Numlock Sunday: Noah Gittell on baseball at the movies
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Noah Gittell, author of the new book Baseball: The Movie.
We spoke about the history of baseball in film, what it says about how American values have changed, and what’s next for the genre.
Gittell can be found at his website.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
All right, Noah, thanks for coming on.
My pleasure, thanks for having me.
I am really, really excited to have you on. You have written a really exciting book all about baseball in the movies, two very central tenets of American society, I feel. When I first heard that you were working on this, I was really delighted because I think there's such a fascinating shared history between cinema and baseball. They both came onto the scene at the same time, and they've been developing in the American mind since. I'll just throw it to you real quick: What got you interested in this topic and what was it like following it?
There are a couple different ways to think about it. Number one is that I've loved baseball and I've loved movies since I was about 6 years old. I grew up in the ‘80s when the New York Mets were really good and I became a fan of that team at a very young age. That was also the age of a lot of great baseball movies. It was a baseball movie boom, probably the biggest boom that there's ever been in film history.
I think those movies really supported my burgeoning fandom, because what you see when you watch a game in person or on TV is just the surface. You don't understand who these people are, how they talk, what their hopes and dreams are, what their fears are. But the baseball movie can at least give us some idea of everything that's happening beneath that surface. Movies like Bull Durham and Major League and Eight Men Out, those films really showed me the personalities of the people that I had grown to worship just for their play on the field. Some of them are more accurate than others, but when you're a kid and you're just learning to love the game, you don't really know any of that. I just loved them all equally, and they taught me a lot about baseball.
That's why I think the baseball movie is important if you're a fan of the game. We've been in a fallow period with baseball movies for the last 10 years, and I don't think it's a coincidence that interest in baseball itself has dropped in that time as well. The two, baseball and baseball movies, really need to work in tandem for the sport to survive.
I guess one of my secret wishes for the book is that it brings about more interest in the baseball movie, and maybe we can get some more of these going.
Yeah. So much of baseball is built on mythmaking and just converting people into legends over the course of the history of this thing, and cinema has been such a crucial part of that. You write about some eras of baseball that were really codified by their appearance in cinema. And even the players — you alluded in early chapters to Lou Gehrig, a very mythological figure in baseball in no small part because, as you wrote about, this film was made about him.
Baseball stars have been a part of movies since even before that, to be honest. Many of the early newsreels had footage from baseball games, and Babe Ruth, in a way, was one of the first movie stars. He actually did act a little bit, as well. He was in a feature film called Headin’ Home in 1920. It was basically a fictionalized version of his life.
But what happened with The Pride of the Yankees is really important, because at that time, baseball movies were considered box office poison. And Lou Gehrig was so iconic, his story was so tailor-made for cinema, that they decided to go ahead and make his movie anyway. It wasn't just a baseball movie; it was a love story. I think in many ways, it was an inspirational metaphor for a country that was on the eve of World War II and about to watch many young men be cut down in the prime of their lives.
The movie was a hit. It was nominated for a lot of Academy Awards, and Hollywood back then, and now, is a copycat industry. We saw about five or six other biopics of baseball players who had to overcome various obstacles to be made over the course of the next decade. There were films about Monty Stratton, a pitcher who lost his leg in a hunting accident and returned to the game. There was a film about Dizzy Dean. There was one about Babe Ruth. Those films really helped launch the whole genre. I think if it weren't for that little run, Hollywood might have given up on the baseball film altogether.
Or even the sports film in general, for that matter. One thing that I really dig about baseball movies and that you talk about in your book is that baseball movies are oftentimes about a lot more than baseball.
Absolutely. My thesis for the book basically is that as the collision of two national pastimes, baseball and movies, baseball in cinema is a metaphor for whatever American values represent at that time.
In the post-war era, the baseball films tried to represent what was great about America. Over time, filmmakers have used baseball to address more complicated issues that are fundamental to this country. Race has factored prominently in many baseball films to varying degrees of success. Baseball films have tried to address gender in some ways, also to varying degrees of success.
But I think because it is the national pastime, even when filmmakers are not explicitly trying to comment on society, they end up saying something anyway, because you kind of can't talk about baseball, at least at the level of depth that a feature-length film requires, without reflecting something pretty fundamental about the American character at the time.
The book itself is structured chronologically, and as you go through it, you can definitely see a history of the American relationship with baseball and lots of interiority about ourselves. There's a nostalgic era that basically tries to hearken back to that golden age, and then that itself has a ripple effect when the boomers have kids. Do you want to walk us through a history of the baseball movie?
Yeah, sure. So I already discussed the post-war era, when these films were really meant to support the building of the American dream that took place after World War II. All of these films were about real-life people who had overcome odds and succeeded on the field of play. They were meant to serve as metaphors for smoothing over, I think, the darkness that followed World War II. Many of them were metaphors for people overcoming post-traumatic stress disorder and reintegrating into society.
