Review of “Baseball: The Movie”

 With the nominations for the 2024 Casey Award for the best baseball book of the year, I have decided to give each one of them (or as many as I can) a look. This one about baseball movies is a finalist and I admit to having mixed feelings about it. Here is my review of “Baseball: The Movie.”

Title/Author: “Baseball: The Movie” by Noah Gittell

Rating:  3 1/2 of 5 stars (Okay)

Review: As one who will watch any movie with a baseball theme, when I saw that not only there was a book about baseball movies, but it was also a finalist for the Casey Award for the best baseball book of 2024, I had to check it out. After reading this book by Noah Gittell, I have mixed feelings about it at best. 

I’ll start with my disappointment to get that out of the way. Some of the critiques felt very preachy to remind the reader about baseball’s racism and sexism in its history and also to pick apart some of the movies to find anything that might not stand up to 2024 moral and social scrutiny. I’ll use two of my favorite movies for this section. While Mr. Gittell mostly praises “A League of Their Own” he did have to mention that the baseball scenes had to be realistic since the mostly male establishment would criticize it if those portions didn’t seem realistic. Couldn’t we just enjoy the movie for the excellence it had without that comment?  He also was very harsh on his chapter on “The Sandlot.”  While yes, the scene where Squints fakes drowning in order to kiss lifeguard Wendy Peffercorn can be labeled as sexual assault, I guess it’s not okay to just enjoy a movie with scenes that many people MIGHT fantasize about. And of course, even though the best player is a Latino, the lack of a Black player seemed to bother the author enough that he had bring that into the discussion.

This kind of commentary is a shame to me because when he is writing just about the movie or the baseball, he has excellent commentary. I felt the best of those are about two other movies I really enjoyed, “Pride of the Yankees” and ”Little Big League.” While my enjoyment of the latter might be biased since I am a Twins fan, I really liked how Mr. Gittell mostly praises this movie for its use of today’s analytical thinking in the game before it was common. His description of the scene where young Billy, while managing the Twins, is talking to one of his coaches on situational baseball. More text like this and less about the social shortcomings in the movies would have made this book much more enjoyable for me. At best I give this 3 1/2 stars. 

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Baseball-Movie-Noah-Gittell/dp/1637272642/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=