Baseball Movies: Scripts to Read Before the World Series
By Steven Hartman · October 2, 2023
What is it about baseball movies that tugs our heartstrings and makes us want to watch them over and over again? The baseball film genre reached peak popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s with such hits as Field of Dreams, A League of Their Own and The Sandlot. Even back then, these films referenced the times of playing ball in backyards and offered a more nostalgic time when baseball shined as America’s pastime.
It’s time to look at some of the best baseball films over the last 35 years and some of the scripts that can teach screenwriters ways to tell a heartwarming tale with lots of supporting characters and memorable moments.
Scripts from this Article
Bull Durham
Field of Dreams
Major League
The Sandlot
A League of Their Own
42
Moneyball
Bull Durham
It’s a love story and love letter to Minor League sports. Bull Durham became an instant classic, securing Kevin Costner’s role as a leading man and pushing both Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon into stardom. It also shows screenwriters the benefits of bringing your life into your writing – writer/director Ron Shelton crafted this story based on his own experience as a Minor League Baseball player (which he wrote about in his memoir The Church of Baseball).
Bull Durham follows the Minor League team the Durham Bulls during a summer season when struggling pitcher ‘Nuke’ LaLoosh (Robbins) starts an affair with Annie (Sarandon) who finds a player every year to have a fling with and becomes a muse to help them succeed. Assigned to help ‘Nuke’ as well is veteran catcher Crash Davis (Costner) whose frustrations in ‘Nuke’ and attraction to Annie threaten to get in the way of success.
Field of Dreams
Part drama, part spiritual, Field of Dreams is a strange and compelling film about an Iowa farmer who starts to hear a voice that tells him, “If you build it, he will come.” What Ray (Kevin Costner) does is build a baseball diamond in his cornfield. He seemingly has lost his mind, however, the audience is along for the ride. Just when all seems lost, the members of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox team, known for throwing the World Series, appear and start playing baseball in Ray’s field.
The baseball field becomes something greater though helping several people deal with issues bigger than baseball. What’s interesting about this film is that it doesn’t quite center around playing the game like so many other baseball films but rather what the sport means in the lives of the characters.
Read script by Phil Alden Robinson, which was nominated for three Academy Awards including Best Adapted Screenplay.
Major League
When the owner of the Cleveland Indians (now called the Guardians) dies, his wife wants to move the team to Miami. But in order to do that, Cleveland must have a horrific season with an extremely low audience attendance. She decides to bring together the worst players in baseball to create her dream team of pitiful players.
Except they still have aspirations of playing great ball. As word leaks out about why this team was assembled, they change their attitudes and begin to play like a true Major League team. This comedy stars Charlie Sheen, Wesley Snipes and Tom Berenger and was written and directed by David S. Ward. Read the screenplay and see how the backstories were created and how to create emotion and stakes in a sports script.
The Sandlot
The hero of this early ’90s classic is a boy named Scotty Smalls (Tom Guiry), a new kid in town with no friends and a desire to learn how to play baseball. Set in the early ’60s, Scotty finds a rag-tag group of neighborhood kids led by a nice, future all-star hitter who mentors him into becoming a capable ballplayer. What makes this movie work is how it incorporates the nostalgia of being young in a way that even if you were a kid from the 1980s or 2010s, you could relate. Each of the kids has a distinct personality and must work as a team when Scotty gets into the “biggest pickle of his life.”
A League of Their Own
If you ever want to write a story rich in characters, heartwarming and comedic, sad and sweet, then you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better example than A League of Their Own. This film was based on the short-lived professional women’s baseball league created in the 1940s as the United States sent its boys overseas to fight in World War II.
The film follows two sisters who are in a constant rivalry as the league struggles to find its place in American life. The teams in the league work to build a following as the players bond over the challenges of being ladies in a “man’s” sport and the realities of a world at war. But It’s so much more though as the writers weave together a story of complicated women from across the country and a coach who believes his glory days are behind him.
Read the screenplay and discover how the writers crafted a fictional story based on real events. A League of Their Own series.
42
42 shows the racial barriers and hostility Robinson and his family faced in 1947 as he stepped onto the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. This baseball drama reveals the lengths both Robinson and supporters had to go to break the unspoken color line in Major League Baseball.
Writers can see how to take an important historical figure and craft a story that both educates and entertains. Chadwick Boseman plays the legendary Robinson in a script by Academy Award-winning writer Brian Helgeland.
Moneyball
How do you write a screenplay based on a book about statistics? Leave it to Aaron Sorkin, Stan Chervin and Steve Zaillian to write an Oscar-nominated film based on the book by Michael Lewis. The film, which was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay, centers around an Oakland A’s manager who took over a team only to find its best players constantly being recruited to higher-ranked teams. With a budget significantly lower than teams like the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sides with an analyst (Jonah Hill) who seemingly cracks the code to finding good players on the cheap by unconventional means and helps take the fledgling team to the playoffs.
Check out the Academy Award-nominated screenplay and see how a true story about baseball statistics became a hit film.
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Baseball films, and any sports film for that matter, are more than just the activity on the field. From true stories to nostalgic themes, it’s about perseverance in the face of incredible odds, the underdog that rises up and a group of individuals coming together to succeed. What makes these baseball movies instant classics are how they make the audience feel and how the writers present the characters in an empathetic way.