After those films played themselves out, there were a couple films in the ‘50s that I think reflected a burgeoning darkness in the American character. One of them is Fear Strikes Out, a really fascinating movie about a ballplayer named Jim Piersall who had a nervous breakdown on the field, which the film attributes to his strained relationship with his overbearing father. That reflects the new interest in psychology that was taking hold across America, and also just the storminess that was breaking through that surface-level American dream that had taken hold before that. This was the era of civil rights and nuclear fears and McCarthyism, so the baseball movie was no longer this shining example of American virtue.
Then when we get to the ‘70s, an era of profound disillusionment, and the baseball film reflects that as well. Bang the Drum Slowly is a really interesting example because it works as a counterpart to The Pride of the Yankees. It's another film about a New York baseball player stricken with a deadly disease, but this film is not rousing in any way, and there's not really even any redemption for the characters involved. It's a long, slow fade-out in which some of the people around this ill player grow up maybe just a tiny bit and learn a couple of lessons, but no one will be saved in this movie. That's a huge difference from The Pride of the Yankees.
And to round out the ‘70s, I must mention The Bad News Bears. I don't think many people think of this as a political film, but there's a really important line early on in the film that people often miss which explains that this team of outcasts and misfits came about because of a class-action lawsuit. Their parents were not happy that they didn't make any of the other teams, so they sued the city and got them to create this team for them. The 1970s were the golden age of class-action lawsuits, and when you think about this team, a very diverse roster as a group of disempowered, disenfranchised people who come together and defeat the hated Yankees, the establishment team on the field of play, it's a really subversive movie. I'm not sure it's ever quite been given credit for that.
We could stop there, but you can see clearly that as the baseball movie evolves, it takes on the properties of the era in which it is produced.
It is such an interesting reflection. I really enjoyed that element of it, just because you can trace what people are worried about, what people are anxious about, what different societal changes are happening all through one sport.
Yes, that's exactly right. And you could kind of do this with any genre, or any genre that's been around a long time. You could look at horror movies, from Nosferatu to The Exorcist, and see how things would change. You could certainly do it with Westerns, because I think Westerns are also fundamentally American.
But to me, the baseball movie works best because it is the national game, and because it was used in this Pride of the Yankees post-war era almost as propaganda for the American dream. The template is already there for it to be a political document first and a work of art second, almost.
I want to talk a little bit about the recent era of baseball and film, just because it seems like it's no longer necessarily as prominent a genre as it was. You mentioned that it started out as box office poison and there was obviously this huge resurgence in nostalgia and the ripple from that, but then the last section of your book is really interesting, I found. It includes things like Trouble with the Curve and Moneyball and 42, the latter of which is a very backwards-looking movie, and there’s a skepticism about the two former, at times.
It's a change in the game and the anxieties driving it. So I'd love to talk about the recent history of baseball movies, too, because I know these things haven't really gone away; they've just evolved with the times.
That's exactly right. They haven't gone away. We're definitely in a fallow period for baseball movies, but maybe they're just perpetually underdogs. They have to constantly prove themselves as being economically viable to the studio executives. I guess there are other genres that are that way as well, but it's fitting for the baseball movie, because so many baseball movies are about underdogs.
Moneyball and Trouble with the Curve is a really fascinating dialectic. Everyone knows the story of Moneyball, how Billy Beane revolutionized the game by taking a sabermetric approach and looking at statistics that were previously discarded as being important and asking questions that overturned conventional wisdom. The Moneyball approach has transcended baseball and been adopted by many industries, certainly including the film industry. That makes Moneyball quite an important film, and I think that's why it was received the way it was and why it was nominated for so many Oscars, including Best Picture: because it is far more than a baseball movie. In fact, the book was far more than a baseball book. I remember Michael Lewis telling someone that he thought it would be of more interest to CEOs than it would to people in baseball.
That movie overturned so many conventions of the baseball movie, showing that scouts didn't know what they were talking about, that players were interchangeable. Managers were not crusty, lovable veterans; they could be just as stubborn and intransigent as anyone else. The real heroes here were the guys in the front office, who in most baseball movies are invisible, at best, or quite often villainous, like in Major League for example.
But then you have Trouble with the Curve, which came out a year later and basically seemed to respond to Moneyball. Everything that Moneyball subverts, Trouble with the Curve tries to put back together. It shows the scout as being the only one with the real wisdom, and the front office, the smarmy general manager, played by Matthew Lillard, being over-reliant on data and computers and not trusting the hard-earned wisdom of his employees.
It's just a fascinating example of how the baseball movie responds to society and then also responds to itself. This is really what happened in the 2000s and 2010s. The baseball movie sort of got divided, and there became baseball movies for different sects of society, like these two. We also had a movie like Sugar, which is a great independent drama about an immigrant, a Dominican player who is signed and comes to the U.S. and has trouble adjusting. This is not a big, major studio motion picture. It's an independent film that played at Sundance, and it took a long time to find its audience.
