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The honorable mentions are too long to list, but the recent Jackie Robinson biopic, 42, was solid and informative. I’m also partial to The Sandlot and Angels in the Outfield, both about the deep connection that one can build to the game as a child. The innocence with which one can approach the game of baseball as a young kid is reflected and purified in both movies, timeless pieces in their own right.

This is where it got hard. I have a list of six movies and eliminating one from the final five has been challenging. I keep waiting for a sign, a miracle of sorts, from the Kansas vs. Detroit contest playing in the background as I write this. None has come, so after much finagling I had to give Field of Dreams, the Kevin Costner classic, the last spot on the honorable mentions list. If you build it, they will come, is perhaps as misquoted as Sally Field’s “you like me, you really like” me Oscar speech. In fact, Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Black Sox Scandal told Costner “if you build it, he will come,” prophesizing that Costner’s father would appear as a ghost if he constructed a baseball field. Full of kitsch, baseball lore, and heartstring pulls, the 1989 Best Picture nominee will live in the pantheon of classic baseball movies forever.

Alas, in my opinion, there are five better baseball movies (and Kevin Costner may have his day, yet).

5. A League of Their Own

Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Madonna, and Rosie O’Donnell - on a baseball field. This has to be the wet dream of…some demographic I can’t quite pin. But, in honesty, this movie has always brought a smile to my face. It’s World War II and many baseball players are off to war. A magnate convinces other MLB team owners to sponsor a women’s only league at this time. The themes of optimism, hope, and despair, should therefore be immediately apparent.

Yeah, the movie has all the kitsch one may expect from an early 1990s fairy tal - —the troubled hero (the alcoholic, washed-up coach played by Hanks), the recalcitrant misfit (both Madonna and Rosie’s characters), and the adorable lead facing obstacle after obstacle (Davis in one of her best performances).

The denouement, however, is anti-climatic and unexpected enough to earn this movie a mention here. The whole point, of course, was that no one was really winning in these troubled times - self-discovery and close personal bonds were the point of the whole endeavor. Simply and subtly, but also effectively, the movie conveys these emotions.

Of the ones on the list, it is the only one to have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, a witness to its timeless and emotional value.

4. Bull Durham

If Field of Dreams and A League of Their Own blended interpersonal drama/kitsch into the game, Bull Durham does so 10 times over and unapologetically.

Before he was the timeless Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner single-handedly reinvented the baseball movie in the late 1980s with the soft-edged quasi-rom-com, Bull Durham. A mostly washed-up catcher in the minor leagues, Costner is tasked with preparing a young Tim Robbins, a stellar pitching prospect for an unnamed team (playing with its minor league affiliate, the Durham Bulls), Costner mostly dazzles as he explores the ups and downs of the brutality of making a successful career in baseball.

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