Baseball: The Movie - An Interview with Author Noah Gittell

0:00 On today's Film and Whiskey, we welcome back friend of Show Noah Gettel, who's just written a new book called Baseball the Movie. We talk about movies. We talk about baseball. We talk about Whiskey. What more could you possibly want from an episode of this podcast that's all ahead on Film and Whiskey? All right, We are joined today by friend of show Noah Gettel. He is an author and film critic.

0:41 And crucially, he has written a new book, which we've just found out is his first book. So first of all, congratulations Sir. Thank you fellas. You did it. You've you've accomplished it. And a hell of a book it is. It's called Baseball The Movie. First of all, I want to say thank you for not adding 18 extraneous subtitles to the book. It's just baseball, the movie, and you get everything you need to know from that because it is so much about not just the sport of baseball, but how it has been immortalized on film and how the two kind of interplay with each other. I can't wait to dive into it. Noah, welcome to the show. Thank you. And thank you for the compliment because there were some people who maybe wanted me to add some subtitles under the end of that and I I resisted pretty hard.

1:25 So I'm glad to know I made the right decision. As two guys who, like you know, went to seminary, our pastors are in the Christian realm. The amount of like John Ortberg titles with like 57 subtitles, it's just not my jam. I'm not interested. Just say what you want to say and get out. Appreciate that. Well, when you come up with a title as clear as Baseball the Movie, why gum up the works with a bunch of nonsense words, right? Well, Brad and I feel like truly valuable members of the media because we've been sent a galley copy to review and man, oh man, I have just torn through this thing. It is just incredible writing.

2:07 I'm really, I don't know man. I'm really impressed by your ability to weave not just your personal thoughts on the movies, but your own attachment to some of these films. And also always be situating us in the sort of Americana of it all and how baseball movies reflect the Americana of their time, but they also influence the Americana, you know, like the the corpus of Americana for years to come after these movies enter it. And I, you know I just, I want to throw over to you man and and give us a little bit of your inspiration for writing the book. But also like why is this the angle that you took. You know, you could have just written a a pretty easy here's the best Baseball movies of all time book.

2:47 But you wanted to do something bigger with it, and I think it the book is much more successful for that. Well, thank you. And, you know, I knew if I was going to spend several years on this project, which is what it has ended up being, it had to be a topic that I wouldn't mind spending several years with, really living with, like talking to my wife about at the breakfast table, you know, watching these movies over and over again. And baseball movies have always been my comfort food ever since I was a child. I mean, I grew up in the late 80s and early 90s, which was really the high watermark for the baseball movie genre. I was a huge baseball fan as a kid. Angels in the outfield, You know, Rookie of the Year. Those are the classes we're talking about, right? Well, not exactly.

3:33 The book. They are referenced in the book for sure, but I would not call those the high watermark. And the the less said about my take on The Sandlot, perhaps the better. I don't know, but I will say that like baseball is a sport of nostalgia. I'm not personally that interested in nostalgia. I think it's such a it's a flattening thing. As a critic, like nostalgia doesn't do much for me. Unless you want to unpack it and figure out what it means that we love this thing that represents a prior time in our life or a prior time in America. And to me, just writing a celebratory book of of baseball films would be to feed into that nostalgia. And to me, that's not what it means to love something, a film or anything else.

4:16 To properly love something is to understand it as as deeply as you can. And this writing, this book was was an act of love towards the genre that I really care about. And it's to understand the baseball movie, you have to understand that it is a collision of two national pastimes, right? It's baseball and movies. These are the things that defined American culture for so much of the first half of the 20th century. And much of the second-half as well. And these days, not as much as it used to, and that's interesting to unpack as well, but it made it this sort of like, I don't want to say this propaganda item because I don't think it was that pernicious, but a great way to sort of measure changes in American culture, in American Society over the years, because baseball was this perfect symbol of America and because movies magnified and magnified that symbol, you know, and and and made it larger than life.

