The Baseball Film

The Baseball Film PDF Author: Aaron Baker
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813596904
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Baseball has long been viewed as the Great American Pastime, so it is no surprise that the sport has inspired many Hollywood films and television series. But how do these works depict the game, its players, fans, and place in American society? This study offers an extensive look at nearly one hundred years of baseball-themed movies, documentaries, and TV shows. Film and sports scholar Aaron Baker examines works like A League of their Own (1992) and Sugar (2008), which dramatize the underrepresented contributions of female and immigrant players, alongside classic baseball movies like The Natural that are full of nostalgia for a time when native-born white men could use the game to achieve the American dream. He further explores how biopics have both mythologized and demystified such legendary figures as Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Fernando Valenzuela. The Baseball Film charts the variety of ways that Hollywood presents the game as integral to American life, whether showing little league as a site of parent-child bonding or depicting fans’ lifelong love affairs with their home teams. Covering everything from Bull Durham (1988) to The Bad News Bears (1976), this book offers an essential look at one of the most cinematic of all sports.

The Baseball Film

The Baseball Film PDF Author: Aaron Baker
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813596904
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book Here

Book Description
Baseball has long been viewed as the Great American Pastime, so it is no surprise that the sport has inspired many Hollywood films and television series. But how do these works depict the game, its players, fans, and place in American society? This study offers an extensive look at nearly one hundred years of baseball-themed movies, documentaries, and TV shows. Film and sports scholar Aaron Baker examines works like A League of their Own (1992) and Sugar (2008), which dramatize the underrepresented contributions of female and immigrant players, alongside classic baseball movies like The Natural that are full of nostalgia for a time when native-born white men could use the game to achieve the American dream. He further explores how biopics have both mythologized and demystified such legendary figures as Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Fernando Valenzuela. The Baseball Film charts the variety of ways that Hollywood presents the game as integral to American life, whether showing little league as a site of parent-child bonding or depicting fans’ lifelong love affairs with their home teams. Covering everything from Bull Durham (1988) to The Bad News Bears (1976), this book offers an essential look at one of the most cinematic of all sports.

Great Baseball Films

Great Baseball Films PDF Author: Rob Edelman
Publisher: Carol Publishing Corporation
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


The Baseball Film in Postwar America

The Baseball Film in Postwar America PDF Author: Ron Briley
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786484799
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This work focuses on the baseball movie genre in the years following World War II, beginning with the 1948 biopic The Babe Ruth Story and ending with the 1962 Mickey Mantle-Roger Maris vehicle Safe at Home!, when the consensus was that conflict should be limited in American society by emphasizing economic growth and a strong stand against Communism. This study of selected films indicates, however, that this strategy was not entirely effective; while offering a certain amount of nostalgia, these films could not provide shelter from the storm gathering in postwar America which challenged conventional ideas of race, gender and class and broke in the 1960s.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game PDF Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066231
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

Stars, Stripes and Diamonds

Stars, Stripes and Diamonds PDF Author: Marshall G. Most
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476634629
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Since the Progressive Era, baseball has been promoted as an institution encapsulating the best of American values and capable of bridging the chasms of twentieth century American culture--urban versus rural, industry versus agriculture, individual versus community, immigrant versus native, white versus color. Among the more enthusiastic of the game's proponents have been American filmmakers, and baseball films present perhaps the purest depiction of baseball's vision of an idealized America. This critical study treats baseball cinema as a film genre and explores the functions of baseball ideology as it is represented in that genre. It focuses on how Hollywood's presentation of baseball has served not only to promote dominant values, but also to bridge cultural conflicts. Commentary on 85 films deals with issues of race, community, gambling, players, women, and owners. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Baseball

Baseball PDF Author: Geoffrey C. Ward
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0679765417
Category : Baseball
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
With more than 500 photographs -- Introduction by Roger Angell -- Essays by Thomas Boswell, Robert W. Creamer, Gerald Early, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bill James, David Lamb, Daniel Okrent, John Thorn, George E Will -- And featuring an interview with Buck O'Neil

Shoeless Joe

Shoeless Joe PDF Author: W. P. Kinsella
Publisher: Rosetta Books
ISBN: 0795311710
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The novel that inspired Field of Dreams: “A lyrical, seductive, and altogether winning concoction.” —The New York Times Book Review One of Sports Illustrated’s 100 Greatest Sports Books “If you build it, he will come.” When Ray Kinsella hears these mysterious words spoken in the voice of an Iowa baseball announcer, he is inspired to carve a baseball diamond in his cornfield. It is a tribute to his hero, the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose reputation was forever tarnished by the scandalous 1919 World Series. What follows is a timeless story that is “not so much about baseball as it is about dreams, magic, life, and what is quintessentially American” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). “A triumph of hope.” —The Boston Globe “A moonlit novel about baseball, dreams, family, the land, and literature.” —Sports Illustrated

Joe E. Brown

Joe E. Brown PDF Author: Wes D. Gehring
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786483512
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
As a young boy in the depths of the 1890s depression, Joe E. Brown had a job: making faces at the firemen on passing coal-burning trains so they would throw coal at him. As a child he also worked as a circus acrobat and newsboy. His inventiveness and spunk helped his family get through hard times but also fueled his fascination with entertainment, and he built up a repertoire of rubber-faced expressions and funny antics that would make his stage and screen work memorable. Baseball was a favorite pursuit in his life and thus a recurring theme in his films and skits. In this biography--the first on one of the top film comedians of the 1930s--the reader learns of Joe's challenging childhood and how it prepared him for later screen roles, and how his love of baseball translated into screen successes. His early career in vaudeville is discussed, his work as a Broadway comedian in the Roaring Twenties, his road to movie stardom, and how he parlayed his love of sports into big hits like 1930's Elmer the Great. The year 1935 gets its own chapter; its films are considered the pinnacle of Brown's career, including Alibi Ike, Bright Lights and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The final chapters reveal what happened after he left Warner Bros., including the bittersweet 1940s, when he entertained troops around the globe while mourning a son lost to the war. The book concludes with a comprehensive filmography of his features from 1928 to 1963.

Baseball: The Movie

Baseball: The Movie PDF Author: Noah Gittell
Publisher: Triumph Books
ISBN: 1637275811
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
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.

The Baseball Filmography, 1915 through 2001, 2d ed.

The Baseball Filmography, 1915 through 2001, 2d ed. PDF Author: Hal Erickson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476607850
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 559

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Book Description
Since the first baseball movie (Little Sunset) in 1915, Hollywood has had an on-again, off-again affair with the sport, releasing more than 100 films through 2001. This is a filmography of those films. Each entry contains full cast and credits, a synopsis, and a critique of the movie. Behind-the-scenes and background information is included, and two sections cover baseball shorts and depictions of the game in non-baseball films. An extensive bibliography completes the work.