Baseball has long been known as an American pastime, but the sport has not reached this lofty position simply because of people’s love of playing or watching the sport. Hollywood has played a vital role in cementing the myth and greatness of the game in the American firmament, dating back to the days when Gary Cooper played New York Yankees legend Lou Gehrig in Yankee Pride won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1943 and continued over the decades with widely recognized classics like Natural, Bull DurhamAnd A league of its own. The upcoming book Baseball: the movie is the first definitive history of this cinematic genre, which originated in 1915 and remains artistically and culturally vital more than a century later. Writer, critic, and Decider contributor Noah Gittell spotlights well-known classics and overlooked gems, exploring how baseball cinema creates a stage on which the American ideal is born, played out, and repeatedly redefined .
Decider is delighted to share this exclusive excerpt from Baseball: the movie with our readers. The book will be available in bookstores worldwide starting May 14, 2024, but you can pre-order it today from retailers like Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.
“The first one through the door is always bloodied.” These are the words of John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, in silver ballspeaking of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who revolutionized baseball in the same way that Dean and Trippi, his national campaign manager, transformed politics: by using the power of data to gain an advantage over a better-funded opposition.
Beane never made the World Series and Dean never made it to the White House, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The Red Sox took Beane’s moneyball approach, added money to it, and won a World Series in 2004. Trippi, a lifelong baseball fan, explains the connection between silver ball and the dean’s campaign. “We had to find a completely different way to compete, and without the normal resources. Diving into digital space and data and using it to outperform the biggest and best. When we started, we only had $98,000, but we were able to play with the big guys because we were ahead of them on digital,” he says. “If John Kerry was the Yankees, we were the A’s.”
Based on Michael Lewis’s 2003 bestseller, silver ball came at a low point for the baseball movie. The boom of the ’80s and ’90s was over, and while the genre still produced occasional box office success, most baseball films of that era failed to make an impact with audiences. Summer catch was a disaster. Mr. 3000 it’s good, but it never found an audience. The less we say about Edin which Matt LeBlanc of Friends Playing baseball with a chimp – check, a man in a chimp costume – the better.
Overexcitement at least deserves credit for its novelty: It’s the first baseball movie to focus entirely on the fans, at least not those who end up playing on or managing the team. Even if it wasn’t a success, Overexcitement marked a shift in the baseball movie, which began to look beyond its typical underdogs — aging catchers, brainless pitchers, crippled superstars, kids with special powers — in search of heroes still more marginalized. This expansion could be seen as part of a broader trend toward authenticity in Hollywood cinema, brought about by a confluence of factors, including the advent of digital cinema, which favored hyperrealistic action over sepia nostalgia ; anxiety about the implications of computer-generated images that could replace humans on screen; and even the tragic events of September 11, which for a time made Hollywood sentimentalism irrelevant. Romantic comedy was dead. Action films had little use for jokey stars like Stallone and Schwarzenegger, and instead favored stoic heroes and shaky-cam action sequences, like those that made Jason Bourne a global sensation.
These developments left baseball films in limbo. How can a genre built on nostalgia survive in an age of anti-romanticism? The answer was silver balla film that balances new and bold ideas with old and familiar tropes. silver ball chronicles a revolution in baseball’s front office strategy that mirrors similar changes occurring in politics, finance, oversight and almost every other sector. But it’s not a revolutionary film. It uses a tried-and-true narrative in which a team of misfits comes together under an unorthodox leader, learns to play to their potential, comes close to the championship but loses, and finds a happy ending in their “wait until next year” . outcome. This is the same model that the baseball movie has used since Bad News Bearsexcept the responsible adult is in much better physical shape.
Even before the film was made, Billy Beane thought of himself as a character in a baseball movie. When asked in 1999 to present to the Commissioner’s Committee on the Economics of Baseball an internal MLB effort to address the growing problem of income parity, Beane opened his presentation with a slide describing the plot of Major League, and compared the A’s, who also depended on cheap players, to the Indians in that film. Even for these educated men and women, the best way to describe the A’s economic dilemma was to quote a baseball movie. silver ball was a movie waiting to happen.
As perpetual underdogs since their heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the A’s story may have lent itself to a conventional baseball movie, but, for a while, there had a chance to silver ball be truly revolutionary. Before Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay and Bennett Miller, recently named an Oscar-winning director with the 2005 film Hoodwas chosen to carry out, silver ball was to be directed by Steven Soderbergh. An Oscar winner for the 2000s Traffic, Soderbergh was also known for his fierce independent streak. Between studio projects like Erin Brockovitch And Ocean Elevenhe made weird and arty films with titles like Schizopolis, Full frontal, And Bubble. When Soderbergh was hired to direct silver ball, his bosses probably thought they were getting the former, but the scenario Soderbergh presented was edgier. Described as a “semi-documentary approach” by The Hollywood Reporter, it reportedly reflected the innovative spirit of its front-office subjects, mixing real-life major league players with the actors, featuring baseball players speaking directly to the camera in testimonials and, according to one account, sporting “an abundance of baseball.” details that executives feared might alienate viewers. As the rewrites got weirder and weirder, the costumes got edgier. Ultimately, the film was shelved five days before filming was to begin, and the producers began looking for a new creative team to tackle the project.
With time to work, Sorkin, Miller and Steven Zaillian (another Oscar winner who wrote a first draft and was retained despite the film’s many permutations) rewrote silver ball to be more conventional, introducing colorful characters, keeping data-driven discussions to a minimum, and concluding with a classic “big game.” They condensed the story of how Beane transformed baseball into a single season, creating the satisfying tale of a rogue employee fighting against an oppressive system. silver ball, as it turned out, is not about data or even really about baseball. The new rules propagated by Beane (no bruing, no stealing, only swinging at your pitch, increasing the number of pitches, and getting deep into the other team’s bullpen) appear on only a few whiteboards and in well-edited montages from Beane. and his right-hand man Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) communicating their approach to the A’s players. Instead, it relies on Hollywood’s most reliable tropes: underdogs, competition and a David versus Goliath narrative, with David played by one of the most charismatic movie stars of his generation.
Brad Pitt, who stuck with the project through every permutation, deserves much of the credit for the film’s place in the canon. Baseball movies are most successful when they have a major star at the center, and those who know Billy Beane marvel at how the actor subtly transformed himself into a legendary manager. It’s a formula for a baseball movie that could easily be replicated, with two exceptions. Stars of Pitt’s caliber are rare these days, and the revolution fomented by Beane and the A’s still dominates the game – and our world. A new story has not yet been written, which means silver ball remains the most significant baseball film of the century.
Baseball: the movie (Independent Publishers Group) will be available in bookstores worldwide beginning May 14, 2024. You can pre-order the book today from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite retailer.
Noah Gittell (@noahgittell) is a cultural critic from Connecticut who loves alliteration. His work can be found in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Ringer, Washington City Paper, LA Review of Books and others. His new book, Baseball: the movieis currently available for pre-order and will be released in May 2024.
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