5:14 So I just had a great time looking at these movies, separating them into eras and what each of those eras represented and learning something about baseball and about Hollywood and maybe a little bit about the country as well. And we do just want it to be known to our listeners that the official stance of the Film and Whiskey Podcast is that movies and whiskey are the primary combining factor of American history. But Noah, you're allowed to have your opinion. We we like to give our guests a little leeway on this show. Oh, like, like everyone else. You know, I love to go to the ballpark and get a big 20 ounce of whiskey and enjoy a a baseball. You know, if we were talking about, like, players of the early 1900s, we could just talk about how drunk they were during the game.

6:02 And that would be a, you know, a perfect segue. Movies. Whiskey and baseball. So Noah, we did an episode a couple seasons ago where we went through our top five baseball movies. And I don't want this to kind of devolve into just regurgitating that. And so I want to take a little bit of a a different tack. And I'm sure that as you go on your press tour for this book, you're going to get asked about your favorite baseball movie a million times. So let's let's try to do something a little bit different here. I'm really intrigued by the last part of your book where you signify that there's a few movies that come out in the mid 2000s and and early 20 tens starting with the Jimmy Fallon movie fever pitch that kind of get at. I think the way you phrase it is how does how does a baseball movie succeed in an era of anti romanticism? You know, we're living in a much more cynical time now. And also the popularity of the sport itself has seemed to kind of wane in in recent years.

6:58 Where does the baseball movie go from here? And I think that's what I'm really interested to talk to you about today. Are you concerned for the future of this genre? Is there still a genre to to speak of at this point? Yeah. So what happened in the 2000s, in my opinion, is we entered this era in which authenticity was more prized in cinema. And you know, we did an episode on Armageddon not that long ago, and a lot happened between when Armageddon was made and Fever Pitch was made. I mean, one thing is that 911 happened and the culture changed, right? And like all of a sudden giant action flicks with CGI and and romantic movies, like, they were just sort of out of fashion and we were seeking something more immediate and authentic.

7:44 And I think you see that for example and like what is the great action franchise of the 2000s, the Bourne movies, you know, which have this immediacy and and a kind of liberal slant as well. I think that really is reflective of of what was going on in the country at the time And and So what happens to the baseball movie, these these movies that are just steeped in Americana and old fashioned heroism and and things like that, they were really out of fashion. Well, they kind of look elsewhere for their heroes. They kind of dig deeper underneath the values that baseball movies take for granted. Deeper pitch is such an interesting example to me, and it's it really is. I don't spend a lot of time on it in the book, but it is one of my favorite baseball movies because it it examines the way that like baseball can sort of ruin your life.

8:33 You know, like that's a movie about a Red Sox fan, but the long-suffering Mets fan. I certainly relate to what it feels like to identify with a team that just makes you miserable all the time and and it tortures you and it makes you question like, why am I doing this? And you start counting the hours and and days and weeks of your life you've spent just being miserable watching this team play. And I think that's a really important turn for the baseball movie, that it's sort of throwing out the values that we've taken for granted and it's seeking A deeper understanding of the game. And then you have, you know, Moneyball came a few years later, which is a real merging of like old archetypes with a new way of doing things. And that movie obviously speaks far beyond baseball. In fact, I think that movie is probably a baseball movie that non baseball fans like the most.

9:22 And then you get into this other area where baseball movies are sort of they're looking at marginalized groups in the game who have not been given their time in the sun. In baseball movies. You know, 42 is sort of a retelling of old Jackie Robinson stories. I don't think that movie is. I enjoy it, but I don't think it's that interesting, really. I think Fences is a really interesting Negro Leagues movie, even though there's no baseball in it. It tells the story of the Negro Leagues through the Denzel Washington character far better than any Jackie Robinson story ever has. And then there's a movie like Sugar, which has it's developing this reputation as sort of a classic in the genre among people who know, you know, baseball has been terrible about telling the story of Latin born players, Dominican players and from other other countries in the Caribbean and Latin America.

10:10 Baseball's been bad about it. Hollywood's been bad about it too, because they don't want you thinking about people like the lead character in Sugar. Who is this minor leaguer who gets brought in from the Dominican Republic and really struggles and in the end kind of has to decide whether he even wants to keep playing this game. And that's a rare story for a baseball movie to tell with a guy's actually thinking about quitting and and he's not going to make it to the majors and he's struggling and he's taking amphetamines and he doesn't feel at home in the country. It's it's a really subversive movie and and you know, that's basically laying out the whole last chapter of the book here. So sorry for the spoilers, but the idea here is that the baseball movie as it once was just really could not exist anymore in the 21st century.

10:56 The culture had changed too much. And that leads us to the point right now where there hasn't been a baseball movie with a major release really since everybody wants some in 2016, and I don't know if we'd even call that a major release. Instead what we're getting is a lot of documentaries and I think that speaks to changes in the Hollywood ecosystem and you know sort of a a how baseball culture has changed into something that has a little more information based than experience based. And I don't know if that's a good change or not, but I think the full story of the baseball movie is yet to be written. I I do think it's still present and it's still evolving. Spoiler alert, If something becomes wildly information based, it's not going to make for a good movie. I think that's right.

11:42 Like Moneyball does it as best as you probably could do that and and still have an enjoyable film but I I'm with you Noah that that seems like a a disappointing trend for something that's so classic for America. I I think that this is going to sound very basic but I know that there's a lot of people who listen to our podcast that are are more whiskey based. They like listen to our whiskey segments. Can you just give us a basic definition in the in the film world of Americana? Oh boy, that's a that's actually a difficult question. I mean I think in a way in in in the idea of film. I think you could talk talk about it as sort of a fetishization of American values.

12:25 You know kind of something like a like a post war era sort of value system and yeah holding it up as a as a as a these these post war American values as a cultural artifact sort. And certainly and you know, not really, not really trying to look look underneath those values and and see the true factors at play, but sort of offering a a shallow but the very compelling vision of of America's exceptionalism. You know, Noah, as I got into the book, I really found myself wondering, you have it split up kind of by era of chronologically, like from way back in the 30s and 40s all the way to the modern day. Was there an era for you that was the most difficult to kind of get your arms around?

13:17 And I I mean, I have kind of a, it's a leading question, 'cause I have a movie that I really want to talk about. But I feel like some baseball eras are much more straightforward about what they think of the game, what they think of, how that reflects America and others get a little bit more tangled up and and knotted. So for you personally, as a lover of baseball movies, what was the easiest era for you? What was the hardest one for you to write about? It's an interesting question because you would think it would be the 80s and 90s cause those are the movies I grew up with. But that actually made it harder because I had such nostalgia for those films that it was it was a little harder to be critical of them or really find the right critical lane or critical Ave. for them.

14:04 Also, because people love those movies so much and know them so much, I felt I felt a lot of pressure. I think actually the 70s era was the easiest for me. There are only three movies in that section, so that helped. But I'm just pretty comfortable. I've done a lot of thinking and a lot of writing about the cultural and political forces in the 70s already. So it was pretty easy to to, you know, parse that out and and lean on my knowledge base there. And I actually had not seen the original bad news pairs when I, like, started writing this book. I know, I don't know how I missed it. It was crazy. But I loved that movie so much when I finally did catch up with it, it's a top five baseball movie for me now.

14:44 So it was. It was fun to watch, to write about that. Sort of like having newly fallen in love with it. Yeah, you know, I totally had something kind of similar recently. I sat down and watched Field of Dreams for the first time, and I don't know how long. And as I was watching it, I I kind of had this realization. Have I ever actually watched this movie front to back before or have I just seen it in bits and pieces on cable? And man, like, you know, this is held up as like the paragon of baseball movies. And I was kind of shocked to see how, first of all, how little baseball is actually in it. But also how you know, if you want to talk about baseball as a metaphor or as a symbol, this movie is like the apex of that. Because it's not really about baseball at all, is it? I totally agree.

