Yoda Reviews Baseball Movies

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I just watched a Japanese baseball film called Poetry of Baseball Enthusiasts. It's based on a manga with everything it could possibly entail. It's about a cute girl who takes up baseball, and I'm not spoiling anything else.

You should watch it if only to make this thread more varied country-wise. Baseball is (or was back then at least) more popular in Japan than in the States, so one shouldn't ignore their contribution to this film genre.
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San Franciscan lesbian dwarves and their tomato orgies.



I'll consider it, though the fact that baseball is popular in Japan isn't, itself, relevant to the project. What's relevant to me is that it be about baseball in some meaningful way (and not just as a backdrop). I'll also likely be reviewing Mr. Baseball, which is about baseball in Japan.



Looking forward to Yoda's 'Major League' review!
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This is probably a stupid question for Yoda but curious to see if you've watched the miniseries 'Baseball' by Ken Burns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_(TV_series)



This is probably a stupid question for Yoda but curious to see if you've watched the miniseries 'Baseball' by Ken Burns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_(TV_series)
Bits and pieces, but I'm thinking of doing it properly, if not for this than just in general.

New review hopefully coming this week, have several half-done, just got a bit distracted by work and (appropriately, I think) a softball tournament.



Trying Real Hard To Be The Shepherd
You really would love it I think Chris. I know the time commitment is daunting, but the amount of footage and how it’s edited. There isn’t anything like it. Especially through the first three quarters.
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Million Dollar Arm (2014)


In a sentence: A desperate sports agent goes to India to try to find major league caliber pitchers.



"Two players run to first. They both have the same time, but one has perfect form. The other, lousy form. Which one do you pick?"
"The one with lousy form."
"'Cause teach him the right form..."
"...and he beats the other guy."




The softball team I run was originally run by a chemistry student, and about half the team was from the chemistry department. Over time a lot of them graduated, moved away, had to go wherever the work was. It was always somewhere else. One of those students was a young man named Jean-Marc. As the name may imply, he wasn't from the area: he was from Trinidad, and he had literally never played baseball in any form. But he had tremendous physical gifts. It was amazing watching him swing without moving his legs, just flicking his wrists, and still hitting the ball harder than most of us using all the momentum our stride could give us. Watching him spring down the first base line at top speed, only to awkwardly try to come to a stop at the base rather than run through it.

He was, essentially, a project. The sky was the limit, if we could marry his natural athleticism to mechanics and muscle memory. He got better: by the end, he was catching most of the fly balls he was used to, and hitting more and more line drives. He started to get the bug, the itch. And then, like all the others, he graduated and moved away.





This movie is based on a true story, which it tells us upfront. But I didn't need to be told. I'm a Pirates fan, and remember hearing about the event this is based on when it happened a decade ago. It was presented as an example of the Pirates forward-lookingness, an example of a smart small market team scouring places the bigger teams can't be bothered to, and finding rubies in the rough. And like the events of this movie, it's fair to ask whether any of it would have happened without the added public relations aspect.

When I watch formulaic movies, I don't really watch them the same way I'd watch something better or more ambitious. I start evaluating them based on rote things like sheer execution, or whether they throw the occasional curveball (sorry) to mix it up a little for savvier viewers. I do a similar thing with films "Based on a True Story": I try to figure out which things were the invention of the screenwriters, which things were changed or exaggerated to help reality fit that formula.

This might be one of those stories, though, that really did fit that formula. That has element after element which you would've sworn were tweaked, amplified, or outright fabricated...and yet they weren't.



I should disclose that I am physiologically incapable of disliking anything Lake Bell is involved with, but the whole cast is impressive and charming. Jon Hamm is overpowered for the role, and Dinesh and Rinku are pitch perfect. And they have to be. This doesn't work if they veer too far in any one direction. They have to seem like adolescents: not fully grown men, and not just wide-eyed boys. It's a real balancing act that mirrors the surreal experience, as a baseball fan, of watching 20 year old kids thrust in front of millions of fans on a regular basis. Almost as surreal as the very first time you realize you're older than one of the players you're watching. I think a lot of you probably remember the first time that happened, or maybe the cinematic equivalent of watching someone younger than you win an Oscar.





Baseball has more international appeal than the other major North American sports, and I'm not sure it's even close. Obviously soccer is the sport worldwide, presumably in part because of its elegance and simplicity, so it's kind of strange that something as convoluted and arbitrary as baseball would find so much purchase on other shores. It's massive in Japan and it's practically a way of life in the Dominican Republic and Cuba, where it has the same quality as football in American inner cities: sometimes, for kids in poverty, it's the only way out.

