Maybe the great ones just make it look too easy. As if you could suit up a team of ballplayers and find a scenic park and have a hit movie on your hands. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There are elements like plot, character development, and dialogue to factor in. It’s also nice when not only the play on the field looks realistic, but the premise of the movie passes the smell test.
See also: Costner movies top list of best baseball flicks; Marshall Fine’s best and worst baseball movies
Skip a few of the basics and you have not just a bad baseball film, but a bad movie. We asked our panel participants for their worst movie, and they were quick to call a balk on these flicks:
Summer Catch (2001)
For Love of the Game (1999)
The Babe (1992)
Major League: Back to the Minors (1998)
The Fan (1996)
The Sandlot (1993)
What the ‘80s were to good baseball movies, the ‘90s were to the awful ones. Each of these movies was panned for different reasons. Here are the criticisms from our panel.
Summer Catch
James Bailey: What is it about baseball’s premier college summer league that inspires bad movies and books (Slider)? “Summer Catch” is chock full of every stereotype character imaginable and develops none of them. The plot and most of the dialogue could have been generated by a computer programmed to churn out movie clichés. You have the troubled “lawn boy” (Ryan Dunne, a.k.a. Freddy Prinze Jr.) who’s trying to capitalize on his last chance to make good; his borderline alcoholic father; his dead mother; the skanky local girl; the rich girl who inexplicably falls for the lawn boy though she knows he slept with the skanky local girl the night before; the rich girl’s conceited father who thinks his daughter is too good for the lawn boy; the hardass, but supportive, coach; the frightened virgin away from home for the first time (Fez from “That ‘70s Show”); and the hotshot, jerk teammate. Jessica Biel is truly horrible as Prinze’s love interest, Tenley Parrish, not that she had any good lines. The only witty dialogue in the entire movie belonged to Billy Brubaker, Dunne’s teammate and catcher. Most of what he says actually sounds like something a wise-cracking college kid might say. Unfortunately, plenty of others had speaking parts. The most ridiculous character is Fez’s house mom, a shameless and poor imitation of Bull Durham’s Annie Savoy, who spends the whole movie trying to seduce him. After settling for a series of his teammates, she predictably makes a man out of Fez as the season concludes. As for the baseball, it’s a good thing Brian Dennehy isn’t a real coach in the Cape Cod League, because he’d get fired for leaving his starting pitchers in to give up eight runs while showing obvious signs of fatigue. Somehow he imparted enough wisdom for Dunne to magically mature into a no-hit wiz by the last game. Of course, if you can swallow the premise of Dunne, who has been kicked out of junior college, making the team to start with, maybe the no-hitter’s not much of a stretch.
Jeremy Tiermini: I admit it. I own this movie. I love this movie. This movie is so bad that it is good. When I lived in Hornell, NY, I hosted a few players from the Hornell Dodgers, a team in the wood-bat NYCBL. This movie reminds me of those days; I even had a neighbor that was eerily similar to Domo’s house-mom. I remember the team passing the hat and having neighborhood kids shagging foul balls since the baseballs were too expensive to replace often. While the premise of the movie is good, as I love college-level baseball and I would love to watch a season of the Cape Cod League, the acting is just hilariously bad. Perhaps that is why I can’t turn the movie off if I stumble across it while flipping through the cable channels. Of course, having Jessica Biel in it might be the other reason. From Brubaker’s ribbing on Miles for his choice of women and for staring at his infielders’ backsides to the comic relief of Ryan’s friends Auggie and Pete…well, this is another quotable movie. However, the acting is nothing short of cheesy, making this an awesomely bad movie.
For Love of the Game
Marshall Fine: There are a lot to choose from – most of them having to do with kids who have magical powers or who inherit baseball teams. But for sheer ineptness and boredom, I nominate Sam Raimi’s “For Love of the Game” (1999) – which puts Kevin Costner at the top and the bottom of my list. It’s less Costner’s fault than Raimi’s; this movie (about an over-the-hill pitcher who finds himself improbably pitching a no-hitter) stacks clichés on top of each other and drains all excitement out of the story with its momentum-killing flashbacks.
