With the possible exception of boxing, no sport has ignited the imagination of cinema more than baseball. It’s uniquely suited for storytelling, examining team dynamics while revolving around baseball’s ultimate one-on-one showdown: pitcher versus hitter. Baseball fans love to argue over what the best baseball flick is, and I’m no exception. As a wee child, I briefly entertained the dream of becoming a big-league pitcher (only talent and skill held me back). With apologies to the much-beloved The Pride of the Yankees (1942)—about legendary New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig, who died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at age 37—it’s too maudlin for my taste, and Gary Cooper doesn’t pretend to be anyone but Gary Cooper.
10. 42 (2013 dir. Brian Helgeland)
In this biopic of Jackie Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, writer-director Brian Helgeland wears his hero worship proudly. And that’s OK. 42, the number Robinson wore as a Brooklyn Dodger, spotlights a historic and heroic story that Hollywood surprisingly neglected in the decades since Robinson played himself in The Jackie Robinson Story in 1950 . Chadwick Boseman gives a star-making performance as the gifted ballplayer whom Brooklyn general manager Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) recruits from the Negro Leagues for his “great experiment” of integrating baseball. Ford’s cragginess as Rickey occasionally lapses into caricature, but it fits the film’s endearing schmaltziness. A very different version might have emerged decades ago, as Spike Lee spent years trying to make the biopic with Denzel Washington as Robinson. But the actor passed, and the project languished.
9. The Natural (1984, dir. Barry Levinson)
Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel is significantly darker than its film adaptation, but 1980s Hollywood wasn’t in the mood for a downer. Barry Levinson and screenwriters Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry soften the edginess of The Natural to expound on baseball’s capacity for mythmaking. Robert Redford is Roy Hobbs, a preternaturally talented ballplayer who arrives on the scene armed with his own Excalibur: a bat he calls “Wonderboy,” carved from an oak tree struck by lightning. Redford’s performance is a bit one-note, but the sturdy supporting cast is bolstered by Robert Duvall as a crafty sportswriter, Wilford Brimley and Richard Farnsworth as manager and coach, and Glenn Close as Roy’s good and decent childhood sweetheart. The production earned Oscar nominations for Randy Newman’s score and Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography. Malamud himself was reportedly conflicted about The Natural’s crowd-pleaser of an ending—a big departure from the book—but it’s undeniably rousing and the essence of why audiences flock to sports movies.
8. Major League (1989, dir. David S. Ward)
As broad as Babe Ruth’s gut after a hot dog bender, only much funnier, Major League features the beleaguered Cleveland Indians and a scheming new owner intent on sabotaging the team in order to facilitate its relocation to Miami. Or some such nonsense. The plot is mostly an excuse to kick around the comic possibilities of familiar archetypes. Tom Berenger is a burned-out veteran catcher who never made good, Charlie Sheen is an ex-con fastballer with control issues both on and off the field, Dennis Haysbert is a voodoo-practicing power hitter, etc. You get the idea. Many of the gags work—especially the inimitable Bob Uecker as Indians broadcaster Harry Doyle (“Juuust a bit outside!”)—but there are some whiffs, too. David S. Ward’s comedy addresses each underdog character’s redemption in parallel, so that the inevitable championship game actually has emotional oomph to it. Major League isn’t a great movie—but sometimes peanuts and Cracker Jack are all you need.
7. Eephus (2025, dir. Carson Lund)
Carson Lund’s feature debut summons the spirit of Robert Altman in this wry ode to male bonding and baseball. The title references a rare variation of the curveball; the eephus is a pitch so slow, it lulls batters into forgetting to swing until it’s too late. That’s also a nifty metaphor for life, and Eephus is about life—midlife, to be exact—in all its ragged, cranky, oh-my-aching-back glory. In small-town Massachusetts in the 1990s, two recreation-league ballclubs square off on a baseball diamond soon to be demolished for commercial development. These men—some physically fit, some not, some young, some old—drink cheap beer, trash talk, and wax rhapsodically about herniated discs and whatever else is on their minds. The screenplay by Lund, Michael Basta, and Nate Fisher is endlessly quotable. “Is there anything more beautiful,” one character opines as the game creeps into the evening hours, “than the sun setting on a fat man stealing second base?” Short answer: no, there most certainly is not.
(See more in The 20 best hangout movies.)
6. Field of Dreams (1989, dir. Phil Alden Robinson)
How can a picture this mawkish be so gosh-darn fun? Just as something magical compels Field of Dreams’ Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) to construct a ballpark on his Iowa farm, so, too, does a benevolent spirit appear to guide this film. “If you build it, he will come,” a mysterious, disembodied voice tells Ray, a happily married farmer still harboring unresolved issues with his late father. Still, love of baseball served as a bond between father and son, and the game connects Ray to dad’s childhood hero when the Chicago White Sox’s long-dead Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) turns up on Ray’s ballfield. Phil Alden Robinson juggles a remarkable number of storylines—the 1919 White Sox team that threw the World Series, James Earl Jones as a reclusive writer once a leading voice of the 1960s, Burt Lancaster as elderly Dr. “Moonlight” Graham—that, by all rights, should have made Field of Dreams overstuffed and insufferable. Yet only the most cynical would dare resist. The Dyersville, Iowa, filming location became such a popular pilgrimage site for fans that Major League Baseball eventually built a working ballpark beside it and began staging regular-season games there. In other words, people came and so they built it, proving the inverse of the movie’s famous line to also be true.
