How Baseball Films reflected American Religious Life

Films reflect life and they do so in often unexpected ways, or not in the way that they seem to on the surface, and sometimes in the ways that the makers of the films didn’t consciously intend them.

Hollywood films, when looked at closely, often display cultural and social reflections that may at first seem at odds with the story and the mainstream nature of the film.

Baseball films, or at least a significant number of them, are no exception, and many years ago, as a fan of baseball and baseball films, I began to notice recurring religious imagery and themes in some of the films.

The Babe Ruth Story (1948) is an early example. Ruth (William Bendix), who in real life enjoyed a hard living lifestyle – drinking, gluttony and whoring – is depicted as a saint in this hagiographic biopic. At one point, he cures a disabled child simply by saying “Hiya kid” to him at Spring Training. The child is able to walk for the first time as a result. Ruth’s deathbed scene is played like the death of a saint in a religious epic, with sacred music playing on the soundtrack and the lighting suggesting that Ruth is on his way to heaven as he wheeled down a corridor for an experimental operation that may not help him but will definitely help others in the future.

In 1951 Angels in the Outfield sees “Guffy” McGovern (Paul Douglas), manager of the losing and inept Pittsburgh Pirates, visited by angels “The Heavenly Choir Nine” who come down to help his struggling team as long as he keeps his to promise to give up swearing and threatening violence to umpires and his own players. He does so, and his team wins the pennant, and he also wins the girl (Janet Leigh) and adopts the orphan who had been praying so hard for the team (“sometimes during arithmetic”) that the angels had come down to help the club. Angels in the Outfield may be a lightweight comedy, yet shows us a religious America where angels exist and will help those prepared to mend their ways.

Major League is a broad comedy about the Cleveland Indians and their Machiavellian owner who wishes them to fail so that she has an excuse to move them to warm, sunny Florida, far away from The Mistake by the Lake. The film features an evangelical Christian pitcher who carries on a running feud with a Voodoo-worshipping batter from Cuba as both seek to prove that their religion is the one that will bring them success on the field.

The highwater mark of Hollywood baseball films that reflect American religious feeling were released in the 1980s – The Natural, Bull Durham and Field of Dreams. The Natural tells the story of a player (Robert Redford) who seems to have almost mystical abilities and contains scenes such as his old flame (Glenn Close) coming to see him play. At one point, she stands up; the sun shines through the brim of her hat, making it look as though she has a halo – she is an angel come to save him from a femme fatale (Kim Basinger) who, Delilah-like, has taken away his strength and his hitting power. In the climactic game, he goes to bat for his team despite the recurrence of an old injury to his stomach and is bleeding from his side (like a stigmata) as he hits the game, and pennant, winning home run.

Bull Durham features another evangelical Christian pitcher who tries to run prayer meetings before games much to the derision of his teammates and which features a superfan Annie Savoy having tried all the other religions (“I really have”), believes that it is only the “Church of Baseball” that truly feeds the soul.

Field of Dreams is a strange mystical film in which a farmer (Kevin Costner) hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field and experiences a vision of what the field will look like. He follows the voice’s instructions, builds the field and then ghosts of dead ball players including “Shoeless” Joe Jackson appear on the diamond to play endless games in the sunshine. Local people come to watch the phantasmagorical games, and it is as though they are “baptised” once more.

There is, however, a darker side to this “Golden Age” of baseball films though in that they portray an American paradise set in the rural heartlands where men play catch with their sons after a hard day’s work in the fields (The Natural) and where heaven is in fact Iowa (Field of Dreams) or hark back to an earlier, simpler, “nicer” time such as seen in Bull Durham where for all the sexual liberation of the female characters, the art direction and some of the action of the film points very much backwards to the 1950s (the women’s clothing, their cars, the interiors, the team bus, even the way the radio baseball announcer recreates the sound of road games in the studio of the local station back in Durham – a practice that went out decades before the film was made). All of this would seem to point to an unconscious yearning for a return to what might be termed a “prelapsarian ideal” of America. A time in America before “the Fall” whatever “the Fall” might be.

Christian settlers coming to America felt that they were leaving the sins and corruption of the Old World to come to a New Eden – a place to start afresh. Then came the Fall – for white, Anglo-Saxons males anyway – caused by urbanisation, industrialisation, civil rights, women’s liberation and the 1919 Black Sox scandal, meant that America would never be innocent again.

The films from the 1980s then provide a view of a comforting world for white men: there are almost no black characters in any of these three films and the films suggest that if America could just get back to a time when people lived in rural communities, worked on the land and women and minorities knew their place then all would be right with the country once again.

Since that high water mark of eighties big-budget Hollywood baseball films have been few and far between and with the exception of The Hill have not told stories that refer to religion. That baton has been taken up by Christian Cinema baseball films: low-budget films made by Christian filmmakers as wholesome entertainment for evangelical Christian families and to proselytise a Christian worldview. These films are poor from a non-Christian critical standpoint (I have watched them so that you don’t have to) yet are celebrated by the community for which they are made. Hollywood, perhaps, doesn’t have to “do” religion in baseball films any more because of the ever-growing number of such films.

Jonathan Plummer is the author of Movies and the Church of Baseball: Religion in the Cinema of the National Pastime published in 2025 by McFarland & Co.