10 Best Baseball Movies, Ranked

OK, Takeshi Kitano’s film isn’t really a baseball movie per se. But it does begin and end with a ballgame, while the rest of it follows a lonely gas station attendant who strikes out at the plate and then gets caught up in a vicious crime story involving warring yakuza. For his second feature at the helm, Japanese TV star-turned-director Kitano homed in on a style that would define his best work of the 1990s, including Sonatine and Fireworks: deadpan minimalist comedy mixed with beautifully orchestrated feats of ultra-violence. The baseball scenes in Boiling Point are both hilarious and highly cinematic, revealing how much America’s favorite pastime is revered in Japan.

Arguably the oldest sports movie to be considered a classic, Sam Wood’s 1942 weepie was released only a year after the death of its beloved hero, baseball great Lou Gehrig. With trademark stoicism by Gary Cooper (who, apparently, had no interest in the game whatsoever), Gehrig’s story is depicted as one amazing accomplishment after another — starting with his humble origins in East Harlem and culminating with all the records he broke as the Bronx Bombers’ first baseman. But everything came crashing down when the Iron Horse was diagnosed with the disease, also known as ALS, that would take his life at the untimely age of 37. His famous speech at Yankee Stadium closes out the film on a heartbreaking note, while appearances by fellow Murderers Row members Babe Ruth, Bill Dickey and Mark Koenig as themselves lend authenticity to the drama.

The contributions immigrants have made to baseball have seldom been highlighted onscreen, which is why Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s indie feature stands as a worthy corrective. More docudrama than full-fledged fiction, this naturalistic saga follows the travails of a talented young pitcher from the Dominican Republic (Algenis Perez Soto) who arrives for spring training in the American heartland, where he hopes to get drafted to the majors. But not everyone makes it — in fact, most players don’t — and Sugar eventually switches gears to show how life can still be meaningful off the field. With the Mets recently signing Dominican outfielder Juan Soto to the biggest contract in baseball history, this moving film reminds us what a rarity that is in the real world.

The same year he broke through in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Robert De Niro made waves as a terminally ill big-league catcher in John D. Hancock’s downbeat drama. The role earned the then-30-year-old his first award (best supporting actor from the New York Film Critics Circle) and accolades from other critics across the country. THR’s Alan Howard remarked that “De Niro proves himself to be one of the best and most likable character actors in movies with this performance,” and things would only go up for him from there. Despite some cheesy moments, Bang the Drum Slowly remains a sincere and searing study of loss — the kind of sports flick that could only emerge from the 1970s. Al Pacino, who rose to stardom alongside De Niro, claims it to be his favorite movie.

There’s something about baseball that makes it ripe for comedy. Yet if there’s room for only one entry in this batting order, Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own nabs the spot. (Runners-up include Major League and the original The Bad News Bears.) Based on a 1987 TV documentary of the same title, this winning saga of women slugging away in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League while the men were off fighting in WWII is funny, touching and historically significant. After directing Tom Hanks in Big, Marshall brought him back to play a boozy big leaguer-turned-manager trying to coach Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell, Lori Petty and Madonna to the championship. The film was rebooted rather successfully in 2022 as an Amazon series.

Both a classic sports comeback flick and artfully made period piece, Barry Levinson’s epic charts the quick fall and long rise of Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford), whose career gets sidetracked when an obsessive fan (Barbara Hershey) shoots him in a hotel room. Sixteen years later, he makes his way back to the majors, performing miracles on the field while refusing to kowtow to either management or the press, including a gossip-mongering cartoonist played by Robert Duvall. With Glenn Close and Kim Basinger among the ace supporting cast, this is a movie that wears its heart on its pinstriped sleeve and whose mood is best summed up by Hobbs’ gushy line, “God, I love baseball.”

Any parent pushing their kid to become a professional athlete should watch Robert Mulligan’s blistering drama, based on the true story of Red Sox center fielder Jimmy Piersall. Starring Anthony Perkins in one of his best roles, the film tracks the troubled life of a young man whose father (played by Karl Malden) is so intent on him becoming a major leaguer that it eventually drives him nuts. In reality, Piersall was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but Mulligan chose to focus on the unbearable pressure children face when they’re obliged to fulfill their parents’ unrealized dreams. Three years before Hitchcock’s Psycho, Perkins proved he could portray an unhinged character whose talent and determination are undercut by traumas that force him off the field.

Sports flicks are to Ron Shelton what westerns were to John Ford, and perhaps nobody has tackled the genre from so many angles as the maker of White Men Can’t Jump, Tin Cup, Cobb and Bull Durham. The last of those, which was Shelton’s first stab at the helm, was a revelation both for the director and star Kevin Costner, who became a certified heartthrob for his portrayal of sexy washed-up catcher Crash Davis. Relegated to the bottom of the minors, Davis forges a bromance with Tim Robbins’ talented rookie Nuke LaLoosh and a romance with Susan Sarandon’s local groupie. What Bull Durham captures so well is the beer-addled camaraderie of players scraping by far from the spotlight, where they fall in love with the game and — sometimes unconsciously — with one another. Costner completed a double-header the next year with the even more successful Field of Dreams, making him a diamond screen legend.

The best semi-recent movie about baseball and just a great movie, period, Moneyball transformed Michael Lewis’ stat-packed nonfiction best-seller into a complex human dramedy about sports in the information age. For his third feature (he’s only made four in 27 years), Bennett Miller cast Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, a former pro general-managing the Oakland A’s on a shoestring budget. Billy enlists a shrewd young economist, played by Jonah Hill, to find undervalued hitters who can take their team to the playoffs — and who wound up carrying the A’s to a record-setting winning streak in 2002. Inspirational and honest, especially about the way money has come to rule baseball and all other major sports, the film underlines how winning always comes at a price both financial and personal.

The problem with so many baseball movies is that they feel more like products of their epoch — especially the ’80s and ’90s, a boom period for the genre — than like films that can stand the test of time. What makes John Sayles’ Eight Men Out rise above the rest is not only its assured direction and performances from a cast that includes John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, David Strathairn and the great oral historian Studs Terkel. It’s the timeless way it depicts the destruction of one of the game’s earliest superstar teams at the hands of ruthless capitalists. Made by one of modern Hollywood’s only truly leftist directors, the film follows a group of players from the 1919 Chicago White Sox who decided to throw the World Series in exchange for cash kickbacks. Sayles portrays them as working-class men crushed by the owners, who underpaid them, and the mafia, who corrupted them. They managed to avoid prison but were barred from ever playing pro ball again. At a moment when America’s beloved sport has become a billion-dollar industry and the budgets of MLB teams could feed small nations, Eight Men Out is a cautionary tale that seems more prescient than ever.