The 1980s and early ’90s may have been the glory years of baseball as portrayed/immortalized on the big screen. A genre that hadn’t been taken very seriously, or more to the point had been depicted haphazardly in the era before Technicolor, all of a sudden had become popular fodder for the imagination industry.in this century.
I won’t spoil too much of the narrative, but let’s just say, for example, that Cubs fans might have reason to bristle at the narrative ofwhich was released in 1993, even beyond the improbability of a Little Leaguer breaking his arm and through that trauma developing a 100-mph fastball and a ticket to the majors.
The movie ultimately was up for 11 Academy Awards and is remembered mostly for its portrayal of Gehrig’s famous “luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech, but it had to work around star Gary Cooper’s own baseball ignorance. The earliest baseball movies, of the ’40s and ’50s, didn’t exactly lean into authenticity when it came to depicting the game on the field, but they could get away with it in the days before the game became a TV staple.