Noah Gittell, "Baseball: The Movie" (SportsLit fan notes)
Gittell explains baseball flicks are a "perfect reflection of America at the time that it's made," the need to get the genre out of its 10-year slump, and what is "cinematic" about the New York Mets.
Scheduled doubleheaders and 270-inning pitcher workloads may be unlikely to return — but Noah Gittell knows the baseball movie is due for a Hollywood comeback.
Since learning about Baseball: The Movie via Craig Calcaterra’s Cup of Coffee newsletter, I was excited to read the book and chat with the author. On review, Gittell squares up his idea of writing a definitive history of baseball movies and uncovering what they uncover.
“I cooked up that the baseball movie is this sort of perfect reflection of American values at the time it’s made,” Gittell says in the newest episode of SportsLit (linked below).
“Baseball is the national game (and) baseball and movies were the dominant form of leisure, at least in the first half of the 20th century.”
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Gittell divides baseball movie-making into eras in Baseball: The Movie (Triumph Books, May 14). It has ebbed and flowed, à la the rhythms of the (too long) 162-game season. Hollywood did green-light baseball movies more steadily in the 1940s and ’80s.
The last 10 to 12 years have been, per Gittell, a “fallow period.” It has been over a decade since you could see Chadwick Boseman inhabit a version of Jackie Robinson in 42 (2013) or see “BillyBrad” in the film adaptation of Moneyball (2011).
At the same time, Major League Baseball under Commissioner Rob Manfred carries on like it is playing some nine-dimensional chess with an endgame of pushing away the public. Access and exposure to the TV product are in major flux. The Oakland Athletics are on an escalator to nowhere, and about six other teams are rumbling about relocating. Most teams seem more focused on chasing luxury dollars than a winning legacy. The irony is that year-over-year attendance is up from last season.
Back in the day, flicks of the bat-and-ball game helped seal in some Seamhead sensitivities. Baseball, after all, is “a storyteller’s game (where) for many people, there is a lot of their story wrapped up in it.”1
And as Gittell notes, the genre's classics took people to places that a telecast could or would not.
“I love baseball movies, and I miss baseball movies, but I think baseball needs baseball movies too,” he says. “When you grow up watching the game, all you see is what’s on the screen — at least when we (adults now in their 40s) were kids, before athletes all had social media… And baseball movies really helped fill in the gaps. Who are these people? How do they think? What do they talk about in the dugout, at a conference on the mound? What goes on in the locker room? Or on the bus? And for me, that really helped me fill out my fandom, and complete my fandom.
“The baseball movie has a chance to give an unvarnished look at what goes on in these players’ minds.”
Bio-wise, writing by Gittell has graced The Atlantic, The Economist, Elle, Esquire, The Guardian, GQ, and the LA Review of Books. He also keeps up a Substack, Good Eye: Movies and Baseball.
The conversation was recorded on May 6, and there was some commiseration. Gittell’s New York Mets and my Toronto Blue Jays each had a day off. At that stage, the Mets were a .471 ballclub, and the Jays were a .457 outfit, and both were already 7½ games adrift of the division pace-setter. Baseball fandom is not about winning.
“It’s a fantastic opportunity for self-reflection — if you choose to use it that way,” is how Gittell puts it.
Here are some fan notes for the episode.
Intro
2:45 The subtext for the intro is the future of media contracts and media exposure for MLB in a post-regional sports network world. As you might know, in 2023, the parent company of Bally Sports, which has ‘local’ broadcast rights to over 40 baseball, basketball, and hockey teams, declared bankruptcy. Now Comcast has dropped Bally, and around 12 teams’ telecasts are blacked out, leaving “hardcore fans frustrated and teams in somewhat of a panic.”2
Exclusivity sucks for fan culture. That’s all I know.
4:50 The second part of that George Carlin line: “Football begins in the fall… when everything is dying.”
