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    • Baseball Documentaries

    Baseball and MLB Documentaries: Films and Series

    Lovers of baseball will often want to throw themselves into the world of the sport, which can include sitting down to watch some documentaries about it.

    Whilst the use of the moniker ‘World Series’ might indicate that baseball is something that is enjoyed by people on all four corners of the planet, that isn’t necessarily true. For those that don’t know baseball all that well, documentaries can be a great way of learning about what the sport has to offer and some of the stories that are involved in making it such a thrilling sport to spend time with.

    The question is, which ones are the best ones to watch?

    Baseball

    • Year: 1994; The Tenth Inning followed in 2010
    • Format: Documentary miniseries
    • Episodes: Nine original episodes, known as “innings”, plus the two-part The Tenth Inning
    • Running time: Approximately 18½ hours; The Tenth Inning adds approximately four hours
    • Watch in the UK: No official UK options, but some episodes are on Youtube
    • Physical release: An 11-disc DVD set containing the original series and The Tenth Inning is available as a US import. It is Region 1 and will not play on most standard UK DVD players.

    It might sound like we’re not putting too much effort into telling you to watch a documentary about baseball that is literally called Baseball, but Ken Burns’ miniseries is considered by most to be the definitive example of a film that gets to the heart of the issue.

    It uses archive pictures as well as film footage in order to offer you a visual presentation about the sport, whilst voiceovers from actors reading the likes of letters and speeches work to bring it all to life. This is a documentary in nine parts, so it is something of an understatement to suggest that you’re going to learn everything there is to know.

    The ‘Nine Innings’ of the film are broken down into Our Game, Something Like a War, the Faith of Fifty Million People, A National Heirloom, Shadow Ball, The National Pastime, The Capital of Baseball, A Whole New Ballgame and Home. There is also a four-hour encore called 10th Inning, which is split into two parts.

    It features a cast of thousands, from all walks of life, talking about their experience with baseball as a sport and why it is that so many people fall in love with it. The overall reception of it when it came out was positive, with only some people saying it was too long and too granular in detail.

    Reggie

    • Year: 2023
    • Format: Feature-length documentary
    • Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes
    • Watch in the UK: Amazon Prime Video subscription
    • UK age rating: 12
    • Accessibility: English subtitles, English audio description and Dialogue Boost are available
    • Content note: Amazon lists violence, smoking and foul language

    Reggie Jackson is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, known to many as Mr October. His success was such that he is considered to be largely responsible for the five World Series titles won by the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees whilst he played for them, yet he wasn’t overly appreciated during his time with the bat in his hand.

    As a result, Reggie is something of a retrospective on his career, exploring both why it is that he was so successful and the reason behind the lack of love that he was shown when he was an active player in the MLB.

    Reggie Baseball Documentary

    Jackson was a larger-than-life character during the 1970s and 1980s, which this film perfectly encapsulates. He was a trailblazer for black athletes up and down the land, which is why the likes of Bill Russell, Hank Aaron and Julius Irving all have something to say about him as talking heads.

    Directed by Alex Stapleton, the film was first conceived in 2019 and began filming in the June of the following year. Distributed by Amazon Studios, this is an excellent place to start if you want to get a sense of baseball’s difficult relationship with race and the people who made the sport popular.

     The Battered Bastards of Baseball

    • Year: 2014
    • Format: Feature-length documentary
    • Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes
    • Watch in the UK: Netflix subscription
    • UK age rating: 15
    • Accessibility: English subtitles are available; the film can also be downloaded for offline viewing

    In 1970, Jim Bouton wrote a book entitled Ball Four, which had the following line in it: “Us battered bastards of baseball are the biggest customers of the U.S. Post Office, forwarding-address department.” It is from that line that The Battered Bastards of Baseball takes its title, telling the story of the Portland Mavericks.

    The defunct minor league baseball team played out of Portland, Oregon, and was owned by actor Bing Russell, featuring in the Class A-Short Season Northwest League for five seasons between 1973 and 1977. What made them interesting was that they were an independent team.

    That meant that they had no affiliation with a parent team in the major leagues, which was unusual at the time. Directed by Russell’s grandsons, Chapman Way and Maclain Way, it features Russell’s son Kurt, who actually played for the Mavericks.

