Stratton Story is the first one that's like, "No, we need to end on a big game of some kind." That's the first one that I ever saw that did it. At the very least, it's the first one I saw that felt like the modern version. And I thought they did it extraordinarily well. I was very tense at the end of that movie hoping that he succeeds.
The book points out the many ways baseball and cinema’s journeys mirror each other — do you see any points of convergence where one influenced the other in a direct, causal way?
I don't think so, but they've moved on parallel tracks. The points I make in the book about them being these escapes for urban dwellers in the early 20th century, the scandals that they encountered in the late teens and '20s, how they dealt with those scandals, and the way they fended off threats over the years just has to do with their place at the top of American entertainment in the 20th century. They've gone through the same things because they exist in that sphere. I don't think there's been a lot of causation. I think television and baseball probably have had a lot more points of convergence than movies and baseball have. They're like siblings going through their paths in the world and running into a lot of the same issues, but not necessarily living a mutual life.
Is there anything to be gleaned from how baseball's been televised over time? When you look at the boxing movie, for example, you see how filmmakers shot it from those early days when it was broadcast over the radio to when it entered a pay-per-view era. Do you feel like there's anything similar in baseball?
Baseball movies definitely changed the way they looked in the 1980s, but I think that had more to do with television than anything else. You had a generation of filmmakers who grew up on TV, like Barry Levinson, who made The Natural. Half of his movies are about TV in some way, and it's such a huge character in his films. Phil Alden Robinson and John Sayles, these people grew up in the era of television, and that changed the way baseball movies looked. Major League looked more like a TV broadcast than any baseball movie ever had before. I contend that the shift toward verisimilitude in making sure the players really passed as athletes also come from the fact that these players grew up with a visual understanding of the game. Looking at close-ups of players as opposed to watching them from the stands, that's why we needed guys who looked like Kevin Costner and Robert Redford did. I think the influence of television changed the visual components of baseball film far more than anything.
How much does it — or should it — matter that the actors look really convincing in their play?
I always notice it when they don't, and it does take me out of the movie for a second. If the movie's good and the drama is good, it really doesn't matter because they're pretty good at faking it these days. This goes all the way back to The Pride of the Yankees when they cast Gary Cooper who knew nothing about baseball in playing like the most revered baseball player of all time. I thought it was so interesting to discover that his training was a story in the lead-up to the movie. They had to get a professional to teach him how to play, and there were all these stories written about it. One of the big points of intrigue for The Pride of the Yankees was if he going to be able to approximate Lou Gehrig in this movie.
It's always good for drama to see whether these guys can do it or not, but I think we've reached the point where it is just expected. If an actor can't look like a professional athlete, it's a huge demerit. Especially in our age when we have fact-checkers, we just expect a certain level of accuracy from biographical films ... and even non-biographical films. There are ways around it; I thought Mr. 3000 was pretty interesting because Bernie Mac obviously didn't look like a professional baseball player, but he was supposed to be a retired player coming back to the game when he was out of shape and far past his prime. But I think it's tougher and tougher. If you throw somebody out there who really can't hack it, I think the movie would get pilloried by the press and by baseball.
For me, there's a gray area in which I'm willing to suspend some disbelief. I think Fincher has some quote about whenever you're really noticing the small details and nitpicking it, it means that you're not invested in the story. So long as it's not glaringly obvious, I'm willing to cut it a little bit of slack.
Totally, and sometimes you'll notice stuff on a third, fourth, or fifth viewing, and that's fine. That's going to happen. I think A League of Their Own is an interesting example, too, because most of the actors in that movie are not great [at playing baseball]. They do a lot of tricks to make it look like they're hitting the ball really far or throwing faster than they are, but the drama is so strong that it doesn't matter. They did something really smart during the tryout montage, which I think is one of the best baseball montages in a movie, they're clearly using people who are real athletes and not actors for a lot of those sequences. They pepper in Lori Petty and Geena Davis so it looks like they can hang with them, but they're using real athletes, and that sticks in your mind that these people can play.
