It’s that time of year again. The scent of artificial pumpkin spice. The air is a little cooler (dipping to the low 60’s in LA). Pumpkin patches abound with Christmas trees looming close by.
It’s October. And until Halloween, it only means one thing; post-season baseball.
There is a lot of real-life drama already underway in the playoffs right now.
But even for the casual or non-fans among us (whoever you may be), we can’t deny baseball movies occupy an interesting spot in our collective consciousness. A mini-genre onto itself, the baseball movie can take many forms. Through these films we experience drama, comedy, inspiration, tragedy, and everything in between. It’s a mirror of the same wild swing of emotions the sport itself offers.
So in honor of the joy and sorrow of October baseball, let’s celebrate the best films out there.
And what better way to celebrate baseball movies than by making them compete against each other using nothing but stats?
So here we go.
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The first problem that arises when trying to identify the best baseball films is that there are a lot more than you might think. For example, a quick search for the plot keyword baseball in IMDB returns 604 titles. Some of these are your old reliables like Field Of Dreams or Major League. While others that appear are Anchorman and Falling Down I supposed because the protagonist is known to hold a baseball bat?
But the egregious outliers aside, there are many other quality baseball movies worth taking a look at and some that might not immediately come to mind.
The next problem is that a simple search of “best baseball movies” on Google returns hundreds of thousands of results.
To help us cut down the options we’re going to index everything against 15 lists that aim to highlight the most notable (not always “best”) of the category. The lists were selected first based on their popularity as determined by Google and then by prioritizing a good mix of view points. The sources for this master list include publications like The New York Times, Vulture, Variety, and Paste as well as some more baseball-centric outlets like Baseball Almanac and MLB.
The total volume of each list varies but in aggregate represents 223 possible spots for the top movies. Only 68 films occupy those 223 spots with varying degrees of frequency. This feels like a good number for optionality while confirming the inevitable overlap of some of the more consistently beloved titles. Also, some of the selections made from the source lists include movies that feature baseball a bit more in the periphery or backstory, however, those seemed like good ones to include for a nice well-rounded menu.
The top ten films with the most appearances on these lists are:
A League of Their Own
The Bad News Bears
Field of Dreams
The Natural
Bull Durham
Major League
Moneyball
The Sandlot
Eight Men Out
42
I bet even this condensed list could be the source of some healthy debate, so how do we crown the champions with 58 titles also hanging in right behind them? Let’s break out the scorecard.
We are going to rank each title on seven distinct metrics and then apply a consistent score based on that rank in each category. The sum of those seven ranking scores for each title will be the film’s total. The ranking metrics are as follows with the corresponding weighting for points awarded:
The number of appearances on our index lists. (1)
Total award nominations. (1)
Total award wins. (2)
Oscar/Emmy award wins. (2.5)
Total Box Office (adjusted for inflation). (1)
Blended score (Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes). (1)
Isolated IMDB score. (1.5)
That last one is important for lists like this because the IMDB score is a user-generated metric. I thought given the wide spectrum of subjectivity in this category, it would be good to add a little more weight to that score.
This mix and weighting of scores is also meant to acknowledge the variety of formats and distribution across the whole list. Some films were released theatrically, others were not. So while a film meant for television would obviously lack box office data, it could make up for it in other areas. I believe the final rankings show this was effective.
So let’s look at the results. According to our scoring system, here are the top 15 baseball movies of all time.
Moneyball
61*
Ken Burns’s Baseball
Pride of the Yankees
The Stratton Story
A League of Their Own
Field of Dreams
Bull Durham
The Bad News Bears
The Natural
42
The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg
Major League
The Rookie
The Sandlot
Except for The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, all of these top films are available to stream on various services. Here’s the breakdown of the top platforms to find all the films on our master list.
Check out the full film menu for those details.
I’m a huge baseball and movie fan and I’m even seeing some intriguing titles on here that I’ve never seen. In fact, there are 4 of them on the top 15 list I need to check out.
To close out, some honorable mentions/field notes:
Just missing out on the top 15 is the 2009 film Sugar which I highly recommend if you have not yet seen it.
A League Of Their Own is the most commercially successful baseball film of all time (664 on the all time box office list). When we adjust our whole baseball list for current inflation, it still blows away all competition beating the number two spot (Bad News Bears) by nearly 50%.
The breakdown of years for this list of 68 films is interesting and provides a bit of a surprising view of the most prolific decades for the best baseball films. I would not have imagined the 2010’s would be on par with the 80’s and 90’s but that certainly looks to be the case as you can see here. A conspicuously missing decade is the 60’s which offered us no movies that make the list.
Well I’ve got my homework cut out for me to catch up on some of the statistical greats. As always, I hope you find some old favorites and new things to watch on this week’s menu.
For those with teams still in the fight, best of luck.