baseball movies

I almost never watch actual baseball games. I think I've seen two - both World Series games on TV - in the last twenty years, both of them because I happened to be there where they were on.

However, I occasionally watch baseball movies. A League of Their Own is one of my favorite movies period. I also enjoyed Moneyball and 42. However, I thought Bull Durham was boring and tedious.

Here are two, actually one and a half, that I saw on the Disney channel:

The Rookie. Dennis Quaid in the true story of a 35-year-old high-school science teacher and baseball coach in rural Texas, still reminiscing about his brief early career as a minor-league pitcher, derailed by arm injuries. When he discovers he still has his sizzling fastball, his team convince him to go for the major-league tryouts. (This must be to get rid of him. I can't believe a bunch of high-school boys would really care about their coach's lost dreams.) So he goes, and Tampa Bay signs him, despite his age. He relief-pitches in the minors for a couple months, and is just about to quit and come home when, near the end of the season, he's called up to the majors. When they play a road game in Texas, the entire town drives 300 miles to see him in the big lights. Fortunately he's called in near the end of the game. He strikes out a demon hitter in three fast pitches (in real life it took him four), and everyone cheers him after the game. The end.

It doesn't say what happened next. Actually it says he pitched for two seasons. That's not true. He pitched in two seasons. He played briefly at the end of 1999. Then in 2000 his arm problems started to come back. Early in the season he was called in to face an extra inning, tie score of course, bases loaded. And he walked the first batter. I don't know that much about baseball strategy but I do know that that's one situation where you really really don't want to walk the batter. He was immediately cut, and that was the end of that. Was it worth the trouble for such a petty result? Did he achieve his long-sought satisfaction from such a meager crumb of a pro career? Or was it enough to be able to say, "I was a major-league pitcher," even if it was only for a moment?

The Sandlot: Heading Home. According to a list I saw of films on the Disney channel, The Sandlot was a charming coming-of-age comedy. But it turns out not to be on the Disney channel. I didn't realize at the time I watched this, the only listing that came up, that it wasn't the original movie but the second direct-to-video sequel, and it really sucks. A pompous self-centered major-league hitter is magically transported back to his 12-year-old self and his sandlot team of the time, where his inability to grasp what's going on, despite the fact that he should recognize the settings and notice that even guys he still knew as adults are now, like, 12 years old, goes on long past plausibility, so I turned it off.