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Posted by Alex Belth

I'd like to pick up on what guest blogger Chris Marcil wrote on baseball movies.

As a teenager, I saw "Field of Dreams" in the theater with a group of friends. We had all loved Bull Durham, which also starred Kevin Costner, and expected to be wowed again. Instead, our enthusiasm was slowly dampened by the movie's cloying sentimentality.

By the conclusion, we were all slightly nauseous. When Costner asked his father, "Dad, you wanna have a catch?" one of my friends could not contain himself any longer and blurted out the rudest thing he could think of.

It gave us a laugh even though it wasn't especially funny. But it was crude and that's what we wanted from a baseball movie. We thought we were going to get bawdy locker room humor and raunchy scenes like the ones featured in "Bull Durham," and HBO's overlooked 1987 movie, "Long Gone."

When my father saw "Field of Dreams," he cried. I thought he was a sucker. He promised that one day I too would be reduced to tears because "Field of Dreams" was not really about baseball but about the damaged relationships between fathers and sons. Not long after my father passed away a few years ago, I caught the movie on TV.

It was more watchable than I had remembered -- at least for the first hour while Costner's earnestness works. But the cloying feeling returned. By the end, I was restless again, fidgeting at the emotional strings that were being pulled by the filmmakers. I did not cry at the big moment. But I did feel close to my father and all the other men who bawl like babies when Costner and his ghost father have a catch. I appreciated why they were moved, and I don't think they are suckers.

We all know that there is no shortage of good baseball books. In fact, there might be more great writing about baseball than there is about any other sport with the exception of boxing. There are probably more good movies about boxing than there are about any sport, too.

Then why are baseball movies almost universally so bad? How come, with a handful of exceptions ("The Bad News Bears," "Bull Durham"), baseball has never translated well to the silver screen?

For starters, it is virtually impossible for the movies to recreate the cinematic or theatrical drama of watching the real athletes. The real Roy Hobbs was Josh Hamilton, hitting bomb after bomb during the 2008 home run derby. This dilemma was beautifully expressed by Roger Angell in his terrific analysis of baseball movies for the New Yorker:

"Watching actors taking their Aunt Hattie cuts at the plate, turning the twelve-second double plays (was that slow-mo, or what?), or striking out the side with high-parabola fastballs, we smile unpleasantly in the dark, smug in the knowledge that our sport and its practitioners are beyond imitation. This tingle of superiority isn't particularly satisfying, since we fans ...more than anyone else in the audience ...want the baseball on the screen to work, to sweep us up and make us care about the story, so we can forget how badly these guys on the screen play ball."

Everything is "heightened" in the wrong way -- in closeups and slow motion, drawing us too far in. The pitcher looking in for the sign, a bead of sweat rolling down his cheek, followed by a close up of the catcher's fingers, and the batter, grimacing like a cartoon monster.

Movies miss out on the true speed of the game -- from being tedious and boring, to a quick rush, a surge of movement and action.

"In sports," Ron Shelton, the director of "Bull Durham," once said, "there's really no 'big game.' I mean, there's always another game tomorrow or sometime soon. Real sports is more about the day-to-day stuff, which Hollywood doesn't care about."

Beyond aesthetics, the difficulty baseball movies -- and movies about any sport for that matter -- face are a matter of simple economics. Hollywood has always considered baseball movies box office poison. "Hear that silence?" former columnist-turned-screenwriter John Schulian said. "That's the sound of the cash registers when "Raging Bull" came out."

Recently, Shelton said that "Bull Durham" wouldn't be made today because so much of the money for independent films comes from abroad. As it was, "Durham" was financed at the eleventh hour, with Costner due to move to another project.

Even the combined star power of Brad Pitt and Steven Soderbergh couldn't save a movie version of "Moneyball" this summer. The film was halted just as production was set to begin. Soderbergh wanted to make the ultimate baseball movie and there is no reason to believe he couldn't have come close. The question is, would anyone want to see it?

Alex Belth is the founder of Bronx Banter (www.bronxbanterblog.com), now in its seventh season.