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By now, the baseball season should be in full swing.
Instead, the parks sit empty, the baseball season postponed indefinitely as the battle against the coronavirus continues.
In times of other national crises, sports has provided a welcome distraction.
9/11 pushed the 2001 World Series into November, for instance, but it still happened.
This is a different, lonelier sort of crisis.
This list attempts just that.
Though many of these selections are great, this isnt an attempt to compile best baseball movies.
(Bull Durham, a masterpiece, is nowhere to be found, for instance.)
John Sayless retelling of the incident digs into its complexities.
Without letting the players off the hook, his film depicts the unfair conditions under which they worked.
Some players might have been motivated by pure greed.
For others, it represented the only chance for a decent payday before baseball had finished with them.
And no one hit home runs like Babe Ruth.
But for Ruth, that wasnt enough.
But history has a way of changing over time.
Its the past America wanted for him and one he might have wanted for himself.
Much of Ruths career still lay ahead of him when he madeHeadin Home.
The passing of time didnt really quell the need to turn him into somebody he wasnt, however.
Made at the end of Ruths life,The Babe Ruth Storyis at leastlessfictionalized thanHeadin Home.
By contrast, Arthur Hillers 1992 biopicThe Babetries to have it both ways.
Its not a whitewashing, but its hard to take this version of Ruth at face value.
Sometimes you end up printing the legend even when you make a run at tell the truth.
How close was it to the truth?
But whats true of baseball legend doesnt always make for good drama.
Making saints of sports heroes rarely works out well, but sometimes demythologizing can be just as wearisome.
It might seemtoosimple if it didnt let the performance of a perfectly cast Gary Cooper set the tone.
Sometimes those frailties cant be hidden.
Piersall later disowned the film, and the script does tend to oversimplify Piersalls struggles.
(Its very much the product of an era that treated psychology as an exact science.)
Sometimes the things that drive us to greatness can destroy us.
Don Larsen is forever the man who pitched a perfect game in the 1956 World Series.
But Ellis was also a troubled man who later admitted to pitchingeverygame high on some substance or another.
As played by Brad Pitt, hes forceful but prone to introspection.
So if you havent watched Ken Burnss monumental 1994 documentaryBaseball, nows a good time.
Baseballs failings corruption, racism, exploitation, class divisions mirror the nation at its worst.