Cuban baseball has its own culture entirely, specifically that its hitters are more free-swinging (and get better at hitting "bad" pitches as a result) than most other places. Or, as it is sometimes put: "You can't walk off the island."

It seems inexplicable that baseball travels as well as it does, given its convoluted nature. Everyone recognizes that there is beauty in simplicity, but it seems to me there is an inverse beauty in the delicate balance, the house of cards, the set of rules tweaked and shaped over a literal century to compliment and counterweight each other. In creating a game that only exists with constant human management and assessment. A game that operates like a machine, with every cog linking to the next. Something fragile and precious that nobody else would ever create. A pocketwatch in place of a sundial.

Yes, we love the simple and the universal. But we fall in love with the quirky and the unique. You love soccer the way you love the sun or the moon. But you love baseball the way you love another person.




How's the Baseball?

It's fine. There's very little of it to speak of. The mechanics of the throwing are good, there's no silly H(B?)ollywoodification where they just pick up a ball and hurl it 95 out of nowhere and everyone's jaws drop. It's a slow, arduous process and they ultimately find people who are merely promising; good runners with bad form.


Do They Win?

Yes. But obviously there's no game. One of the tensest scenes in the film, in fact, takes place in the parking lot of a strip mall, which is where Dinesh and Rinku have their first MLB tryout. That, alone, sets this film apart from every other baseball film I've ever seen.

The tryout goes terribly, but they manage to secure another (with fewer attendees) at the location they actually trained out, and of course at this point everyone's given them the requisite emotional support they need to succeed. And they do: the Pirates offer them professional contracts.





Jean-Marc kept playing softball after he moved, and has occasionally kept me updated on it. And he showed up at one of our year-end parties after moving, a personal surprise I found out about only when he arrived. It was a good thing, too, because he had a hilarious star turn in the highlight reel: he was superimposed on Rene Russo's face.

I don't know if he'll keep playing or not. Maybe he'll make good on all that potential, and some team in his new home will enjoy the benefits. I hope so. But I already got all I could want out of him: I got to share the game I love with someone who knew nothing about it, watch him take to it, get better at it, and start to see why it was so special to so many of us.





Neither Dinesh nor Rinku ever pitched in the major leagues. This particular barrier remains unbroken. But so it goes: the person who has to knock down the wall usually isn't going to pick themselves up and keep running with the baton after. That's not their job. Often, their job is to be a human wrecking ball of possibility, knocking down one of a hundred barriers to entry so that some day, a poor Indian boy will pick up a baseball and change his life.



Trying Real Hard To Be The Shepherd
I remember being pretty excited about Million Dollar Arm. It was a baseball flick and had Don Draper. I was disappointed but your review makes me want to give it another shot despite learning real quick not to be excited about a movie with Don Draper.



I remember being pretty excited about Million Dollar Arm. It was a baseball flick and had Don Draper. I was disappointed but your review makes me want to give it another shot despite learning real quick not to be excited about a movie with Don Draper.
I think your first reaction was pretty reasonable. It's formulaic...it's just good for a formulaic film. And it gets credit for the story being so naturally dramatic that they didn't have to tweak it much to make it feel like a movie, which is kinda wild.

I was mostly interested in it because I remember this when it was in the news, because the cast was great, and because it's a great excuse to talk about baseball's international scene a bit more (though I'll certainly be doing that again later, with an emphasis on Japan).



A system of cells interlinked
Was the wife and my 8th anniversary yesterday, so I made her a nice steak dinner and after Stelly went to bed, we plopped down and watched A League of Their Own (her choice). We had both seen it before, but of course ended up enjoying it just as much as ever.

This film often reminds me of my grandmother, as she was from the same generation as these ball players. The actress that plays the older version of Dottie nails the sort of wistful look as she is facing the camera thinking back to the old days of the league, just before we are plunged backward in history to the era most of the film takes place in. I recall seeing that look on my grandmother's face when I was a boy, but of course, I didn't understand what it meant at the time or what she was thinking about. My grandmother was very much a Dottie, and while she was a journalist during the war - a far cry from a ballplayer - she dressed similarly and had the same laid back ease about her. As I watched the film last night, my mind wandered, thinking about what it must have been like to live back then, when the entire country was rallied around the same cause - a cause that affected everyone both at home and abroad. All those people were truly in a league of their own, and not just the ballplayers.