    When it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the film received a standing ovation, which was an insight into the positive reviews that it would also receive from a wider audience. It is a film filled with so many twists and victories for the underdog that it would be considered unbelievable if it were a fiction rather than a documentary.

    Fastball

    • Year: 2016
    • Format: Feature-length documentary
    • Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes
    • Watch in the UK: Available to rent or buy digitally from Amazon Video and the Apple TV Store
    • Accessibility: English closed captions are available
    • Physical release: Imported or second-hand DVD and Blu-ray copies are available through specialist sellers
    • Content note: Amazon lists foul language

    One of the most thrilling things to watch in baseball is a pitcher throwing a fastball. It seems to defy the laws of physics that a human being can make a ball travel that fast by simply throwing it. This documentary takes a look at the science behind that type of pitch, looking at its history as well as how it works in a literal sense.

    This isn’t just a load of baseball people sitting around and chatting about the fastball, instead being a documentary that speaks to scientists in order to find out what the science behind such a pitch is, as well as the theoretical limits of throwing a ball at speed.

    Fastball Baseball Documentary

    There is no getting away from the fact that this is a deep dive on a very specific aspect of baseball, but if you’re the sort of person who likes to engage in a bit of research into topics that interest you, this is a great place to turn. Fastball isn’t all just about scientists talking to us about how fast a ball can be thrown, with archive footage and player interviews also looking to bring the subject to life.

    As well as working out how fastballs can be thrown, the documentary also investigates what it is like to face one, talking with the players who were tasked with trying to get a bat on the end of one.

    Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose

    • Year: 2024
    • Format: Documentary miniseries
    • Episodes: 4
    • Running time: Approximately 54–57 minutes per episode
    • Watch in the UK: HBO Max, the HBO Max Amazon Channel, Sky Go and NOW subscriptions
    • UK age rating: 15
    • Accessibility: English closed captions are available; Sky also lists audio description
    • Content note: Includes discussion of gambling and allegations that Rose had sex with a minor

    One of the most controversial moments in baseball’s recent history came in 1989, when Pete Rose was given a lifetime ban for betting on baseball games. In Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose, the contradictions of one of the game’s most divisive players are delved into, with the man himself looking to find some sense of redemption.

    He was a complex man, full of inherent contradictions, and the film exposes how his desire to be redeemed doesn’t stretch as far as to show any kind of atonement. That, in many ways, is a neat summary of the man himself.

    He is considered to be the all-time hit king, whilst many believe he should be given a place in baseball’s Hall of Fame. Yet the film doesn’t leave many viewers feeling as though that’s what he deserves, instead being a good argument about a lack of contrition from someone who tainted the sport in the eyes of many.

    The documentary might be considered overly long, with some criticising it for being repetitive, but it is also one that offers genuine insight into both the man and the sport that made him famous – and then infamous. He epitomised the American blue-collar ideal, for all that that entails.

    Almost Perfect: The 99th Pitch

    • Year: 2024
    • Format: Short documentary
    • Running time: Approximately 16 minutes
    • Watch in the UK: Free on YouTube

    Sport isn’t always fair. Many teams and players have come close to achieving something, only to be found wanting when it mattered the most. If you want a neat summary of that, you could do a lot worse than to sit down and watch Almost Perfect: The 99th Pitch.

    It centres around the 20th of April 1990, when the starting pitcher for the Seattle Mariners, Brian Holman, went up against the Oakland Athletics and came close to having a perfect game. It is a performance that still stands out as one of the sport’s most rare of events, telling you all about how he came close and yet just missed out.

    If you want to get a sense of the overall theme of the film, these sentences from Holman himself might just offer it: “We won the game, and we went back to the hotel. I woke up at 4 o’clock the next morning, sat up in bed, and screamed as loud as I could. I knew I would never have a chance to do that again.”

    This is a documentary that tells the story of Holman’s night coming close to the perfect performance, yes, but it is also a look at how baseball is a game that puts individual performers up against one another. It is a thrilling exploration of the psychology of one of America’s favourite sports.