Ever since last year’s MLB season ended I’ve been trying to think of a way to ease the pain. My wife says I’m always looking for the next fix. She’s even said I’m this close to hanging out at parks asking, “You sure you kids don’t want to just play some baseball so I can watch?”
Last November I thought maybe I’d have an off-season baseball movie month but we were in the middle of a move back to Iowa so I delayed my plans. I ultimately settled on February for a few reasons. There’s not much baseball going on and it would be a good lead in to the college baseball season and spring training. Also, my experience with baseball movies is they tend to suck, so I should probably start with the shortest month. I don’t want to try my wife’s patience any further.
So that’s what I’m going to do here. I thought I’d lay down some ground rules/expectations. First, I’m going to try for 29 movies. I’m really going to try for a movie a day but as nice as the weather’s been maybe someone will show up and ask me to play some pickup baseball one day and I’ll have to watch two movies the next. One can dream right?
I have a list of movies to pick from and I’ll try to post a more official list soon but for now the focus is going to be on movies that I’ve wanted to see/should see. I will probably mix in some novelty movies. I have actually not seen a ton of baseball movies so there are some classics that will be on the list. I’ve never seen The Natural or Bull Durham and I’ve only seen movies like Field of Dreams and Eight Men Out when I was really young. Oh and I haven’t seen Ed, we can’t forget Ed.
I’m going to lean towards fiction. Documentaries are easier movies for me to pick. I have a documentary about origami in my Netflix queue for Pete’s sake. So I’m going to set a 50% limit on documentaries. I will try to even include biopic-type fare in that count like The Babe.
The most important ground rule is that I will lean towards movies that interest Jayne. I’m guessing that’s about three films, tops. There are several good choices on Netflix Instant so I don’t have to “spend” a disc on a baseball movie. The ones that are “important” will warrant a spent disc occasionally. For example, as a baseball fan in Iowa, The Final Season is required viewing. I’m expecting it to be pretty weak but we’ll recognize places plus Samwise!
In fact The Final Season is the first one to arrive tomorrow. We’ll let that one get us started, I’ll probably have some more ground rules, a more finalized list and a scoring system to come. Obviously I wouldn’t be telling you about this if I wasn’t going to keep you posted on each movie. Pitchers and catchers report tomorrow for The Final Season.