Baseball is a curious thing – it’s the most statistics-oriented sport I know and at the same time it’s the sport that generates the most high-falutin’ emotions.

There may be more football fans in this country, but nobody waxes poetic like baseball fans. And that goes double for baseball movies. It’s hands down the most sentimental sports genre there is. In A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN, Tom Hanks famously proclaims “There’s no crying in baseball!” But that’s certainly not the case in baseball movies.

Take THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES. Nobody remembers the baseball played in that movie. What everyone remembers – even people who never saw the film – is the “I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech that a dying Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper) gives to an adoring crowd at Yankee Stadium. That scene has become so much a part of the collective cultural memory that it’s even slyly referenced in the otherwise godawful SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE. The Gehrig movie is shamelessly sentimental (he hits not one but two home runs for the sick kid in the hospital bed) and hokey as hell by today’s standards but that speech still holds sway over baseball fans everywhere.

THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES was probably the sport’s weepiest film until Kevin Costner’s THE FIELD OF DREAMS came along thirty years later. DREAMS is sort of a BEACHES for men. When Costner asks his long-dead father, “Hey Dad, wanna have a catch?”, tough guys have been known to melt. But for all its sentimentality, DREAMS does a better job than any movie I know in conveying baseball’s majestic sense of itself. When James Earl Jones intones that America may have had its ups and downs but baseball has always been the one constant throughout history, he does it so forcefully, you just accept it as received wisdom. The film’s mystical take on the game drives some baseball fans, like George Will, up the wall. (The title of Will’s baseball book says it all : MEN AT WORK. He sees baseball not as a flight of rhetorical fancy but as a nitty-gritty game of physical exertion and athletic skill at the highest of levels.) But FIELD OF DREAMS is not just an unchecked wallow in the glories of America’s pastime. It also recognizes the limitations of the game: Burt Lancaster gives up his baseball dreams (twice!) to do his doctorly duty, and the film clearly endorses that decision.

A much less seen film than the above two classics is BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY from the 70’s. It’s another one of those player-battling-a-fatal-disease movies, this time with a very young Robert DeNiro as a dying catcher and an equally young Michael Moriarty as a sympathetic pitcher. It’s a real tearjerker and extremely well-acted but it hasn’t aged well. At the time of its release it was quite heralded and for years I considered it one of the best baseball films. Sometimes movies play better in your memory, and BANG is one of them.

After all this sentimental hogwash, you can really appreciate something like EIGHT MEN OUT, my personal favorite baseball movie. John Sayles’ brilliant and meticulous depiction of the Black Sox scandal is refreshing in its dispassionate approach to the game. It’s as much an analysis of the business side of the game as it is a representation of the game as it is played on the field. EIGHT MEN OUT also never loses sight of the fact that baseball is a TEAM game, but that team is necessarily made up of very distinctly different individuals. With just a few strokes of his pen, and a brilliant cast to do them justice (David Strathairn, John Cusack, D B Sweeney, even Charlie Sheen), Sayles successfully brings to life real men at work who had been lost to history in a fog of iniquity. The film may indeed be a biting critique of baseball management but it also honors the men who play the game, even when they don’t play by the rules.

But celebrating the Black Sox scandal on Opening Day seems in questionable taste. So I’m going to close not with my favorite baseball film but rather with perhaps the best baseball movie MOMENT ever: Robert Redford’s home run in THE NATURAL. Being a literary guy as much as a movie guy, I was at first more than a little chagrined that Hollywood changed the ending of Bernard Malamud’s book. I mean, c’mon. In the book, Roy Hobbs strikes out in that last at bat!!!! And the movie has the nerve to turn that into the most spectacular home run ever? On the face of it, it would seem to be Hollywood at its worst. And yet … that scene, starting with the crack of the bat, and the fading call of the announcer, and then the swelling of the music as Redford goes into a slow-motion trot around the bases and the homerun ball smashes into the overhead bank of lights, sending an impossibly expansive shower of confetti-like electrical charges onto the field as the players erupt in a kind of group ecstasy … that scene works. Not in a Malamudian way, of course, but in a way that’s true to the sport. Every fan knows that moments of true exhiliration are rare in sports. For every triumph there are scores of crushing defeats. And yet, what keeps every fan coming back, year after year, (even Cubs fans), is the fervent belief that reaching the pinnacle is always possible. What that scene in THE NATURAL does so magnificently is depict what every fan craves: ultimate exultation.

What sports can offer are moments of perfection, and THE NATURAL delivers just such a moment. Awe can bring a man to tears too.

Personal coda: Not long after THE NATURAL was released, a hobbled Los Angeles Dodger Kirk Gibson hit a game-winning home run off Oakland A’s reliever Dennis Eckersley in the World Series. Everyone compared it to THE NATURAL, of course. But since I was an A’s fan, the comparison killed me. And now, no matter how many times I see THE NATURAL, that scene always triggers awful memories of Gibson’s game-winning swing. Ah, bitter irony.