15:32 I had a hard time writing about it. And you know, somebody on another podcast asked me to like define what is a baseball movie. And I said it's really hard to do because the best definition you can come up with will have the exceptions. And typically I would say something like a baseball movie is a movie where the baseball moves the plot forward in some way. But Field of Dreams it does not at all. Like the the baseball action in that movie is almost it's completely incidental to the plot, right. But on the other hand, it is about baseball perhaps more than any other movie that's ever been made. So it is, it is really a hard one to pin down. I had AI had a quote from Michael Scherer that I didn't actually use in that chapter. I used a different one because he was writing a he wrote a A series.

16:19 He was going to adapt it into ATV Series A couple years ago, and it got dropped by Amazon just before they started shooting. But he said that when he went to his writers room before they started writing it, he said that this movie is like a giant. It's like a giant bubble, like it's that delicate. It's delicate and it shimmers and it looks different from different angles. And we have to be stewards of this bubble and make sure it doesn't pop. And I thought that was so fascinating because it just it explains how precarious the whole movie is that if you start pulling at the threads, like the whole thing just kind of falls apart. Yeah, it's just really interesting, kind of. And I don't know, political document, like it's very clearly this like apology. You know, I don't.

17:03 I don't know if it's a defense or an actual apology on behalf of, like, the boomers that made this movie that, you know, we were these young liberals at one time. And now we've slipped into conservativism. And it's like, there's a lot of Reagan going through this movie. But, like, at the end of the day, it's also very much like, we want we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want to be able to say that, like, we still have this liberal streak in us, but we've settled down. We live on farms now, and that's OK. And baseball is the metaphor for America that allows us to, like, be OK with that decision. Like, hey, time marches on. But baseball's still here and it allows us to tap into our nostalgia and still be OK with the with the way things have shaken out, really interesting, like political point of view going on in this movie that I was not expecting in my baseball film. If I'm being honest, man.

17:57 It's like a sequel to The Big Chill. Yeah, yeah. Right, which Kevin Costner was famously in for half a second. So that's pretty interesting, though I do get into that in the book. The politics of that are really fascinating. I spend a lot of time on it in that chapter actually. I've been thinking about Moneyball and like, what a watershed that is in the history of the baseball movie because it is such a it's such an anti, not an anti baseball movie, but it's anti what we've come to know as a baseball movie in terms of, like, negating it. In a lot of ways it's about the informational side of things. And yet they still can't land the plane on that movie without putting like the big climactic game at the end of that movie. So you still have to fall into the tropes. But part of me wonders if you know Brad when we were in seminary and if you take public speaking classes, this is like one of the first things they ever tell you is like, don't use sports metaphors when you're talking with large groups of people.

18:50 Because, like, you will lose your audience immediately if they're not intimately familiar with the rules of football. Like, you can't make a football reference and. And I kind of wonder if like that standard has crept into movie making in a lot of ways where yes, sports is still the thing that unites us the most. We still watch the Super Bowl every year, but the sort of anti sports movie seems to be more generally accepted now than like your your straightforward sports film. And I'm kind of wondering too, like Noah, if you were tasked with writing a baseball movie to continue this genre, like where would you go with it? Because Brad and I have had this conversation about sports films in general. I can't remember the last time a truly great sports movie came out, not just baseball.

19:35 And the ones that do seem to be really focused on contextualizing their sport in a particular time. Like, I think about Cinderella Man. I think about even like Seabiscuit, a movie that I really like, because it's so perfectly ties together the ideas of modernization and the depression with that horse. Like, is that the way forward with baseball is to is to talk about it in past terms, or is there a modern baseball story to be told here? You know, baseball is obviously not as popular as it once was. You know, numbers wise it's still doing quite well. Everybody's making a lot of money. People are seeing are going a lot of games. But it's it's third, you know, among the major sports in in America right now.

