Baseball and Fictional Television: Our National Pastime Meets Our National Obsession

Most baseball fans and film aficionados can easily name their top five baseball films of all time. Academic research in this area has focused on such classic and popular films as The Natural, Bull Durham, and Field of Dreams, to name a few. When we think about the relationship between baseball and television, our thoughts tend toward televised games, SportsCenter highlights, or Ken Burns's Baseball miniseries. The reverence fans have for baseball in film does not exist for baseball on television, partially because of the limited attention fictional television has paid to our national pastime.

Overall, there seem to be two types of baseball movies. The first, which can be called a primary baseball film, is defined by Gary E. Dickerson in his book The Cinema of Baseball. For a film to qualify as a primary baseball film, "the principal character (or characters) plays, coaches, or has more than a casual association with the game of baseball, and the narrative must, either explicitly or implicitly, be principally about baseball."¹ In their book Reel Baseball, Stephen C. Wood and J. David Pincus define secondary baseball films as "films that use one or more elements of baseball as important yet subsidiary parts of the film. As such, a secondary film might make spare use of baseball, but it is a deliberate use, and makes the game serve the film's characters, scene, or storyline."²

If we take the definition of a primary baseball film and apply it to television, the number of series that would qualify is quite low. Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh's Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows describes a handful of baseball series, none of which lasted longer than one season. The longest-running series was The Bad News Bears, which aired from March 1979 through July 1980 and was based on the film of the same name.³ The shorter-lived series include The Bay City Blues, which ran for one month in 1983 and chronicled "the private and public lives of [a] minor league baseball team."⁴ Hardball, which followed "an inept American League baseball team" and aired for one month in 1994; A League of Their Own, which was based on the film of the same name and ran in April 1993; and A Whole New Ballgame, which aired from January to March 1995 and followed a baseball star sidelined by the 1994 strike who was then hired as a celebrity sportscaster.⁵ The extremely brief runs these series had can make research difficult. Luckily, television provides a unique opportunity that film does not: while there may not be a large number of baseball series, there still exists the possibility of baseball-themed episodes and recent programs that have nothing to do with sports in their premise. For example, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The X-Files, and Monk have aired both primary and secondary baseball episodes.

Here we will discuss television episodes categorized as either primary or secondary baseball episodes, all of which aired after 1990. The goal is to analyze what these episodes say about baseball; what, if any, overall themes are present; and whether these themes and situations track with the ones present in baseball films.

In his book Baseball in the Movies, A Comprehensive Reference, 1915-1991, Hal Erikson describes the archetypical baseball film scenario in this way:

A young rube, fresh off the farm with a great deal of natural talent but with a shy and or goofy demeanor is whisked away to the big city to play major-league baseball. Once in the city . . . something dreadful compromises the player's talent and integrity and gets him into deep, hot water by the fifth reel. Even supposing that none of the above occurs, the quintessential baseball flick finale has still remained fairly consistent: the winning play at the bottom of the ninth in the Big Game.⁶

Overall, the baseball episodes analyzed here tend to stick with this formula or some derivative while at the same time introducing one or two unique elements into the archetype...