Baseball in the Movies
(and Television)

Baseball Cinema: The canonical works

Any organized religion or belief system has at its core a certain set of commonly accepted literary and artistic works that serve to convey a sense of the Ideal World in terms that average human beings can understand. Baseball is no different. Over the course of many decades, the most common media in which the stories of heroism and virtue are conveyed has gradually changed from written text to music to the cinema.

NOTE: The image on the right is from the final scene of the movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner.

It is interesting to observe that movies about baseball have proved far more successful than movies about football. Football games just do not carry the kind of riveting, nail-biting drama that baseball games do. Baseball's long descent into mediocrity and insignificance which began in the 1960s (Vietnam!) may well have been halted in the late 1980s (fall of the Berlin Wall!) by the release of several remarkable motion pictures, listed below. Hollywood to the Rescue! It is hard to film motion pictures in real major league stadiums in northern latitudes because all the production apparatus would disrupt the real games. As a result, substitute stadiums are often used, with varying degrees of success in terms of authenticity. NOTE: Only movies with an explicit baseball theme are listed below, but other movies are referenced on the respective stadium pages.

SOURCES: Baseball Almanac.com: Movies ~ , Internet Movie Database

Baseball on Television

Baseball games were first broadcast on a commercial basis in the late 1940s, and TV has become an integral part of the business of baseball. Since the days of Leave It to Beaver in the 1950s, baseball has often been a topic on family oriented television shows, but there have been few fictional programs devoted primarily to baseball. Growing appreciation of baseball by intellectuals was manifested by Ken Burns' historical documentary series broadcast on PBS in 1994, just when the sport itself hit rock bottom.