Geek Girl Navigating the World – Baseball Movies Are a Different Story

Geeks come in many different types with a range of interests. While there are some pretty common overlaps, I think it’s a little bit difficult to describe what a typical geek is. Even in areas with a small concentration of geeks, you’ll probably discover that each and every one of them is going to do something or like something that doesn’t fall within the realm of what you’d assume a geek is.

I’m no exception. Sure, I’ve got a comic book collection and one heck of a personal library. For that matter, my DVD collection is a sight to behold. There is one particular genre of movies that I really enjoy that just doesn’t quite fit in with all the others. It’s a bit like that song on Sesame Street, you know the one, that song that goes “one of these things is not like the others.” (I apologize if I’ve just gotten that stuck in your head.) This is the time of year that I usually break out those oddball movies and start to watch them.

March is typically kind of a lost month in the world of television. The programming segues from the Superbowl to March Madness, and most networks don’t bother to compete with the seemingly endless array of basketball games available for viewers. A person can’t go anywhere without seeing mentions of brackets and playoff specials. There will be a few reruns and some half-hearted attempts at show marathons so fans can catch up on plotlines before sweeps hits, but by and large, March makes me truly grateful for my DVD player.

March is also the first appearance of nice weather, which, where I live, means it’s spotty at best. The week will start with a couple of days in the 50s or 60s, but those glorious sunny days soon give way to snow, rain, and the cold dreary pattern that only serves to remind us that winter hasn’t quite left entirely. Still, those brief interludes of warmth and brightness bring to mind that most un-geeklike interest of mine:  baseball.

I admit it, I played baseball when I was very young, in those leagues where score doesn’t matter and most of the kids aren’t coordinated enough to smack the ball off the tee onto the field. I wasn’t very good, either; there’s a reason little kids get relegated to the outfield that early in their baseball careers, and I was a shining example of why. Still, though, it was fun. I learned enough of the rules that I can understand what’s going on in any given game, which puts me further ahead as a casual spectator than I am with any other sport.

To this day, I love watching games if I’m in the stands. The city where I live has a minor league team, and I truly enjoy going to at least one or two games a season. I’ve been to major league games that I enjoyed just as much. Games on TV do nothing for me; I just don’t think they’re interesting at all. The energy in the stands is what fuels the experience, and the joy of audience participation is what really holds the appeal, I suppose. The closest that I get to actually playing anymore is the occasional game of catch. I still pretty much belong in the outfield. Well, really, my skill level probably means that it’s best for me to just stay in the stands.

That might not seem like it has much to do with movies, but it really does. I’m unashamed to admit that I love watching baseball movies. Yes, there’s a part of me that, every year in the spring, thrills to the idea of pulling out the baseball DVDs and firing up the DVD player.

I think it all started with the movie The Sandlot. First of all, the main character is a pretty geeky little kid. He didn’t understand anything about sports, and he certainly didn’t know anything about baseball. To make matters worse, he didn’t really seem to care. He’d moved to a new town and managed to fall in with a group of boys who played baseball and needed someone else to make a full team. The whole team of kids was pretty much a crew of misfits. I could certainly relate on that level. Then, of course, there was the monster dog in the junkyard next to the abandoned lot where the kids played, which lent the plot a little bit of a fantasy element, because that dog was not only larger than life, he was a legend in his neighborhood. The Sandlot was funny and felt like it was about real kids; even though it was a fairly simple story, it was the kind of movie that can really resonate, because somewhere, sometime, we’ve all met kids like that or we were kids like that.

Very close to that time, Rookie of the Year also came out. This was another baseball story about kids and had an even more obvious connection to fantasy. The movie was about a boy who broke his arm. After the cast came off, it turned out he went from an ordinary kid on an ordinary team to a kid who could pitch a record-setting fastball. Naturally, he got recruited to pitch for a major league team. Again, this one had quite a bit of comedy. It’s probably got one of my favorite Daniel Stern characters of all time in it, Phil Brickman. Brickman is affable and completely bizarre, but doesn’t seem to carry around the hopelessness that Stern’s characters usually do. Every time I get to the scene where Brickman gets trapped between the doors of the adjoining hotel rooms, I laugh so hard that it hurts–and I’ve watched this movie more times than I’d care to admit.

