Featuring Field of Dreams, The Bad News Bears, A League of Their Own, and more!  This is a probing and entertaining work at the intersection of pop culture and sports.

Baseball has always been a symbol as much as a sport. With a blend of individual confrontation and team play, a luxurious pace, and an immaculate urban parkland setting, it offers a sunny rendering of the American Dream, both the hard work that underpins it and the rewards it promises. Film, America’s other national pastime, which magnifies and mythologizes all it touches, has long been the ideal medium to canonize this aspirational idea. Baseball: The Movie is the first definitive history of this film genre that was born in 1915 and remains artistically and culturally vital more than a century later. Writer and critic Noah Gittell sheds light on well-known classics and overlooked gems, exploring how baseball cinema creates a stage upon which the American ideal is born, performed, and repeatedly redefined. Traversing history and mythmaking, cynicism and nostalgia, this thoroughly researched book takes readers on a multifaceted tour of baseball on film.

Noah Gittell is a culture critic who has written for publications including The Atlantic, The Ringer, GQ, Esquire, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is a regular film critic for the Washington City Paper and a frequent contributor to BBC. He is also a mainstay at Smithsonian Associates, where he lectures several times a year on various film topics.

Praise for Baseball: The Movie

“Reading Noah Gittell’s book is as satisfying as watching Ray Kinsella have a twilight catch with his father or Dottie Hinson snatch a hardball with her bare hand. With a fan’s passion and a critic’s clear eyes, Gittell pays excellent tribute to America’s pastime and the beloved films staged among its diamonds and sandlots. Nostalgic, smart, and entertaining all at once.” 

-Erin Carlson, author of No Crying in Baseball: The Inside Story of A League of Their Own 

“There’s analysis and there’s storytelling. In my professional life, I practice them in the booth all season long. Noah Gittell not only masters each skill in Baseball: The Movie, but intertwines them seamlessly with humor, depth, and a personal perspective that makes it a must read for any movie lover, baseball fan, or curious observer of American culture.”

-Ron Darling, author, baseball analyst, and former MLB pitcher

“Despite scant mention of the absolutely atrocious Grover Cleveland Alexander drama The Winning Team, Noah does a wonderful job of celebrating baseball and the movies and, mostly, baseball at the movies. Now if you will excuse me, I must go watch A League of Their Own for the 293rd time.” 

-Joe Posnanski, author of The Baseball 100 and Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments