Honoring MLB All-Star Week: Great films and books to celebrate America’s pastime

In honor of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Week, held in Seattle July 7-11, here are a handful of great movies and books that celebrate the game — and the art — of baseball.

Books

“The Cactus League” by Emily Nemens (2020). Nemens, who grew up in Seattle, structured her first novel like a baseball game: nine chapters, each focusing on a different character during baseball’s major-league spring training, interspersed with sports writer commentary. Their stories — a star outfielder, a near-retirement batting coach, a player’s wife, a sports agent — gradually and intoxicatingly converge under the cool February sunshine.

“The Dreyfus Affair” by Peter Lefcourt (1992). At once a comedic novel, sports satire and unexpectedly sweet love story, this is the tale of a married major-league shortstop in the throes of a pennant race — who inconveniently realizes that he’s attracted to his second baseman. A story seemingly made for the movies, it’s been in screen development for decades (most recently, the book was acquired in 2020 for a television series), but it works perfectly on the page.

“The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach (2011). Harbach’s debut novel has at its center a remarkably talented baseball prodigy: the elegantly named shortstop Henry Skrimshander, who at the book’s beginning is a teenager from South Dakota recruited to play college ball near Lake Michigan. The novel follows the fortunes of the team, as they go on to have the best season in the college’s history, and of Henry, who struggles to retrieve his former magic after an errant throw injures a teammate.

“The Brothers K” by David James Duncan (1992). My dad, who was a devoted baseball fan, loved this novel so much. It’s the story of a former major-league pitcher who settles in Camas, Clark County, to raise his family of six children. The New York Times described it as a “wildly excessive, flamboyantly sentimental, tear-jerking, thigh-slapping homage to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy — and the game of baseball.” (The K, of course, is for a strikeout.)

“Shoeless Joe” by W.P. Kinsella (1982). If you loved “Field of Dreams,” obviously you’ll love this, too, because this is the book on which the movie was based — a magic-realism tale inspired by the Black Sox Scandal (a 1919 incident in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the World Series) and by the love of baseball.

Movies

“Bull Durham” (1988). Any list of great baseball movies that doesn’t begin with this one is, in my opinion, highly suspect. Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins play out one of cinema’s great romantic triangles in Ron Shelton’s delicious mixture of atmospheric sports movie and sexy rom-com. Watch it, and see if you don’t find yourself joining the Church of Baseball.

“A League of Their Own” (1992). Penny Marshall’s irresistible comedy-drama follows a competitive pair of sisters (Geena Davis, Lori Petty) who join the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — which was a real thing, from 1943 to 1954. You’ll laugh (“There’s no crying in baseball!”), you’ll cry (that scene of Davis in her boardinghouse room weeping gets me every time), you’ll fall hard for this movie, which I need to rewatch, right now.

“Sugar” (2008). I’m always recommending this heartwarming baseball drama from writing/directing team Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (who went on to make 2019’s “Captain Marvel”), as not enough people have heard of it. Algenis Pérez Soto plays a 19-year-old pitcher from the Dominican Republic who’s recruited to the U.S. to play minor-league ball; it’s a moving, beautifully shot story of the elusiveness of the strike zone, and of one man’s American dream.

“Field of Dreams” (1989). Yes, this tale of an Iowa farmer (Kevin Costner, in his baseball-movie phase) who hears strange voices telling him to turn his cornfield into a ballpark is absolutely hokey, and yet … well, good luck resisting a movie in which James Earl Jones in his suspenders gives speeches about how when people come to watch baseball “it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters.” Just surrender to it. If you build it, they will come.

“Damn Yankees” (1958). Should you be in need of a baseball musical — and who among us isn’t? — this 65-year-old classic fits the bill, complete with some actual New York Yankees in archival footage. Bonus: If you got hooked on the “Fosse/Verdon” miniseries a few years back, here’s the real thing, with Gwen Verdon (reprising her Tony Award-winning stage role) performing Bob Fosse’s choreography — and, briefly, dancing with him in a sizzling mambo.