Anyway. Great stuff, and the baseball is pretty fun, too.
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“Film can't just be a long line of bliss. There's something we all like about the human struggle.” ― David Lynch



More coming! Have not forgotten, and I've got pieces of a couple other reviews done already. Fittingly, real-life baseball stuff (fall playoffs and our big year-end party) have delayed them a bit, but plenty more are on the way.



A system of cells interlinked
Happy Anniversary!



That's really cool.
What's really cool is that, although I didn't end up with much from my grandmother when she passed, I did end up with a CD of an interview she did with Noble Oil Co. when she passed, which was in relation to her coverage of and involvement with the CanOl project during WW II. Pretty cool stuff to listen to. I also received a color copy reproduction of her journal, which was found in an old filing cabinet in the 1990s.



What happened to this?
My local softball leagues added a Late Fall season because we had so few rainouts, so that my season actually only ended a week ago! And then I immediately had a trip out of town.

I've got a few more reviews already half-written, will have another up soon.



Field of Dreams (1989)


In a sentence: A farmer begins hearing mysterious voices that implore him to build a baseball field.



About eight or nine years ago, my softball team and I were getting ready for our first practice of the year. We all go a little stir crazy in the offseason, so we pounce on the first opportunity. We watch the forecast like hawks, and more often than not we get a day in February (!) that gets up into the 50s, which is more than enough to practice in if you're desperate.

As we started practicing a young man walked across the field and asked if he could play with us. We said yes (we always say yes)...and he was incredible. Fast, smart, and genuinely one of the kindest people I've ever had the pleasure of playing with. He said his name was Nate, and we promptly invited him to join the team. He told us later that, when he saw how warm it was going to be he threw a bunch of different equipment in his car—gloves, soccer cleats, a football—so that he'd be able to play with whoever he found in the park that day, no matter what they were playing.

He was so fast and impressive in the field that people would often ask me: "where did you find that guy?" And I always said the same thing:

"He just walked out of the corn one day."




When you actually describe this movie, it sounds really weird. And not just weird in the sense of being unconventional, but in the sense of being unpredictable, even random. There's a farmer, and he's obsessed with Shoeless Joe Jackson, and he helps a novelist, and the two of them help an old man who never got to bat in the majors. Oh and there's a PTA meeting subplot about banning books that seems like it's only there to justify the novelist stuff.

They don't really link together in any logical way. You can't A-to-B your way from one thing to the next. Everything is A, to Q, to %, and then back to A except this time it's lowercase and for some reason it makes you think about your grandpa's house. If this film's plot were a series of directions, you couldn't say "turn left." You'd have to say stuff like: walk until you start to think about your childhood, and then follow the feeling of eating a corn dog. If you start thinking of your Senior Year home room it means you've gone too far.

Can it be made to make sense? Is trying to do that missing the point? There might be some connections there, so thin and ephemeral you'd need an EMF meter to detect them. Maybe Terrance Mann is just a cautionary tale about what happens if you're the kind of person who doesn't listen to the voices. Maybe he's there so they have an excuse to talk about banning books, which has some kind of connection with being banned from baseball. Maybe the focus is Shoeless Joe because losing the game he loved is like losing your father. I don't know. It all requires the same leap of faith the characters have to make.





Of course, everyone knows that Field of Dreams is about faith. It's also about marriage. But I repeat myself.

Ray's wife is the real hero of this film. All Ray does is hear a voice and do what it tells him. It takes faith on his part, and bravery for sure, even though approaching this movie as if it were reality would lead any sensible person to scream at Ray that he's an irresponsible idiot, possibly with an undiagnosed brain tumor. Like marriage, it only works if you decide to buy into it, immediately and completely.

...but he, at least, hears the voices. Annie doesn't. Ray has to trust that the mysterious voices are right, but Annie has to trust Ray in trusting that the mysterious voices are right. It's a much harder job. But they're married. They're a team. She's along for the ride. That doesn't mean unwavering support in any context. Sometimes it means the opposite: sometimes it means they're the one person in the world who can shake off the sign, who can tell you the difficult thing you need to hear. And that's the paradox of marriage, right there: simultaneously being the most supportive and the most critical person in someone else's life, and accepting the same in return.





Unfortunately, this leads to one of my biggest criticisms of the film: Annie's dream.

Annie is rightfully skeptical of Ray's plans. She doesn't give him an ultimatum (which demonstrates her ultimate faith) but she expresses her reticence...until she has a dream about Ray going to Fenway Park with Terrance Mann. It's a mystical coincidence she can't ignore. It's unlikely enough that it's almost as if she's hearing the voices, too. And it dilutes her faith, her sacrifice, and her contribution to both the marriage and the story.