5. Bull Durham (1988, dir. Ron Shelton)
Ron Shelton had long wanted to make a film drawing upon his five years playing minor-league ball with the Baltimore Orioles organization. It wasn’t until his would-be project attracted the interest of then-rising star Kevin Costner that a studio—Orion Pictures, in this case—was willing to play ball. The result was what Sports Illustrated crowned as the single greatest sports movie of all time. The groupies, the locker-room sexual escapades, the cheesy promotional stunts—much of Bull Durham comes from Shelton’s own experiences. At its center, however, is a love triangle among veteran catcher “Crash” Davis (Costner), poetry-reading Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), and up-and-coming pitching phenom “Nuke” LaLoosh (Tim Robbins). Bull Durham is a romantic comedy as much as it is a treatise on what Annie calls “the church of baseball.” Her opening monologue lays out her creed with the fervor of a sermon, touching on everything from the “sweet spot” on a bat to the virtue of a slow kiss, and it sets the tone for an Oscar-nominated screenplay that is more interested in ideas than in championship games.
4. Eight Men Out (1988, dir. John Sayles)
The “Black Sox” scandal is the stuff of infamy, when a cabal of gamblers bribed eight players of the American League champion Chicago White Sox into throwing the 1919 World Series. John Sayles’ Eight Men Out is a handsomely crafted depiction of Major League Baseball’s most notorious shame, but at its core is a story about athletes exploited by one group and seduced by another. More so than the players, Eight Men Out’s villain is White Sox owner Charles Comiskey (Clifton James), whose miserliness pushed his players into the clutches of gamblers. Sayles, who seems to be having fun playing sportswriter Ring Lardner, assembles a treasure trove of character actors—particularly Christopher Lloyd, Bill Irwin, Michael Rooker, and Don Harvey—but it is David Strathairn as star pitcher Eddie Cicotte and John Cusack as infielder “Buck” Weaver who lend the movie its melancholy soulfulness. Eight Men Out was released a year before Field of Dreams and received only a sliver of that film’s love, but it remains the tougher, clearer-eyed picture of what the game actually costs those who play it.
3. Sugar (2008, dir. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck)
Part of what makes Sugar a remarkable sports movie is that it isn’t a sports movie, at least not in the conventional sense. It’s about a baseball phenom—but that’s where the familiarity ends. Instead, Boden and Fleck tell the much more common story of a phenom who never quite makes it. The filmmakers auditioned hundreds before discovering Algenis Perez Soto when he was playing baseball with friends. He is outstanding here as Miguel “Sugar” Santos, who lands a spot with a farm club for the fictional Kansas City Knights. After his pitching falters, however, Sugar quietly walks away from the game altogether, resurfacing in New York City among other ex-prospects who have likewise abandoned professional ball. Boden and Fleck’s naturalism and rejection of sentimentality—they cast nonprofessional Dominican players for greater authenticity—offer a window on the experience of being an immigrant, one alienated within a system that hopes to monetize his talents while simultaneously keeping him at arm’s length.
2. The Bad News Bears (1976, dir. Michael Ritchie)
The first movie to obsess me as a kid was this comedy of a monumentally awful Little League team that perseveres under the dubious coaching of a broken-down alcoholic. Part of my affection for The Bad News Bears was due to my love for baseball, and maybe a wild childhood crush on co-star Tatum O’Neal had something to do with it, too. The movie is so unabashedly honest about adolescence as to be revelatory—the bullying, the casual racism, the yearning both to fit in and disappear into the crowd. Screenwriter Bill Lancaster (son of Burt) had its pint-sized characters talk like real kids, F-bombs and all. Now, many moons later, I can appreciate elements that sailed over the head of preteen me, particularly its razor-sharp satire of competition and its capacity to inspire and corrupt. It’s a theme that fascinated director Michael Ritchie, who explored similar ground in Downhill Racer (1969), The Candidate (1972), and Smile (1975). Walter Matthau is pitch-perfect as the boozing coach, the gloriously named Morris Buttermaker, but the real stars are the child actors. Not even a pair of mediocre sequels and Richard Linklater’s superfluous 2005 remake can tarnish the luster of the film I saw eight times at the theater while the rest of the country was preparing for Bicentennial stuff.
1. Moneyball (2011, dir. Bennett Miller)
Moneyball posits what might sound obvious but seemed fairly revolutionary in the early 2000s: baseball games are won by runs, not star players. That is the deceptively simple premise behind this fictionalized account of the Oakland Athletics’ extraordinary 20-game winning streak in 2002, one of the sport’s defining modern achievements. Based on Michael Lewis’ nonfiction bestseller, it details how A’s General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and Ivy League-educated numbers-cruncher Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) compensated for the ballclub’s limited budget and resources by embracing sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of baseball popularized by writer and analyst Bill James. “Billy, of the 20,000 knowable players for us to consider, I believe that there is a championship team of 25 people that we can afford,” Billy is instructed by Peter (Paul DePodesta in real life). “Because everyone else in baseball undervalues them, like an island of misfit toys.” Director Bennett Miller had no interest in making a traditional baseball flick. Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant, incisive script probes the dichotomy between baseball as sport versus business, intuition versus examination. In so doing, Moneyball demystifies the game while still romanticizing it, albeit in a grownup way. Pitt and Hill are in top form, and the score by Mychael Danna is understated but stirring. Moneyball’s six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, were the most for a baseball movie since 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees collected 11—the very film this list opened by benching.
Honorable mention: Bang the Drum Slowly (1973, dir. John D. Hancock), Big Leaguer (1953, dir. Robert Aldrich), The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976, dir. John Badham), Everybody Wants Some!! (2016, dir. Richard Linklater), Fear Strikes Out (1957, dir. Robert Mulligan), A League of Their Own (1992, dir. Penny Marshall), No No: A Dockumentary (2014, dir. Jeffrey Radice), The Rookie (2002, dir. John Lee Hancock), The Sandlot (1993, dir. David Mickey Evans), 61* (2001, dir. Billy Crystal)
