11 baseball films that left Make Me Jane Leavy’s Park | Interviews

Jane Leavy knows baseball. And she really likes baseball. She is a former sports editor and author of bestsellers on Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle. His new book is Make me commissioner: I know what is wrong with baseball and how to fix it. The book is a clever mixture of history, personal connections and information based on the search for countless games as a fan for life. She writes on how baseball was affected by technological changes, “money -maker” mathematics to television cameras that have sheltered on the playground, the transition from families to billionaires to billionaires, even the way stadiums are designed, the passage of “the sun is pitchclock”, keeping the action to an estimate that there is only 17 minutes of action in a baseball game. She explains how they affected the game and what it would take to bring a new generation of fans to fall in love with what we called the American hobby.

I particularly appreciated his chapter on the bananas of Savannah, a minor league team that concerns fans – even their name came from a fan. I learned the most from his chapter on “Tommy John surgery” that more than a third of professional launchers end up needing, his conversations with the architect of the baseball stadium, Janet Marie Smith, and his criticism of the failure of baseball to support black players, while indicating the historic time of Jackie Robinson in the major league as a key to its history. What passes on each page is how much she likes each piece of the game, her players and her coaches and her managers. She also likes baseball films and I asked her to share her favorites with me.

“Pride des Yankees”

Because of Gary Cooper’s chin. Because sometimes I need a good cry. Because the marble at the old Yankee Stadium was a long noisy ball from my grandmother’s fair. Basically, your relationship with the game is personal, perhaps intimate.

“Bull Durham”

Because he celebrates the language of baseball, how they really speak and the answers practiced dictated by Crash Davis, the receiver of the big failed league, on how to answer a question without saying anything. Derek throw was an art master. The love story between Crash and Annie, the Ultimate Club -House Annie, is of course a metaphor for the love of the game – only more humid and funnier.

“A league apart”

He tells a story that was to be told about women who pinched for Major League Baseball during the Second World War. He obtains all the details and, in doing so, gives women an implicit credibility. Penny Marshall had it. Baseball is funny. “There are no crying in baseball.”

“Bang the drum slowly”

The best and most faithful Hollywood treatment of literary baseball fiction, Mark Harris’s novel on New York mammoths and the friendship between their star launcher and his terminal phase. Robert Deniro and Michael Moriarty are sublime. Beautiful.

“Eight men”

John Sayles’ important film on the 1919 Chicago Black Sox cheating scandal which has renewed the relevance now that MLB decided that the game was correct and that Donald Trump twisted weapons to make Pete Rose in the renowned temple.

“Moneyball”

The story of origin of baseball analytics with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill as a cuddly cuddly couple: Handsome Billy Beane, insurgent managing director of Oakland AS, and Hill, his guy in fictitious analysis, because the real one, Paul Depodesta, did not want any part of the film. As he was created in 201, eight years after Michael Lewis’ book, Analytics caused his teeth to the game. Bean’s methods were an old hat, and each managing director aspired to look like and dress like him. Hollywood took the usual liberties. Beane did not license the director of scouting Grady Fuson because he opposed the drafting of a large recipient. But the film was counting.

“The natural”

Barry Levinson changed the end of Bernard Malamud’s novel in 1952 to leave the big one, the great Robert Redford play the hero Robert Redford, invoking a magical realism as opposed to the simple realism. Redford knocks out the lights. Glenn Close, The Lady in White, summons the best of Roy Hobbs damaged. Irresistible.

Tie: “Bad news wear” And “Angels in the outside field”

Walter Matthau and Christopher Lloyd with wings.

“Dream field”

I hated the novel by WS Kinsella, the overworked novel “Sho school Joe”, and I hate everything he is led. Especially the games on the Dreams field of MLB in 2021-2023, does not play on the Hollywood diamond sculpted in an Iowa cornfield but in a pop-up stadium designed to look old with a false pine adhesive padding. And these Ray Liotta corn trachers came out of Sho school Joe Jackson looking for redemption? Plastic. The landscaper, Chris Krug, told me. He was the recipient of the Cubs whose wandering launch allowed the only race to mark in the perfect game of Sandy Koufax. But I am an aspirant for James Earl Jones, more now that he has gone. And this book scene played very well in 2025.

“Damn Yankees”

The 1950s: When people wanted to play baseball so much, they would conclude an agreement with the devil. Everything Lola wants.