8:00 “Lucky bastard”; The obvious thirsty reference to Glen Powell being a leading man alongside Sydney Sweeney is thirsty. G
ittell recently published another installment of his top 50 baseball movies. Everybody Wants Some!! made the top 20!
Also, if you pick up Baseball: The Movie, you will find out what real-life 1980s MLB outfielder gave Richard Linklater the model for the EWS!! character Glen McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin).
Interview
11:30 Sometimes leading with a hyper-specific question instead of something generalized is better. The leadoff batter has to do something, right, George Springer?
This is the decisive scene in A League Of Their Own that Gittell examines.
18:00 For context, Major League (1989) had a budget of around $27 million when adjusted for inflation. That is approximately 40 percent less than the Jennifer Lawrence-driven 2023 summer comedy No Hard Feelings.
18:45 Did I mention Parenthood mostly to enable sharing the scene where Steve Martin does a victory dance when his son’s Little League team gets their only win of the season? You bet. Did you do a parlay where you bet this movie coincidentally came out during a summer when my house league softball team also posted only one W all season?
You better have! Please gamble responsibility on my past.
21:00 Gittell posted an essay entitled, “A Fan’s Evolution,” on Good Eye: Movies And Baseball in April 2023. That was what I was referring to in my question about “mood regulation.”
The Blue Jays game I refer to was an 11-8 loss against the Washington Nationals on May 5.
25:00 The Pride of the Yankees was released in theatres in the summer of 1942, less than a year after the United States joined the Second World War following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.3 I have only seen it once, at least 25 years ago.
Lou Gehrig was a first-generation German-American, too, so the golden opportunity for symbolism was obvious.
30:00 Must quote the pitching coach from the mound conference scene in Bull Durham: “Candlesticks always make a nice gift, and uh, maybe you could find out where she's registered and maybe a place-setting or maybe a silverware pattern. Okay, let's get two!”
32:40 Gittell refers to three different movies made about Jackie Robinson. Robinson played himself in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950). A young Andre Braugher starred in The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson (1990). Most recently, there was the film 42 (2013), starring Chadwick Boseman alongside Harrison Ford portraying Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey.
Regarding Robinson’s court-martial, you should watch this clip from a PBS doc that double-underlines the guts he showed to refuse segregationist behaviour. Content warning: it includes the most notorious anti-Black racist slurs, along with the F-word.
35:00 Better later than never, Major League Baseball is recognizing the institutions of Black baseball. In 2020, it retroactively conferred major-league status on several circuits, teams, and players from 1920 to ’48. Numbers — glorious numbers! — to fill out the narratives.
And, following the concept of the Field of Dreams game, MLB is staging a Tribute To Negros League game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., on Juneteenth weekend. Willie Mays played there, and he’s the oldest living Hall of Famer at 93 years old, so it is good that MLB did not wait much longer.
42:50 An obvious contrast to the casual misogyny of Major League is how its obvious source material, Slap Shot (1977), treats dynamic female characters.
Absentee governor Anita McCambridge gets her way and folds the Charlestown team for a tax-writeoff. Lily Braden reconciles with Ned Braden after he takes off his clothes in public. It is hinted that Francine Dunlop has finally left Reggie Dunlop in the ditch of life.
49:00 Fortunately, the “situations and tendencies” scene from Little Big League has been uploaded to YouTube.
The line from the late great Earl Weaver that I had taken to heart: “If you play for one run, that’s all you’ll get.”
53:00 Timeline clarity. Dazed and Confused is set in 1976. I was born in ’77. The film was released in ’93. I saw it for the first time in ’95 while I was in Grade 12.
Gittell, in 2016, reviewed Everybody Wants Some!! for The Guardian.
(The film) expands its socially inclusive ethos into something resembling a potent, anti-partisan political statement. It’s a redefinition of the tribalism that has dominated our political discourse in recent years, embracing humanity’s tendency towards self-sorting but refuting the notion of a tribe as a closed system. Ultimately, it offers a zen-like frat bro philosophy, suggesting that the best way to have a good time is to spend time with people of different beliefs and interests. (Noah Gittell, April 6, 2016)
If I had known of his review, I would not have bothered writing a post about the movie in 2023.
