The Bookshelf Conversation #181: Noah Gittell

I don’t have a whole lot of hobbies, so when I see a book that combines any of them on my periodic “Coming down the pike” stories, I get extra pumped. Baseball: The Movie covers two of them.

Now that I no longer have Turner Classic Movies, since they went to a subscription platform, I miss out on a number of my favorites, although, to be fair, many are still available on demand for free; I just have put up with commercials.

Baseball: The Movies goes beyond mere reviews. It discusses the importance of each film in context with the times they were released. For example, you could never have a movie like Bad News Bears in the 1960s. It was only in the decade which saw sweeping changes in societal issues that a bunch of rowdy, foul-mouthed moppets could become a classic. Same for Bull Durham. Could you imagine Gary Cooper as Crash Davis? (Don’t get me started on the lack of athletic prowess of Cooper or Anthony Perkins as Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out or William Bendix in The Babe Ruth Story.)

Noah Gittell, in his first book, does an excellent job in both academic and popular veins as he discusses these and other baseball movies, why some work and some don’t, why some have become classics of the genre. That becomes clear in our Conversation.