I sort of get it. I'll argue against myself and say that there's a sweet sort of "marriage is a shared delusion" angle here. It's nice that they truly team up, that she's completely on board instead of just allowing it or just believing him. But there's a cost there, in that her belief is more impressive when she doesn't get to experience what Ray's experiencing.

Instead, the role of Real Person is played by Timothy Busfield, who gets the thankless job of being the only person in the fairy tale who cares about basic finance. He's the person we'd all be (I hope) if we saw this actually happening. He is a necessary foil, though I think there's a better version of this film where he's less aggressive, more sympathetic, and doesn't accidentally almost kill Ray's daughter, a clumsy addition seemingly only there to make it perfectly clear whose side we're supposed to be on.

The character brings to mind Frank Grimes, the famous Simpsons character cursed with real-world awareness about the absurdity of Homer's cartoonish nature, the way he Mr. Magoo's his way through everything. The only person who can see his plot armor.



How's the Baseball?

Fine, but there's not much of it. But Ray Liotta bats right-handed, and Shoeless Joe Jackson was famously left-handed. It's a small, but nearly unforgivable oversight, particularly given how theoretically easy it would've been to fake it a little and/or mirror a shot, or something. If this film were made a few decades later, there's no way they allow this.



Do They Win?

There's no game to win, but Ray and Annie are rewarded for their faith in the end, in a memorable aerial shot showing a line of cars stretching out of frame. These are "the people" who "will come." It seems happy, it seems sweet, until you remember Terrance's speech: "For it is money they have and peace they lack." Every car in the shot representing a peaceless person, searching for something. Nostalgic for a time they didn't live through which only kind of existed. An endless line of lost souls who would do anything for one more minute with someone they've lost, and basking in memories is the closest thing to it that they can find. Hoping that maybe if they sit down and watch the game, a ghost will come and sit next to them.





In the same way The Natural lives on because its ending more than anything which came before it, I think it's fair to say Field of Dreams owes the bulk of its staying power to James Earl Jones' famous monologue.

Jones' monologue is exactly the sort of flowery stuff I've been filling these reviews with. And it's good, but kind of clumsy to include in the middle of a film. He might as well be looking right into the camera (and at one point he almost literally is). Here are the parts I want to highlight:

They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.

"Of course, we won't mind if you look around," you'll say. "It's only twenty dollars per person." They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it. For it is money they have and peace they lack ...

... The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.

America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.

This field, this game -- it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.
This idea of baseball as a metronome, a thing that is always there, is one of its best qualities. There are so, so many games. 162 per team in the regular season alone. For about six months each team has roughly a 90% chance of playing a game on a given day. In its heyday, people listened to it on the radio. While this is less engaging than watching it on TV, I think this played to its advantage: it made it the background of their lives. A constant presence underlying everything else they were doing. Folding laundry, eating, living. It weaved its way around people's day-to-day activities. It just kept going. It was always there, greeting you every morning and bidding you good night every evening. And you kept listening even when it frustrated you, because there was still a magic there.

Remind you of anything?

It's not for nothing that, when a team wins the World Series, all the players get rings. It's a partner you stick with through streaks and slumps, and it gives you a little symbolic promise that your faith will be rewarded. And the reminder of that promise is staring you in the face in every game you've ever seen: right in the middle of the field, a diamond.





Nate (which means "He gives") played with us for several seasons before moving to Arizona. When we got new jerseys made a couple of years ago, he ordered one, even though his days playing with us were over. I still miss him, and I still keep one eye out in every practice for someone looking for a place to play, looking for a team. Because some day, someone else will walk out of the corn.




Trying Real Hard To Be The Shepherd
Good review Chris. You capture the ethereal quality of the movie very well. The hotdog murder scene does stick out in an otherwise fairytale quality story too, good point. I rewatched this for the first time in a lot of years last year, and was reminded of why I loved it. Can certainly see why the movie you describe wouldn’t work for everyone though.



RIP www.moviejustice.com 2002-2010
Great review of Field of Dreams Yoda! I have something of a connection to that film.

Field of Dreams came out in 1989 when I was seven, so yes being in Iowa it was all the rage. In fact in the early to mid 1990s I was living in a little town call Marion over by Cedar Rapids, Iowa and it's an hour's drive up to Dyersville. I actually played on a traveling Little League team when I was 11 and 12 years old, so we went to Dyersville and played against them and they smacked us. The joke was that the kids were perhaps just a little bit older than the 12 3/4 years of age cutoff or whatever it was.