The setting of Everybody Wants Some!! and the timing of its release is hella cryptic. The story is set about two months before the disastrous 1980 U.S. presidential election. It was released in the spring of 2016, just over six months before an even more disastrous U.S. presidential election. I refuse to believe that is a coincidence.
59:30 Gittell is referring to the showdown between then-MLB teammates Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout that was the climax of the 2023 World Baseball Classic. Ohtani struck out Trout to seal the championship for Japan against the United States.
And, of course, now Ohtani is a batter-only with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Trout is injured, because we cannot have the nicest things.
60:00 On April 26, Noah published an essay, “My Week as a Phillies Fan.”
Could I wear an officially licensed hat of one of the Blue Jays’ AL East counterparts? Hell to the hard no. There was a stretch around the end of the ’90s where I rocked a Boston Red Sox hat in protest of the Jays doing a uniform remodel with a cartoon-ey bird logo.
~65:00 Some belated context to Gittell’s note that the Mets “are a very cinematic team.”
The franchise, after all, is the child of a shotgun marriage. The Mets were birthed in a 1962 expansion so the National League could have a New York team to replace the Dodgers and Giants, quash Rickey’s proposed Continental League, and stop the United States Congress from saber-rattling about baseball’s antitrust exemption.
In terms of celebs living and dead among the fanbase, well, Google can cover that. But TIL the NY Mets were Robin Williams’s favourite squadron.
As a Blue Jays fan, all Canadian celebs who appear in listicles about the team’s famous fans are suspect — with a few exceptions:
Avril Lavigne, since she and I have the same hometown;
Geddy Lee, it goes without saying, due to the RUSH frontman’s donations to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City;
Eugene Levy and Dan Levy; since Eugene is One of Hamilton’s Great Ones;
Simu Liu, since the actor lived in Kingston for a spell as a child.
Previously on SportsLit
A baseball book was covered three episodes ago. Keith O’Brien discussed Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, And The Last Glory Days of Baseball. It was a thrill to talk with an author the day his book reached The New York Times best-seller list.
Our other sports movie-centric ’sode was with Jonathon Jackson in 2023, discussing The Making of Slap Shot: Behind The Scenes of the Greatest Hockey Movie Ever Made, Revised 46th Anniversary Edition.
The talk with Noah Gittell about Hollywood’s reductionism of Jackie Robinson stirred the echoes, so to speak, of what Howard Bryant has imparted through his work. Bryant appeared on the show in ’22 to chat regarding Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original.
Bryant also won a Casey Award for his first book, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston. It includes a chapter about the ill-fated tryout the Boston Red Sox — Bryant’s hometown ballclub — gave to Jackie Robinson, Sam Jethroe4, and Marvin Williams, in May 1945. Robinson later commented, “Not for one minute did we believe the tryout was sincere.”
And, another episode with a bit of baseball was in the first season. Stacey May Fowles was co-editor of the inaugural Best Canadian Sports Writing, but the conversation swung around to her book Baseball Life Advice.
Fowles was a gamer. It was not mentioned to us that Fowles, the third-ever guest, was well into her third trimester with her first child. We used an edit suite at the Toronto Reference Library to record, and Fowles gamely sat on a hard-backed plastic chair for nearly one hour.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
April 24-May 16, 2024
Hamilton, Ont.
Russell A. Carleton, The New Ballgame, pg. 219.
Dan Wetzel, “The great debate for every sports league and team in America: maximum profits or maximum exposure?” Yahoo! Sports, May 9, 2024.
My maternal grandfather, John Clarence Head (1922-1993), had deployed to Europe about a year earlier with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
In 1950, Jethroe became the first Black player for the Boston NL club (later Milwaukee, now Atlanta). Jethroe led the National League in stolen bases in his first two seasons in integrated ball.
The Red Sox did not integrate until 1959.