Little Big League also came out around the same time. When a boy inherits the Minnesota Twins from his grandfather, he takes over as manager of the team. Again, it’s easy to argue the fantasy elements in this one, but it’s a fun story about a pretty ordinary kid who does some extraordinary things. This one had a little less comedy than either The Sandlot or Rookie of the Year, but it still had its moments. Mostly, though, this is one of those baseball stories that is about the underdog team making good and turning their season around as they remember how to work together as a team.

Underdog stories aren’t anything new in the realm of baseball movies. I would be horribly remiss in the writing of this article if I didn’t mention the Major League franchise. Major League is the baseball movie that I’m probably most likely to watch at any given time of the year. When the new owner of the Cleveland Indians gets the team, she immediately puts together the worst team of unlikely misfits she could ever hope to assemble in order to be able to relocate the team to Miami. Her plan backfires once the team finds out, and they start winning. I think this movie is hilarious. First of all, you’ve got Corbin Bernsen playing an egotistical jerk and perennial tough guy Tom Berenger playing an aging former star who’s so close to down and out even he doesn’t think he stands a chance of making the worst team in the league. The cast is full of actors who created great characters, and it’s one of the best underdog stories in a genre that’s flooded with them.

Major League II picks up a season later with the same cast and a pretty similar story line. It’s still pretty funny, and it remains watchable. It isn’t one of the baseball movies that I watch more than once a year, certainly, but I still look forward to the annual viewing. I do have to admit, I haven’t watched any of the other sequels. Without the same characters, it’s harder to care that there’s another Major League movie out there, and it’s much harder to convince myself that I should probably watch it.

Both of the Major League movies are really about the team, but there are individual underdog movies, too. Take Mr. Baseball, for example. Tom Selleck plays Jack Elliott, a former star who ends up being traded to a Japanese team. Of course, Selleck’s character hates Japan, hates the team, and is utterly convinced that he’s far too good for what is happening to him. It’s a comedy and a fish out of water story, and it’s kind of fun to watch Selleck be an arrogant idiot through most of the film. Of course, he does change his mind, and there’s a love story in there, too. It’s also interesting to see that in a culture as different as Japan’s is from ours, the baseball remains essentially the same, though the stadiums do come with much different trappings and a different fan culture than ours.

Baseball movies aren’t all about the guys, either. A League of Their Own is all about the women’s professional baseball league and stars Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Madonna, and Rosie O’Donnell, along with Tom Hanks. It, too, has some comedy, but it’s mostly about the women on the team and how, while they enjoyed playing baseball, they were more than just women baseball players. This movie was the first one that I really remember Tom Hanks playing a character who was less than the average, high-strung but ultimately nice guy. Jimmy Dugan, the manager of the Georgia Peaches team, yells at the women quite a bit, including delivering that famously quotable line “There’s no crying in baseball!” Well, sure there was, but A League of Their Own really kept away from just showing that girls would only be able to play baseball like girls. They held their own, and it made for an imminently more likable movie.

There are other baseball movies out there that I haven’t mentioned, movies like The Natural and Bull Durham and The Scout. Some of them are included in my DVD collection, or on the list of movies that I’ll get some day. Some of them I won’t be buying any time soon. Although, looking back on my list, I’m starting to realize that maybe my love of baseball movies isn’t so ungeeky after all. What’s a baseball movie, really, except a different way to set up a quest story? The team is just another form of a fellowship, and more often than not, some fairly commonplace set-ups are really just elements of the fantastic that the audience doesn’t even realize are there.

So, if the approach of spring makes you feel like pulling out a few DVDs and firing up the player, go for it. Even if it seems counter to your geekishness, it probably isn’t. Really, it’s not like anyone will take away your geek points, right?