We didn't play on the Field of Dreams field, as that was a tourist attraction, BUT it was open to the public to play catch, etc and at least two or three times I went there and played catch with my dad when I was a kid. I don't live in that part of Iowa anymore, and it's probably pushing 30 years since I've been to Dyersville, so I have no clue what the field is like now, although I think I remember reading and hearing stuff about how they play at least one Major League Baseball game there per year.

By the time I was in high school I didn't live in that area and sports were not a thing for me anymore as by that point I was really starting to get into film and also video games, school, hanging out with friends, and also working two jobs. So even though Field of Dreams was a small part of my childhood, it's just a film that I honestly never thought was that great even the first time I saw it when I was around eight or nine and we checked a VHS copy out at the local library. Yeah at the time it was cool that it was filmed in Iowa, but as far as the movie went, it didn't do a lot for me. Even at the tender age of nine I think I understood how silly the premise was and how sappy it all might have been. Certainly I had no ability or sense of how to explain it, I just knew it was. At that point a handful of my favorite films were (and honestly still are) The Princess Bride, The Empire Strikes Back, The Goonies, Gremlins, Beauty and the Beast, The Land Before Time, Joe Versus the Volcano and soon to be White Men Can't Jump, City Slickers, and Terminator 2. I still love each of those to death even re-watching them as an adult, so my temperament and personality, even as a child, never lent itself to the type of sentimental material, mystical/supernatural light, heavy on symbolism and nostalgia type of material that Field of Dreams clearly is right at home within. Yeah, it's not really about baseball it's about making connections and time spent and missed between a father and son that once it's gone you can never get it back.



It's just something about that material always felt heavy handed. Yoda is spot on with his assessment of the plot going everywhere and taking us on a road trip from Iowa to Baltimore and back, so it is a film that the viewer has to have buy-in right away otherwise, it just won't work; it's far too big of a pill to swallow. If you're the type of person who loves a Frank Capra film, some Steven Spielberg films, or even a film like A Guy Named Joe, I'm certain that A Field of Dreams won't seem like too much of a stretch. But yeah the premise of a man hearing voices, plowing down his cornfield, the dreams, the wife having the same dream (I agree Yoda with your criticism there), ghosts from the White Sox coming out to play baseball, and then people driving from around the country to see all this play out... wrapped in a blanket of sentimental musical score and some scenes of the sunsetting and monologues about having a game of catch with ghost dad... again I completely get how this stuff would have appeal and Field of Dreams DOES have appeal apparently as it's one of the most beloved films of the late 1980s, but it's more than I can really handle.

Spot on too about the wife being the person in the film who takes the real leap of faith in going along with the husband saying he heard voices to plow down their livelihood. This sort of thing would likely end up in divorce court either immediately or after the financial ruin and bankruptcy... assuming they don't have the land paid off and can't liquidate or sell it AND it's highly unlikely that while their P&C or farm insurance will pay for wind and hail damage to crops, I don't think it provides coverages for loss of crop due to crazy farmer mowing his field down.

Also of note too, right now a quick 15 second google search revealed that farm prices around Dyersville are on average $13,000/acre (which is fairly low end of average for Iowa standards). In addition to the tax write offs and farm subsidies farmers are receiving today, it's safe to say that in 2024, even if we could get behind the premise of voices talking to a farmer, the real sell and bridge too far would be to think a farmer in Iowa has any chance at financial ruin. The richest people in this state are the farmers and landowners and Iowa has the least amount of forest and public land as a percentage to land area than any state in the entire nation AND in many of these rural communities like Dyersville of under 10,000 people the wealth disparity is some of the highest in the country. We have many farmers and small business owners who are in the agricultural industry who, and I shit you not, are worth millions of dollars and more often tens of millions of dollars with a sizeable number of Iowa farmers who are worth well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. These are people who are living next to their neighbors working at the local Casey's convenience store and Walmart for $14 or $15 an hour, renting the roof over their head, with a net worth of under $10,000 and $5,000 of that is wrapped up in their rapidly depreciating 20 year old 2003 Buick Lesabre, which is now more rust than car.

So while the Kinsella's during the tail end of the farm crisis in the the 1980s might have been struggling a bit financially and that plot point being an easy sell... now, if transposed into 2024, all those scenes would play as a huge gigantic joke.

If I were to grade Field of Dreams, it's probably the quintessential "C" average film for me. If it's on, sure I can watch it and enjoy it, but it doesn't really do anything for me. Just a well crafted, but far-fetched story and I know why people love it and I'm perfectly OK with that.

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