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Baseball has long been viewed as the Great American Pastime, so it is no surprise that the sport has inspired many Hollywood films and television series. But how do these works depict the game, its players, fans, and place in American society?
 
This study offers an extensive look at nearly one hundred years of baseball-themed movies, documentaries, and TV shows. Film and sports scholar Aaron Baker examines works like A League of their Own (1992) and Sugar (2008), which dramatize the underrepresented contributions of female and immigrant players, alongside classic baseball movies like The Natural that are full of nostalgia for a time when native-born white men could use the game to achieve the American dream. He further explores how biopics have both mythologized and demystified such legendary figures as Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Fernando Valenzuela.
 
The Baseball Film charts the variety of ways that Hollywood presents the game as integral to American life, whether showing little league as a site of parent-child bonding or depicting fans’ lifelong love affairs with their home teams. Covering everything from Bull Durham (1988) to The Bad News Bears (1976), this book offers an essential look at one of the most cinematic of all sports.

As one of popular culture’s most popular arenas, sports are often the subject of cinematic storytelling. But boxing films are special. There are more movies about boxing, by a healthy margin, than any other sport, and boxing accompanied and aided the medium’s late nineteenth-century emergence as a popular mass entertainment. Many of cinema’s most celebrated directors—from Oscar Micheaux to Martin Scorsese—made boxing films. And while the production of other types of sports movies generally corresponds with the current popularity of their subject, boxing films continue to be made regularly even after the sport has wilted from its once-prominent position in the sports hierarchy of the United States. From Edison’s Leonard-Cushing Fight to The Joe Louis Story, Rocky, and beyond, this book explores why boxing has so consistently fascinated cinema and popular media culture by tracing how boxing movies inform the sport’s meanings and uses from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century.