20:17 But in other countries it is still growing and popular. It's doing great in Japan and Korea. And you know, last year many of us were glued to our TV's watching the World Baseball Classic, watching teams from Great Britain and Australia and Israel and Czech Republic competing on a on a global stage. And to me, that's where the future of the baseball movie lies. I don't know that it will remain an American artifact in the future, certainly not the way it once was. But if you want to make a great baseball movie, you said it at the World Baseball Classic. There are so many storylines happening there.

20:59 You've got, obviously you've got the international thing, people from different countries competing. You've got you've got players who are not in the major leagues, like playing for their homeland, You know, like there there were people on Team Israel who were like minor leaguers in the major leagues for in in America, for example, but they're playing on Team Israel against America's major leagues. That's a really cool dynamic. You've got people who are out of the major leagues who are past their prime, but they're still playing for their home country in the World Baseball Classic. You guys, you've got young guys, you've got old guys. You've got people trying out for managerial roles in the major leagues by managing, you know, their home countries team.

21:40 There's so many kind of veteran rookie storylines happening there. And you've got the most important thing to get a baseball movie made, which is that you're building in an international audience. The reason the baseball movie took so long to really find its boom in American cinema is because it was widely understood to be box office poison overseas. There was a thought that people in other countries will not go to a baseball movie, and the two movies that really overturned that were Field of Dreams and Moneyball. But I think that only happened because they had huge movie stars that they could put on the posters. And baseball movies actually don't often have that because they're ensemble movies for the most part, and not movies driven by a major star. But if you can convince people, Hollywood executives, that a baseball movie is going to have an international audience all of a sudden, that completely changes the calculus. So to me, creating international storylines, setting the movie of the world, Baseball Classic, that kind of thing, is the path forward for the baseball movie in terms of creating a compelling story that speaks to our more, you know, global world and also making an financial calculus that makes sense to the suits.

22:52 And and who's Who's your movie star? Who? Who's drawing people in? For the ball, Well, that's a pretty big question, 'cause we don't have guys, you know, like Brad Pitt anymore, except Brad Pitt, who's still still hanging around. I don't know. You know, Glenn Powell was a pretty good baseball player, and everybody wants some. And he's still, he's still young enough that he could, he could be in a baseball movie. His star is on the rise. You're speaking Bob's language. Right now he. Loves him some Glenn Powell. The thing is, we don't have movie stars of a certain age that have baseball bodies anymore. Like you can't put Chalamet in a baseball movie. He's too. He's too slight like nor. Can you put Jason Momoa in a baseball movie? You need somebody like in the middle. Yeah, you can put Momoa in a movie that's about juicing and then you'd be like, oh, this is a really compelling Oscar bait movie, right?

23:45 You could you could play Jose Canseco. There you go. Well, Noah, before we get out of here, OK, we're we're casting and and writing your dream scenario here. Who's a filmmaker that you think could help resurrect this genre? Who's Because, you know, in the book, you kind of start the whole thing off by saying baseball is the most cinematic sport. And this is a thing that Brad and I have talked about a lot. There's something about the unique combination of inertness and then like bursts of energy that it allows film makers to really explore the sight lines, the geography, to situate an audience in a baseball field in a way you can't do with the fast pace of football or basketball. For instance, who's a filmmaker that you really want to see operate in this area, that that understands the rules of shooting a movie set on a baseball field? All right.

