When The Cat’s Away, The Mice Will Play (Movies)

Well, it’s early summer, little local coverage to speak of and the girlfriend is out of town for a week. So what else would a nearly 25-year-old, no longer single male do? Watch a bunch of non-chick flick movies, of course!
While going through my giant tub of DVDs looking for wasteful ways to pass the time when not at work or catching up with friends, I noticed the large amount of sports movies I own (and remembered the handful or so more that I at one point owned on VHS and left back home). So I thought, ‘Why not hit two birds with one stone?’ I could watch movies to pass the time and by relegating it to sports movies, I can write my blog about it. Ingenious, I know.
Well, with the idea coming back on Thursday, the possibility of getting ALL of my sports movies watched by today, I decided I would make this a two-part blog. Today’s blog being about the movies I watched over the weekend, and next Sunday’s about the rest of the movies. I decided I would watch my baseball movies first since we are in the heart of the professional baseball season and since the College World Series began over the weekend.
To help with writing the blog, I am going to rank the movies I own. But not just one big list (though that will come at the end). First, I’m going to break them down by sports with baseball movies, football movies, basketball movies, hockey movies and a miscellaneous sport movies category. Then, I will rank them by genre and ending with a complete ranking off all movies.

*Spoiler Alert*

Before the possibility of getting complaints from my baseball list and concerning where I placed “Field Of Dreams” I just wanted to justify my decision for having it further down in the list than many would expect. I took a Sports Literature in the Movies class at KU and one of the books turned movie that we read was “Shoeless Joe” which is the book “Field Of Dreams” is based on. Now, I had seen the movie (and probably would have had it atop the list) prior to reading the book. However, after reading it and discovered so many glaring elements were left out from the book that made it completely different, my view about the movie diminished a bit.
For instance, in the book the main character Ray Kinsella actually has an identical twin named Richard and plays a role in the book. In the movie they decided to combine the two character traits of the twins into Ray Kinsella. Another difference, which I think would have made the movie even better if they would have followed the book, is that the bleachers were not along the first base line like was portrayed in the movie. Instead, Ray Kinsella had built a small section of a left field wall in which there was a door to get up to the bleacher seats. There wasn’t an entire fence, but it would have been really cool to see how a baseball diamond in a cornfield would look with just a portion of a wall in the outfield. Had the movie followed he book, it would have easily been No. 1 on my list and No. 1 in my heart of all-time movies (sports-related or otherwise).

On With The Show

Now that I’ve given my peace on the one discrepancy people may poke at with my list, I now present you with the list along with memorable quotes from each movie:

1. 

   Shot of cover of movie "Major League

   Major League — “Juuuust a bit outside.”

2. Bull Durham — “I want to bring the heater. Announce my presence with authority!”
3. BASEketball — “Steeeve Perry!” (There were so many great ones to choose from, unfortunately many of them are not PG quotes!)
4. Field of Dreams — “If you build it, he will come.”
5. Eight Men Out — “Say it ain’t so, Joe! Say it ain’t so!”
6. Major League 2 — “Women… Can’t live with them and they can’t pee standing up.”
7. The Rookie — “So how does it feel to be the oldest rookie in the last 30 years?”

Fun Factoids:

• Many relate baseball movies to Kevin Costner, what with “Field of Dreams”, “Bull Durham”, “For Love of the Game” and oft forgotten “Chasing Dreams”. But let us not forget the name of one Charlie Sheen. Sheen has carried his own in baseball movies. Obviously he was the star in “Major League” and “Major League II” by playing the memorable role of Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn, but he was also in the movie “Eight Men Out” as one of the eight baseball players involved in the infamous “Black Sox Scandal.”
• After having watched all seven baseball movies that I own, I wracked up 12 hours and 57 minutes of movie watching. And to think, I’m not even halfway through my collection of sports movies!!!

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