What's the last baseball movie you've seen that's done something visually interesting in terms of pushing the form on how the action is shown?
Moneyball is not a movie about the baseball field, that's secondary. But the scenes that they do show of baseball during the streak — when they show the players adapting to Billy Beane's philosophy, taking walks and everything — I don't quite know how to describe it, but it looks different than any other baseball movie. It reminds me a little bit of the final scene of The Natural; there's a lot of high contrast, shadows, and bright lights stuff. But I thought that was really unique, and it captured the uniqueness of the ideas of the movie.
I will also cite 42. I wrote a lot about Jackie Robinson in this book and how no movie really quite captured who he was as a person, how complicated he was, and how disruptive he was in a good way. But I do think the scenes of him on the base paths in 42 are really dynamic, and they capture not just how fast he was but how uncomfortable he made opposing players. That's not something I've really seen in any movie before, and I think it's particularly poignant in a Jackie Robinson movie because that disruption that he caused on the base paths is a great metaphor for the disruption his presence served in broader society. I thought that was extremely well done.
I don't think we're lacking necessarily for Jackie Robinson content, but it does feel like 42 especially is very much the Obama-era version of his story. I do feel like we need a post-2020 version of that story that is willing to get into the knottiness of his character. I want to see the unmade Jackie Robinson movie that Spike Lee was working on that you cite in the book!
Heck yeah, SO badly. It's his anger that is missing in those movies. We don't see it at all in the first movie, The Jackie Robinson Story. We don't see it in the HBO movie, Soul of the Game. We see it a little bit in the TV movie, The Court Martial of Jackie Robinson, mostly just because Andre Braugher is so good. It's not really in the script, but he's so good at controlled rage. In 42, we see the one scene after the Phillies manager, Ben Chapman, is just hurling racial insults at him, he goes into the dugout and slams his bat against the wall. But as I write in the book, even in that scene, we're looking at him from a distance and watching his rage from afar. He's backlit, and it's almost like he's a Christ figure. He's not human to me in that scene.
But his anger is such an important part of who he is. He was angry. He wasn't this anomalous unicorn of like restraint. He was holding back, and he was mad about what was happening to him. Who wouldn't be? The Jackie Robinson films of the past, including 42, never got into that because they wanted to use him as an example of restraint and nonviolent resistance. But, as you point out, that's not the era we live in now. We're in an era now where we want to understand black rage and how racism impacts people. We don't just want to say, "Let's just move everybody forward. We don't have to dig into this stuff."
Spike Lee's script really did that. As I point out in the book, there's a sequence in there where Spike Lee allows Robinson to get angry. It's a fantasy sequence where instead of going into the dugout to smash his bat against the wall, he goes into the Phillies dugout and smashes his bat against all the racists on that team. It's almost like a Tarantino-style revenge sequence. Something like that would be great, but we do need something more. Even 42 felt anachronistic to me. It's an Obama-era movie, yes, but it also doesn't change very much from The Jackie Robinson Story we saw in 1950. That's just really weird: to have 60 years go by and be basically telling the same version of that story.
Jackie Robinson supported Nixon in the '60s and took a very conservative turn. Given the way Spike Lee handled Delroy Lindo's character in Da 5 Bloods who goes MAGA with respect, I think he could do a good job portraying that as well.
Sadly, he's probably the only Black filmmaker who can get into those complexities with a big-budget movie right now. Maybe someone like Barry Jenkins could, but Spike Lee has shown an interest in that sort of thing. I criticized 42's focus on capitalism as a driver of social change, but Jackie Robinson really believed that, too. He believed the only reason that his teammates came around on him was because they saw he could help them win and get their World Series bonus.
