Trailing 6–5 in the bottom of the ninth, Joe Carter stepped up to the plate and hit the second World Series–winning home run in baseball history, cementing back-to-back titles for the Toronto Blue Jays. Eight months later, MLB players went on strike, and 1994 marked the first year without a World Series since 1904. But the game didn’t vanish altogether; instead of the ballpark, fans crammed into local cinemas to get their fix. This is the story of how Hollywood saved baseball.
OK, but really? Well, yes and no.
In truth, the baseball-movie boom of ’94 began two years earlier. Between 1950 and 1990, Hollywood churned out an average of 1.1 baseball movies per year. Between ’92 and ’94, that number climbed to 3.3. The list includes Mr. Baseball, A League of Their Own, Rookie of the Year, The Sandlot, Cobb, Major League II, Little Big League, The Scout and Angels in the Outfield, and the latter five (along with Ken Burns’ iconic documentary Baseball) were released in ’94.
Look at the glut of comic-book movies this decade and it should come as no surprise that it’s common to find cycles of thematically related releases—and baseball films are no exception. “There’s an industrial reason [for the boom],” says Cinema Scope editor and Vice Guide to Film writer Adam Nayman, “which is that Field of Dreams was such a big hit in 1989, so baseball movies of the era were easier to green-light.”
MORE LOVE FOR SPORTS MOVIES:
The two-sports-movie star you’ve never heard of • The greatest sports movie never made • Breaking down the dubious science of Rookie of the Year • Patrick Patterson picks his favourite sports flick
But there was more to it than that. The early ’90s was a time of turmoil for the sport. A strike had been looming over MLB since 1990, when CBA talks first died. When negotiations deteriorated again during spring training in 1993, a brewing work stoppage hung over the field like a storm cloud. Which is why, Nayman argues, it’s not the volume of baseball films released in those years that stands out but the type of film. “It was a moment of disenchantment,” says Nayman, “and these films are trying to recapture a love for the game. They’re mostly imaginative fantasies—or in the case of A League of Their Own, nostalgic recreations. They’re about kids, or outsiders, these fantasies of triumph, success and fitting in through baseball.”
If there was a dark side to the sport—the kind that was very much playing out in real life—you’d have been hard-pressed to find it represented on screen. MLB-backed films like Rookie of the Year and Little Big League sold a particularly rosy take on the league (including the Cubs actually winning). As Nayman puts it: “They all point to the idea that baseball is great.”
So the baseball-movie boom resulted from the success of the genre at the turn of the decade and the fact that MLB was losing a lot of fans during the ’94 strike. But those of us who flocked to theatres or hoarded VHS tapes—we were all winners.
This story initially appeared in the August 2016 issue of Sportsnet magazine.