The Babe
Bill Begley: Why is it the best players inspire the worst movies? Seems that way, at least, when baseball is concerned. Babe Ruth still is iconic in the sport, but some of the worst baseball movies ever made were about his life and times. With due respect to the truly pathetic efforts of William Bendix in 1948, the 1992 version, starring John Goodman, was so bad it was nearly comedic. Which is sad, because it was supposed to be a serious movie. In both cases, Goodman and Bendix were comically unathletic, and the dialogue in both was over the top, filled with clichés and some truly bad over-acting. At least Goodman’s spent a little time talking about the Babe’s dysfunctional life, but that was achingly over-reaching. Lord knows, there are myriad stinkers that have focused on baseball (i.e., “The Slugger’s Wife” and “Mr. Baseball” not to mention any title that begins “Bad News Bears” and ends with a roman numeral or a destination in the title, or any enumerated “Major League” effort). But, when considering the subject, the mountain of information and research available, and how badly those resources were used, “The Babe” is, well, a big ol’ swing-and-a-miss.
The Fan
Bill Ballew: Never have I been more disappointed in a movie than this one. I could not have been more riveted by Peter Abraham’s psychological novel of the same name; it was literally a book I could not put down. I read it until the wee hours, and then looked forward all day to continue reading it again. The movie was the polar opposite. I planned my entire day around watching “The Fan,” even got the family committed to something else in order to watch it alone, only to wind up having to deplete every bit of patience to watch it until the end. The ability to put together a movie was completely absent, and Wesley Snipes as a pseudo Barry Bonds was on par with John Goodman (in “The Babe”) in his acting ability as a baseball player. Robert De Niro was his usual self, but even he could not save an absolute butchering of the novel and an even worse execution. The novel generated incredible suspense and eerie events, but the movie was a monotone of ineptitude that could not have been more contrived. I bought the DVD for five bucks because I try to buy all baseball movies, but it will take the planets aligning perfectly with few other choices on the agenda for me to ever give this movie another two hours of my life.
Major League: Back to the Minors
Thomas Nelshoppen: Do you all remember when the movie “A League of Their Own” tried to make the move to television? Yeah, I barely do either. It only lasted for a couple episodes. The producers used the all too common formula of borrowing a few of the actors on from original movie and throwing together a confused plot and seeing how far it would fly. “Major League: Back to the Minors,” aka Major League 3, reminded me of the ALOTO’s failed attempt on TV. They used the same formula. This time they took the same Corbin Bernsen character from the first two Major League movies and put him charge of an AAA team (thank goodness they didn’t make the old guy play). The plot is the ol’ tried and true (read: overused) one. Find an aging minor leaguer, hire him to be the manager of a rag-tag AAA minor league team (except for the sole bright prospect with potential) and against all odds, take on the club from the bigs. And don’t forget the hijinks and hilariousness on the way. Ok, maybe the writers forgot that part. I should say that Bob Uecker makes a return as broadcaster Harry Doyle. Now I have a lot of respect for Uecker (remember when he used to make appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson?). Unfortunately, the writers in Back to the Minors didn’t give him a lot to work with and mostly had him rehashing his old jokes from the previous Major League movies. Major League I and II were certainly no Mel Brooks films but they had me laughing and the plots, while certainly unrealistic, they had me going (especially the first one). As for Back to Minors, it is only watchable if you have nothing to do and you’re not paying the video rental fee.
The Sandlot
Pete Sabatini: You may think it’s an innocent kid’s coming of age movie but come on – hockey gets the “Mighty Ducks,” football gets “Little Giants,” and soccer gets “June Bugs.” OK, that wasn’t Rodney Dangerfield’s finest hour, but baseball gets “The Sandlot”? No, baseball gets “The Bad News Bears,” the best of the bunch reserved for baseball, just as God intended. Then for some reason in the early ‘90s a few guys in Hollywood decide we need a new kid’s baseball movie all sweet and corny this time. It’s as if the kids from Goonies decided to play some baseball and then disappear into oblivion. We didn’t need “Angels in the Outfield” and we sure didn’t need “The Sandlot.” I’m a big fan of Denis Leary but he’s also the same guy who did “The Ref” so I guess I can’t be appalled that he took the chance to be in “The Sandlot.” James Earl Jones, on the other hand, must have thought he was signing up for some “Field of Dreams” prequel. I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about this movie. The crotchety neighbor, the mythically large dog, and the hapless stepson unknowingly in possession of a baseball treasure all add up to a movie that gives me little to care about. If my kids want a baseball movie I’ll get them “Rookie of the Year.” If I want to put my brain on hold for a baseball movie I’ll watch “Summer Catch.” But I’ll willingly subject no one to “The Sandlot.”
