Baseball: The Movie

Featuring Field of Dreams, The Bad News Bears, A League of Their Own, and more: a probing and entertaining work at the intersection of pop culture and sports

Baseball has always been a symbol as much as a sport. With a blend of individual confrontation and team play, a luxurious pace, and an immaculate urban parkland setting, it offers a sunny rendering of the American Dream, both the hard work that underpins it and the rewards it promises. 

Film, America's other national pastime, which magnifies and mythologizes all it touches, has long been the ideal medium to canonize this aspirational idea. 

Baseball: The Movie is the first definitive history of this film genre that was born in 1915 and remains artistically and culturally vital more than a century later. Writer and critic Noah Gittell sheds light on well-known classics and overlooked gems, exploring how baseball cinema creates a stage upon which the American ideal is born, performed, and repeatedly redefined.

Traversing history and mythmaking, cynicism and nostalgia, this thoroughly researched book takes readers on a multifaceted tour of baseball on film.

Noah Gittell is a culture critic who has written for publications including The Atlantic, The Ringer, The Guardian, The Economist, The Los Angeles Review of Books, GQ, Esquire, Elle, and Wired. He has been the regular film critic for the Washington City Paper for the last eight years and is a frequent contributor to BBC’s “Talking Movies." He is also a mainstay at Smithsonian Associates, where he lectures several times a year on various film topics, including an annual presentation on the history of the Academy Awards.