24:40 Boy, that's a tough question because none of these young film makers are really doing anything quite quite like this, to be honest with you. But see somebody who understands stillness. I mean, I think an easy answer would be, you know, you look at what Ryan Coogler did with a boxing movie and I would, I'd be pretty interested to see what he could do with a baseball movie. I think he could make it very dynamic. You know my mind is going to older film makers. I have to say like I, you know Spike Lee wanted to make a baseball movie. I talk about it in the book. He he had a Jackie Robinson script that is incredible. And I dissected in the script and I want more movies about the Negro Leagues, to be honest with you. There was a documentary about the Negro leagues that came out last year that I thought was fine. I didn't think it was particularly great. But there's so many great stories from that era and we're we're in such a we're in such a kind of golden age in terms of like uncovering history about the Negro Leagues. You know, the museum was opened not that long ago. And, you know, it's just, it just seems like there's people who care about baseball are putting a lot of thought and effort into learning about the Negro Leagues and honoring its history.

25:48 None of the Jackie Robinson movies really show much of the Negro Leagues. There was a great HBO movie called Soul of the Game in the 90s that was good but didn't get a lot of attention. I think that's what we need. So I I mean somebody like Ryan Coogler or another one of our great young black film makers, I would love to see them tackle something like that. I think that's the kind of thing that could keep the baseball movie fresh, because we're really finding, you know, unwritten stories from baseball's history that still deserve more of a spotlight. Brad, I want you to picture this for a minute. All right, let's let's go on the Spike Lee train. You know, the famous Spike Lee shot of his actor standing on the Dolly, like, floating down the street? The best version of it that we've watched for the podcast was at the end of Malcolm X, right?

26:31 I want you to picture a Spike Lee movie depicting the 1995 Cleveland Indians. And I don't know. Lakeith Stanfield is playing Kenny Lofton and Spike Lee saves that shot for Kenny Lofton stealing home, dude. Like. That is the best use of that shot in the history of that shot, dude. I mean, Kenny Lofton is my favorite Indians player from that era, so I'm sold already. I was going to recommend like a a horror baseball mix over We get Jordan Peele in here to direct a movie that I think that could be fascinating, I thought. You were gonna go with like a like a Ari Aster.

27:12 You know, it's funny, 'cause Noah was like, who's somebody that understands stillness? And I was like, oh gosh, please don't recommend like the, like the Celine song baseball movie, right? Like I don't know if that mashup would quite work as well. You know what, if a slow cinema is a baseball movie? I think that the MLB executives would have a conniption fit over that they're trying to speed up the game. They don't want slow cinema, baseball movies. As I say, you said like a a director who understands stillness paired with those bursts of action. I like this could be a wildly off answer. I think Edgar Wright could be an interesting director for a baseball movie. Oh. That's fun, yeah. Like, he has enough of his own stuff that would fit in there, but I I think he could be a really fun baseball director, especially as somebody who I am guessing did not grow up with baseball as their primary thing. To have an outside voice and thought process on it could be fascinating.

28:08 I got, I got a couple more that just sprung to mind. You know, we're talking about stillness, I mean, and confrontation. And, you know, the baseball is like, it would mesh very well with the Western, I think, with somebody who knows how to direct Westerns. So this is an insane idea. But how about a How about a Kelly Riker baseball? Movie. Oh, nice. You can't shoot. It in cut off with baseball. I was going to say you can't shoot it in Academy ratio though. Like you got to get my girl shooting these movies in like at least 185 just for the sake of seeing the stadium. No, no stadium shots. No crowd shots. Just the pitcher and and the batter. That's it. There you go. I want to see a Terrence Malick baseball film.

28:51 That's what we need to revive the baseball. Play it in a wheat field, yes. All right, everybody, this has been our friend Noah Getzel. Noah, I'm I'm so glad that you chose to spend a few moments with us talking about this book. The book is called Baseball The Movie. Noah, where can we find the book, and where can we find you on social media? The book is available at all the places people buy books, Amazon and Barnes and Noble and bookshop and Target. You can also find me on Twitter at Noah Gutel. I'm on TikTok a little bit and Instagram a little bit. And you can go to my website noahgutel.com, that's 2TS2LS and you'll see all the book information there as well as events that I have coming up.

29:37 All right. We'll be back on Tuesday with another regularly scheduled episode. But until then, I'm Bob Book. I'm Brad G. And we'll see you next time.