Alexander: Behold, the vanishing baseball movie

The 1980s and early ’90s may have been the glory years of baseball as portrayed/immortalized on the big screen. A genre that hadn’t been taken very seriously, or more to the point had been depicted haphazardly in the era before Technicolor, all of a sudden had become popular fodder for the imagination industry.

There were “The Natural,” “Bull Durham,” “Field of Dreams,” “Eight Men Out,” “Major League,” “A League Of Their Own,” “The Sandlot” … all the way up to “Moneyball” and “42″ in this century. The game itself, with its dramatic confrontations between pitcher and hitter and enough time between pitches to properly digest the stakes, would seem to be the perfect vehicle to explore greater themes, some of them even rated PG.

Were those movies that we saw in the cineplex really as good as we remember? Would they hold up to scrutiny all these years later? And did we in fact become spoiled by the idea that the real game is now in our living rooms every night? The TV techniques and camera angles not only take us onto the field and into the dugout but allow us to become unofficial umpiring critics (and most nights there’s a lot to criticize). Maybe there’s enough drama in real time – especially once we know more about the players off the field – to make the cinema version pale in comparison.

So a look back seems appropriate, as the genre appears to have dried up. Noah Gittell, film critic and baseball guy, did a deep dive into the relationship between baseball and cinema and the result is “Baseball: The Movie” (Triumph Books, 2024), a history of baseball movies in 276 pages that’s, well, equal parts nostalgia and criticism.

“Mostly very positive,” Gittell said of the response to the book, which was released in early May, during a Zoom interview.

Then he added:

“Some people have been unhappy that I massacred a couple of sacred cows in the book. But honestly, that’s why I wrote it. Baseball movies are nostalgic artifacts, you know? And to me, nostalgia is nice, but it can be also very pernicious. And I wanted people to look at these films that we’ve loved, many of them since childhood … through clear eyes, and that can be unpleasant for some people. So I’ve had a few people who have been angry at it a little bit. But most people have really loved it and said it was challenging and celebratory.”

I won’t spoil too much of the narrative, but let’s just say, for example, that Cubs fans might have reason to bristle at the narrative of “Rookie of the Year,” which was released in 1993, even beyond the improbability of a Little Leaguer breaking his arm and through that trauma developing a 100-mph fastball and a ticket to the majors. That’s implausible enough, but try to grasp the idea that the Cubs – the one team in major league baseball whose ability to draw people into the ballpark historically has had little to do with wins and losses – would desperately need the kid pitcher to draw fans and avoid the poorhouse.

“If I were a Cubs fan, I’d actually be a little insulted by that, to be portrayed as fairweather fans when their whole identity is based on the fact that they show up, win or lose,” said Gittell (who, in fact, is a Mets fan).

Then there’s “Moneyball,” the Brad Pitt vehicle released in 2011 and based on Michael Lewis’ 2004 book on the Billy Beane-constructed Oakland A’s. And never mind that, especially in the movie, Beane’s low-budget acquisitions to help the A’s to the AL West title were emphasized, and the contributions of pitchers Barry Zito, Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson, shortstop and American League MVP Miguel Tejada and slugging third baseman Eric Chavez were minimized.

(Angel fans, of course, have their own gripe, recalling which AL West team actually won the World Series that year.)

But the biggest complaints about “Moneyball” came from a source that, to be honest, shouldn’t be that surprising (and no, it’s not scouts).

“The group that hates “Moneyball” the movie the most are players,” Gittell said. “We’ve seen so many teams use Moneyball as an excuse to not pay players what they’re worth, to keep their payrolls lower. And that might have happened with or without the movie. But the movie is certainly a big, shining example of it.”

Gittell goes all the way back to “Pride of the Yankees,” the cinema portrayal of Lou Gehrig’s life released in 1942. It was made only over the objections of producer Samuel Goldwyn, who proclaimed, “It’s box office poison. If people want baseball, they go to the ballpark.”

The movie ultimately was up for 11 Academy Awards and is remembered mostly for its portrayal of Gehrig’s famous “luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech, but it had to work around star Gary Cooper’s own baseball ignorance. The earliest baseball movies, of the ’40s and ’50s, didn’t exactly lean into authenticity when it came to depicting the game on the field, but they could get away with it in the days before the game became a TV staple.

What drove Gittell to write about baseball movies in the first place?

“I wrote a book that I wanted to read, a book that didn’t exist yet,” he said. “I’ve loved baseball movies since I was a kid. I was very lucky to grow up in the great baseball movie boom of the ’80s and ’90s. I remember seeing “The Natural” when I was incredibly young. I didn’t get to see “Major League” or “Bull Durham” until I was a little older, but I knew about them and I was excited about them. My mother, to her credit, would not let me see them when I was eight years old.”

Movies can actually deepen one’s appreciation of the game, or as he put it, “support our fandom.”

“When I was a fan, a young fan, I … didn’t know anything about these players and who they were and what their hopes and dreams and fears and perversions were,” he said. “And the movies really showed me that. And so now when I watch a game, when I see a journeyman catcher bouncing back and forth between the majors and the minors, I think about Crash Davis (Kevin Costner’s character in “Bull Durham”), and I think, ‘Oh, that must be what it’s like to be that kind of guy.’ And that really deepens our love for the game. At least it did for me.”

As noted above, the conundrum is that the pipeline of great baseball flicks has dried up, although there is a Little League-themed story, “YOU GOTTA BELIEVE,” starring Luke Wilson and Greg Kinnear and scheduled to be released August 30.

The lack of baseball films partially reflects the sport’s level of popularity stateside, but a lot of it has to do with the industry’s reliance on foreign box office results. Baseball doesn’t translate successfully everywhere.

The solution Gittell offered – and I don’t think he’ll mind the spoiler toward the end of the book – is to produce a movie that is set at the World Baseball Classic.

So, aspiring screenwriters, here’s your assignment: Remember that Shohei Ohtani-Mike Trout pitcher-hitter confrontation at the very end of the 2023 WBC in Miami? How would you make that moment, either based on reality or as a scenario with fictional characters, the pivot point of a full-length movie?

jalexander@scng.com