Why don't they make baseball movies anymore?

13:25Where have all the baseball movies gone?

While baseball may be back in season, the baseball movie — a staple of 80s and 90s cinema — has been absent from the box office in recent years. 

From A League of Their Own to Field of Dreams, many of the most iconic titles in sports cinema were inspired by the game. Now, while sports movies like 80 for Brady and Champions still make the big screen, the baseball narrative appears to have fallen by the wayside. But do fewer baseball movies coming out of Hollywood reflect declining interest in the sport or is there something else at play?

Noah Gittell is a film critic and sportswriter. He recently wrote a piece for The Guardian on the baseball movie drought from the last few years. Likewise, Stacey May Fowles is a culture writer and the author of Baseball Life Advice: Loving the Game That Saved Me. 

They joined host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to get to the bottom of the baseball movie's disappearance — and what it would take to bring it back.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Noah Gittell is writing a book about baseball movies, and Stacey Fowles is a writer and massive baseball fan. They're here now to convince us to build a radio studio in the middle of a cornfield and wait for people to come and talk about baseball, I assume. Hello to you both. How's it going?

Stacey: I wanted to say, "and Stacey May Fowles is already very emotional."

Elamin: That's a better bio, I should have just used that. Stacey, I'll start with you on this…. These are settings for sweeping large narratives, deep personal transformations — what do you think it is that makes the game of baseball such a perfect setting for a movie?  

Stacey: It's the fairytale, right? … It all sort of comes down to a moment. I think the beautiful thing about baseball, is that it's lots of boring, long-drawn-out moments that are punctuated, and that is depicted so beautifully on film…. Baseball does lend itself to that very dramatic, everything-is-on-the-line [tension where] one second changes everything. I think that's why people fall in love with the game and it's why people fall in love with these movies.  

Noah: Yeah, and I think just to add to that, baseball is a game of confrontation. The pitcher and the catcher, there's one-on-one confrontation; it's like a duel in an old Western. There's something very cinematic about it. And as Stacey said, it has the space to build the drama. It has these moments where the pitcher and the batter are staring into each other's eyes. Not a lot of other sports have that ability to get inside the head of the players and give you the space to really imagine what they're thinking and build the drama. Although I guess there's a little less space this year than there used to be.

Elamin: Right, so we were talking about this right before we went live on air, which is that baseball just introduced all of these changes that I don't fully understand because it is not my sport, but I understand that one of the big changes is the pitch clock. Pitchers now have about 15 seconds to pitch, and that changes these long pauses that you're talking about, Stacey May; there's a little bit more structured drama, as opposed to sort of a free-flowing sense of that drama. How do you think that might change a baseball movie, Noah?

Noah: I don't care for it. I don't care for it as a baseball fan, and definitely not as a baseball movie fan. As I'm writing this book, I'm thinking about all the great moments in baseball cinema history and how few of them would be possible with a pitch clock. For Love of the Game, the Kevin Costner movie where he's an aging pitcher throwing a no hitter — I counted the seconds between his second-to-last pitch and his last pitch in that movie, and it's 65 seconds. There's time for him to look around the stadium, soak up his last moment of glory. There's time for the announcer to wax poetic about the moment…

Elamin: That's four times the pitch clock, dude. That's too long.

Noah: Four times! It is way too long. This stuff is important to the baseball movie. And I know they can use some movie magic and extend time as they like to do. But even in real life, we need that time to soak up the moment, and I don't think we have it anymore.

Stacey: Baseball relies on your patience, and they're taking it away. I absolutely [agree with] your point about how these movies rely so much on the long drawn-out drama, the backstory culminating on the mound. And to say, "Wait, can you hurry up and remember your entire life?" Feels like it's not going to work in a cinematic universe.

Elamin: I hear the disappointment in both of your voices just about the fact that it's taking the drama a little bit out of the game. Noah, let's return to the movies. Why don't you think baseball movies are getting made?

Noah: I think there's a couple of reasons. The first is just that the movie industry has changed so much since the baseball movie boom, which I really consider to be the 80s and the early 90s when there's one or two coming out every year and they were all big hits. Mid-budget movies for grown ups are not really being made at all by studios anymore. They're really focused on intellectual property, on movies that are franchiseable, and Major League aside, baseball movies are not really franchiseable. And frankly, some of it's been moving to television. There have been some baseball TV shows over the last few years from Brockmire to the A League of Their Own reboot and even Pitch, which was a one-season show about a female baseball player. 

And that's been happening in other genres as well, but I do think that the vibe around baseball is not a very good one right now. They are making changes to the game every year, and it's bringing some excitement, but I think it also highlights the fact that executives in MLB are not super confident about the state of the game right now and if I were a movie executive, I would probably see that and think maybe that's not the best place to invest my company's dollars right now. I'd rather make a basketball movie, of which there are four in the last month or two, or a football movie like 80 for Brady, which was kind of a hit in January. Those seem like safer bets, and movie executives want safe.

Elamin: Stacey, what's your take on this?

Stacey: The line "a whiff of desperation" in Noah's piece is such an apt one. Baseball is cool because it is sort of deeply uncool, and I think it's important to lean into that and not make everything different all the time. I think that the baseball movie will see a resurgence. There are some great books that have been optioned to be made into baseball movies — The Art of Fielding, we've all been waiting for, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, we've been waiting for, so maybe there could be good things on the horizon.

Elamin: Am I sensing optimism from both of you? Or am I sensing sort of a skepticism of the future?

Stacey: Well, it is early in the season, so optimism is rampant.

Elamin: What about you, Noah?

Noah: I'm optimistic. I was such a fan of the World Baseball Classic last month, and I think that would be a great setting for a baseball movie 

Stacey: That's great.

Noah: Because you've got a built-in international audience. I think that's the way to go, and I think it might happen in the next few years.

Elamin: Well, I appreciate the optimism. I appreciate the careful and kind of gentle rage at the ways that the big game has been changing. Thank you so much to both of you, Stacey May and Noah.

Noah: My pleasure. Play ball.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.