14 Best Baseball Movies for People Who Don’t Care About Baseball
“Everyone loves baseball,” my aunt once told me. I don’t know about it. A lot of people really like baseball, but I think she was misled about the sport’s ability to win over any audience. What can be said with certainty is that baseball is inextricably linked to American history, especially in the 20th century. If his grip on us has waned a bit, we can still look back at the history of the sport and see a reflection of everything that happened in the wider culture during those decades.
The same is true for baseball films. There have been many hundreds of them over the last century—the genre is nearly as old as the film itself—but many of them are forgettable niche films best viewed by audiences already in love with the sport. That’s fine (many people really love baseball), but there’s also something to be said for films that don’t preach to the already converted. The very best baseball movies appeal to a somewhat broader audience, appealing to those of us who… have a limited interest in watching a real baseball game, but who would definitely watch a movie if it’s about a bunch of promiscuous underdogs trying to prove once and for all everything that they are not losers. Or if Madonna plays in it. Or there are ghosts. In honor of Opening Day, here are 14 films that go beyond the baseball diamond to appeal to viewers who can’t tell the difference between an earned run and an assist. Some of them might even make you think about watching the real game.