When you look at his post-playing career, he wanted to be on the boards of companies. He wanted to be on the board of a bank. He supported Nixon as many other black Americans did because he trusted him. Did he come to regret it? Sort of. He clashed with Black activists and nationalists in the '60s, as many men of his generation did as well. There's a real story to be told there that is not just the Jackie Robinson story but the story of his generation of Black Americans. I don't think we've seen that on film before.
Do you think we’re overdue for a Negro Leagues narrative, not just a documentary like Stanley Nelson’s excellent documentary The League? More people are watching non-fiction cinema now, but it still doesn't penetrate the culture in the same way.
I didn't think that movie really hit with the public, but I agree, I thought it was very good and corrected a lot of false narratives about the Negro Leagues. It exposed a lot of things that we needed to hear. One of the great joys of writing this book was learning about the Negro Leagues for those Jackie Robinson chapters. The bittersweet nature of integration in baseball is that it destroyed the Negro Leagues, and these Black cultural centers just disappeared when black players started entering the majors. That's a fascinating contradiction that I would love to see explored more.
I do think we're overdue for something like that. There are all these great stories and incredible characters from the Negro Leagues. I mean, I think we're overdue for a LOT of great baseball movies because we're not getting very many these days. That little league movie with Luke Wilson and Greg Kinnear that just came out, I'm gonna have to drag myself to see that. That's not the kind of baseball movie that I really want to see.
Based on how movies adapt to the state of the game, what do you expect will define the pitch clock era?
The pitch clock, to me, makes the baseball movie a little more difficult. For example, For Love of the Game is not one of my favorite baseball movies, but it has that incredible scene at the end with the last bat of Billy Chapel's perfect game. In the book, I time how many seconds there are in between each pitch. Between the second and third pitches, there are over 60 seconds. It gives you time for Billy Chapel to look around and take in the moment. It gives you time for Vin Scully to wax poetic, which ... is there anything better?
Obviously in cinema, you can expand time and cheat a little bit, but the rhythms of the game are different now. I don't think they lend themselves as much to cinema as they used to, or at least not the kind of baseball cinema that I love. Baseball's supposed to be a contemplative game, and I think that's part of why it lends itself well to film. I think the next great baseball movie is going to be a gambling movie because the thrill and the excitement of gambling are what baseball is looking for right now. That's what the pitch clock is all about, trying to make it more exciting.
You point out that Moneyball ushered in a new era of baseball movies that was more focused on the fans than the players. Thinking about what's happened since 2011, the widespread adoption of sports gambling does mean we're probably overdue for the Uncut Gems of baseball.
That would be great! I would watch that. I don't gamble, and I don't love what gambling has done to the game, to be honest with you. I sat next to some kids at a Yankee game last month, and they were just living and dying with random things happening in the game. They were shouting obscenities after a walk in the fourth inning, and it was clearly because they had money on some prop bet or something like that. It was a bummer; I didn't like sitting next to those guys. That's not a vibe I go to when I want a game.
I don't love the influence of gambling, but it's clearly here to stay. Baseball needs to reckon with it, and I think the baseball movie could reckon with it too. Gambling has been part of baseball since the beginning. It's been controversial since the beginning. There's a real history there, so there's probably a way to do it that honors the history of the game and tells us something about what's happening now.
The flip side of this equation is looking at the players and their economics, which fascinated me in the book. I didn't know that even Babe Ruth would take entertainment jobs in the off-season because they didn't make enough money from the game. Do you see anything about player compensation that might factor into the movies?
The labor negotiations are pretty interesting stories. I think there could be a great movie made about Curt Flood and his efforts to bring free agency to baseball. Strikes are not something baseball players really want to think about very much, so I don't see baseball movies being made there. I do think the compensation players are getting — which obviously I support, they deserve their share of the profits — makes them a little less relatable as protagonists. It's a little hard to follow a guy making $30 million a year and have him be an everyman. For blockbuster movies, we do need relatable characters to be in them. If you're making an art house movie about a millionaire player, delve into those complications. I'm all about that. But in terms of the classic baseball movie, it's a little harder. If you look at the Major League or something like that, those guys were underdogs. They weren't millionaires; they were working-class guys. There aren't too many working-class guys left in baseball, so it's a little tricky.