Baseball movies like that were never made in the past. So, the baseball movie definitely still exists, but it operates at a different plane than it did in the post-war era during the 1980s. I'm not sure it'll ever get back to that place, given how the industry works today.
It's funny that you compared it a little earlier to the Western. That's actually a really interesting angle to pull at, just because it is a genre that existed in various different forms, with some that were rather nostalgia-driven and others rather disinterested in that. It’s a really interesting comparison. Do you want to talk a little more to that?
I think the baseball movie and the Western really have a lot in common. I mean, baseball is a game of confrontation and contemplation. There are a couple things that separate it from other sports. One is that there's a lot of stillness in baseball. There's a lot of standing around waiting for something to happen. And you see a lot of that in Westerns, too, for sure.
The other thing is that it is a team sport, but it also is an individual sport. The main confrontation is between the pitcher and the batter. When that is happening, which is most of the time in a baseball game, there are only two people on the field, in a way. I’ve seen so many shots in baseball games of a pitcher staring at his catcher and the batter staring back at the pitcher that could be a duel in a Western. That could be Clint Eastwood, as the Man with No Name, staring at Lee Van Cleef or someone else. And even Ron Shelton, when he was making Bull Durham, said that he thought of Crash Davis, a character played by Kevin Costner, as a cowboy, because he was like a mercenary who would move from town to town, come in, do his job, and then be sent off somewhere else.
I think there is a real thematic tie between those two genres that has existed for a very long time, although it's always existed just under the surface.
That's great. I'm fascinated by that. That's a delightful angle.
I'll also tell you that I wrote a piece a couple years ago on this guy named John DeMarsico, who does the Mets’ telecast for SNY. He's the director, and he's a huge cinephile. He has brought all of these cinematic techniques to the broadcast, and one of them is really playing up that confrontation between pitcher and catcher. He actually gets inspired by real shots that he sees in film, and he finds a way to do them during a live broadcast. It's an amazing, amazing thing, but it also draws out the connections between baseball and the Western that, as I said, really have gone unexamined.
That's fascinating. I love that.
What's something that you didn't know going into the book that you learned over the course of reporting it out?
Oh, that's a good question. I definitely didn't know that over the last 15 years, there have actually been dozens of baseball movies produced, but they just haven't made it to theaters.
I was looking for something to write the last chapter about, because I knew it had to be different. I was looking at a list of all the baseball films ever made, and I kept seeing these titles, films that had come out in the last decade and a half, that I'd never heard of. And when I looked them up one by one, I discovered they were all faith-based films.
Oh, wow.
There's been a huge boom of baseball films in the faith-based industry over the last 15 years. I started watching all these movies, and it was really interesting to me how many of them had similar content to the films of the post-war era. They were very often about characters who were overcoming an obstacle through baseball, whether it was alcoholism, or sometimes it was a player with an intellectual disability. Usually it was alcoholism. They were often set in rural America; they often featured religion prominently, as many of the post-war films did. And many of them are not very good. Some of them are. The difference is usually whether they draw their talent from Hollywood or just from evangelical circles.
What fascinated me is that these values, which were considered mainstream in the 1940s, had now been shuffled off to the side in this little niche subgenre. They’re films that basically only play on faith-based streaming services or end up in bins at Walmart. But they're actually not that different in content, at least, from some of the films that built the genre.
Wow. So the baseball renaissance is happening; it's just in the faith-based section of Amazon.
That's right. I don't know if I can call it a baseball movie boom since most of them are terrible — I don’t think we can give it that rosy assessment — but it does show that interest remains. Faith-based people represent a significant chunk of America. If I were the studio executive and I saw that happening, I would say, well, we can get those people, at least. Let's see now how we can get some of the other people.
Occasionally those movies do cross over a little bit. There was a film that came out last year called The Hill with Dennis Quaid. It was a film about a physically disabled child who dreamt of getting to the major leagues, and did eventually get there. It was based on a true story and it played in 1,500 theaters. It didn't make a lot of money and it wasn't very good. Those are two significant setbacks, I would say, for the baseball film. But they are trying, and I do think it's only a matter of time before one of these films gets made at a bigger scale at some point.
Fascinating. That's really cool.
Before we wrap up, is there anything that you want to finish with? Anything particularly interesting that you want folks to take away from this before we tell them where to check it out?
I would just say that this is not just a book for people who love baseball or baseball movies. It's been described by someone else, not me, as a cultural history, and I think that's a pretty good description of what I was going for.
My hope is that in reading the book you will learn about how baseball has evolved over the years, but you'll also learn about how Hollywood has evolved over the years and how American values have evolved in that time. It'll make you want to watch more baseball movies, but it'll also give you something a little deeper than that, I hope.
All right. So why don't you tell folks what it's called, where they can get it, and where to find you?
Baseball: The Movie is available everywhere you buy books — in bookstores, on Amazon, on Bookshop, in Barnes & Noble. I will be traveling a bit around the country talking about this book, and you can find a full list of my events at my website, noahgittell.com.