Do you see links between the decline in mass-appeal baseball stars and mass-market movie stars as driving similar declines in fortune for both activities? In the book’s Twilight aside, you talk about superhero movies dooming baseball movies because no athlete could rival these characters … is there something internal in baseball that is their MCU?
Movies have to be big. They have to have international appeal, which definitely is a problem for baseball movies. Historically, they've performed very badly overseas. Baseball movies fall into that category of the mid-budget movie that we just don't get much of from the studios anymore. They're not Oscar movies, so they're not going to fall into that lane. They're not blockbusters, for the most part. (I don't think anyone thought Field of Dreams was going to be a blockbuster; it just sort of happened.) They also rely on movie stars to a large degree. Moneyball and Field of Dreams are two of the only baseball movies to make much money overseas, and I'm pretty sure that's because they had Brad Pitt and Kevin Costner on the poster. We don't really have that kind of movie star anymore, so there are so many things working against it ... not to mention our shorter attention spans, which have affected both baseball and movies.
It's a tough time right now, but I do think there are signs of a comeback. I think the presence of baseball in non-baseball movies has been increasing. For example, in Night Swim, that character did not need to be a baseball player. It could have been any sport. He could have been an NFL player, and it probably would have been more popular. But, for some reason, they made him a baseball player. There's a surprisingly large amount of baseball talk in that movie.
I know Darren Aronofsky's next movie is going to be about a retired Major League Baseball player, and reportedly, the new Superman movie is going to have some baseball stuff in it. There was a shot at a stadium where they had redone it to be the fictional Metropolis baseball team, and that seems like a really big deal to me. It wouldn't surprise me if MLB had some sort of product placement deal behind the scenes with the studios, because I do feel like it's cropping up more and more. I don't know if it's going to lead to a full baseball movie renaissance, but it does seem like we're inching toward at least one more really good baseball movie.
You mentioned the more limited international appeal of baseball, which reminds me of how 2009's Sugar stands largely alone in looking at the extractive nature of baseball outside the States. What do you make, then, of baseball coming back to the Olympics in 2028?
I think an Olympic baseball movie could be great. As I mentioned in the book, I think a World Baseball Classic movie could be great. Ellen Adair, a friend of mine who writes about baseball and has a podcast about baseball movies called Take Me into the Ball Game, made the point after reading my book that she thinks the baseball movie is strongest when we believe in the American dream. Part of the reason there haven't been a lot of baseball movies in the last decade is because the American Dream is not popular right now. Faith in that is very low, and I don't know when that will be returning. My hunch is not anytime soon.
The future for the baseball movie probably lies outside of the U.S. That's my take on the World Baseball Classic movie: let's internationalize the baseball movie. Sugar did it on a small budget and with not much of an audience, although that movie has gained a cult following in recent years. For baseball, obviously, we have Japan, we have Korea, and it's starting to become popular in Great Britain and a lot of other places due to the World Baseball Classic. I think there's a real opportunity here to make the baseball movie not an American artifact but a global artifact. And I think that would open up all kinds of opportunities, storytelling opportunities, yeah,
We're talking in the afterglow of the DNC where the Democrats are trying to reclaim patriotism and American identity. If we don't have another Trump term, I'll be curious to see if any of that triumphalist national language becomes something adopted by a broader swath rather than just the ultra-conservatives complaining about the book.
And if it is, Hollywood will be all over it, I'm sure. And a baseball movie, maybe even an old-school classic, will be on the docket. For no other reason, let's hope for that.
Back next week with a little something to round out Hispanic Heritage Month (which is admittedly long overdue and delayed thanks to the fall festival season).
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall