best baseball movies

The Natural is a 1952 novel about baseball written by Bernard Malamud. The book follows Roy Hobbs, a baseball prodigy whose career is sidetracked when he is shot by a crazed serial killer. Most of the story concerns itself with his attempts to return to baseball later in life, when he plays for the fictional New York Knights with his legendary bat 'Wonderboy'.
A film adaptation of The Natural starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs was released in 1984.
The novel opens with 19-year old Roy Hobbs on a train to Chicago with his manager Sam. He is traveling to Chicago for a tryout for the Chicago Cubs. Other passengers on the train include sportswriter Max Mercy, Walter 'The Whammer' Whambold (the leading hitter in the American League and 3 time American League Most Valuable Player at the time in the novel) and Harriet Bird, a beautiful but mysterious woman.
The train makes a quick stop at a carnival along the rail where The Whammer challenges Hobbs to strike him out. Hobbs does just that, much to everyone's surprise (and The Whammer's humiliation). Back on the train Harriet Bird strikes up a conversation with Hobbs who does not suspect that Bird could have any sort of ulterior motive. In fact, she is a lunatic obsessed with shooting the best baseball player. Her intent was to target Whammer but after Hobbs struck him out, her attention has turned to him.
Once off the train Hobbs checks into his hotel room in Chicago and promptly receives a call from Bird who is staying in the same hotel. When he goes up to her room she shoots him.
The novel picks up sixteen years later in the dugout of the New York Knights, a fictional National League baseball team. The team has been on an extended losing streak and the careers of manager Pop Fisher and assistant manager Red Blow seem to be winding to an ignominious end. During one of these sad games Roy Hobbs emerges from the clubhouse tunnel to meet Pop and to announce that he is the team's new right fielder, having just been signed by Judge Banner, a man known by the team as 'The Judge'. Both Pop and Red take Hobbs under their wing and he learns from Red about Fisher's plight as manager of the Knights. The Judge wishes to push Pop out of the team's payroll completely but cannot do so until the end of the current season - and then only so long as the Knights don't win the National League pennant.
Being the newest player Roy has a number of practical jokes played upon him, including the theft of his 'Wonderboy' bat. Once Roy gets his first chance at bat however he proves he's truly a 'natural' at the game.
During one game, Pop substitutes Hobbs as a pinch hitter for team star Bump Bailey. Bailey had not been hustling and Pop was unhappy with this. Pop tells Roy to 'knock the cover off of the ball', which he ends up doing, hitting a ball into centerfield for a ground rule double. A few days later, a newly-hustling Bump will die from injuries resulting from running into the outfield wall in an attempt to play a hard hit fly ball. Roy then takes over for Bump on a permanent basis.
Max Mercy reappears in the novel, now searching for details of Hobbs' past. Hobbs remains quiet on the subject, but Mercy remains insistent. He offers five thousand dollars to Hobbs for his entire life story, but Hobbs refuses, saying that 'all the public is entitled to is my best game of baseball.' At the same time, Hobbs has been attempting unsuccessfully to negotiate a higher salary with the Judge, arguing that his success should be rewarded. Meeting with Mercy again, he introduces Hobbs to bookie Gus Sands, who is keeping company with Memo Paris, Pop's niece and the woman with whom Hobbs has been infatuated since he came to the Knights. Hobbs proceeds to perform some magic tricks which appear to impress Memo.
Max Mercy proceeds to write a column in the paper about the Judge's refusal to grant Hobbs a raise, and a fan uprising ensues. Hobbs, however, is more occupied with Memo and attempts to further their relationship. Pop warns Hobbs about Memo's tendency to impart bad luck to the people with whom she associates. Hobbs dismisses the warning, but soon after, he falls into a hitting slump. Hobbs tries to solve his slump in a number of ways, but all of them fail. Hobbs finally breaks out of a slump, hitting a home run in a game in which a mysterious woman rises out of her seat a number of times. Before Hobbs can look to see who the woman is, she has already left the game. Roy eventually meets the woman, Iris Lemon, and proceeds to court her. Upon finding out she is a grandmother, however, his desire for her drops and he turns his attention back to Memo Paris.
While Memo rebuffs Roy's advances, Hobbs continues his hitting streak and leads the Knights to a seventeen-game winning streak. With the Knights one game away from winning the National League pennant, Roy goes to a party hosted by Memo, and eats a large amount of food. He collapses and wakes up in a hospital bed. The doctor tells him he can play in the final game of the season, but that his days of baseball must end after the season if Hobbs is to live long past the days of his career. He wants to start a family with Memo but is concerned about how he would do that if he retired from the game of baseball.
The Judge offers Hobbs $25,000 to lose the final game for the Knights. After substantial consideration, Hobbs makes a counter-offer, which is accepted. That night, he is unable to sleep, and reads a letter from Iris. After seeing the word 'grandmother' in the letter, he discards it and tries to sleep. The next day, he does play. During an at-bat, he fouls a pitch into the stands that strikes Iris, injuring her. The bat also splits in two lengthwise. At the end of the game, with a chance to win it, Hobbs then strikes out, ending the season for the Knights.
The book ends with Hobbs seeking out the Judge, Memo, and Gus Sands, hitting both the Judge and Sands out of frustration. Sands has his glass eye knocked out of his head and the Judge has a bowel movement in his pants. Memo Paris fires at Hobbs, but misses. She then places the pistol in her mouth until Hobbs takes the gun away from her. That evening, as he leaves the stadium, a late edition newspaper headline declares the career of Hobbs to be over on suspicion of throwing the game that afternoon. A newsboy asks him to tell him it isn't true, but Hobbs breaks down and weeps. The novel ends with this image.
Redford was born Charles Robert Redford, Jr. in Santa Monica, California, the son of Martha W. (née Hart) and Charles Robert Redford, Sr., a milkman-turned-accountant from Pawtucket, Rhode Island.[2][3][4] He has a half-brother, William, from his father's re-marriage. Redford is of English and Scots-Irish ancestry.[5][6][7]
He attended Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles, California (where he met Natalie Wood), graduated in 1954, and received a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado, where he was a pitcher. He lost the scholarship due to excessive drinking, possibly fueled by the death of his mother, which occurred when Redford was 18. Before leaving CU, Redford joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity. He later studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and took classes in theatrical set design at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.While still largely an unknown, Redford made his screen debut in War Hunt (1962), co-starring with John Saxon in a film set during the last days of the Korean War. This film also marked the debuts of Sydney Pollack and Tom Skerritt. After his Broadway success, he was cast in larger feature roles in movies. He played a bisexual movie star who marries starlet Natalie Wood in Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and rejoined her for Pollack's This Property Is Condemned (1966)—again as her lover. The same year saw his first teaming with Jane Fonda, in Arthur Penn's The Chase. Fonda and Redford were paired again in the big screen version of Barefoot in the Park (1967), and were again co-stars in Pollack's The Electric Horseman (1979).
Redford became concerned about his blond male starlet image and turned down roles in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Redford found the property he was looking for in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, scripted by William Goldman, in which he was paired for the first time with Paul Newman (1969). The film made him a bankable star and cemented his screen image as an intelligent, reliable, sometimes sardonic good guy, and Redford became one of the most popular stars of the 1970s.
Redford suffered through a few films that did not achieve box office success during this time, including Downhill Racer (1969), Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), and The Hot Rock (1972). But his overall career was flourishing, with the critical and box office hit, Jeremiah Johnson (1972), the political satire The Candidate (1972), The Way We Were (1973) and The Sting (1973), for which he was nominated for an Oscar.
During the years 1974-76, exhibitors voted Redford Hollywood's top box office name. His hits included The Great Gatsby (1974), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). The popular and acclaimed All the President's Men (1976), directed by Alan J. Pakula and scripted once again by Goldman, was a landmark film for Redford. Not only was he the executive producer and co-star, but the film's serious subject matter, the Watergate scandal, also reflected the actor's offscreen concerns for political causes.
He also starred in the baseball film The Natural (1984). Many sports viewers mark it as one of the best baseball films to date.
Redford has continued his involvement in mainstream Hollywood movies, though projects became fewer and farther between. He appeared as a disgraced Army general sent to prison in the political thriller, The Last Castle (2001), directed by fellow political junkie Rod Lurie. Redford, a leading environmental activist, narrated the IMAX documentary Sacred Planet (2001), a sweeping journey across the globe to some of its most exotic and endangered places. In The Clearing (2004), a thriller co-starring Helen Mirren, Redford was a successful businessman whose kidnapping unearths the secrets and inadequacies that led to his achieving the American Dream. Redford stepped back into producing with The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), a coming-of-age road film about a young medical student, Ernesto Guevera—who later became revolutionary Che Guevera—and his friend Alberto Granado. Five years in the making, Redford was credited by director Walter Salles for being instrumental in getting the film made and released. Back in front of the camera, Redford received good notices for his turn in director Lasse Hallstrom's An Unfinished Life (2005) as a cantankerous rancher who is forced to take in his estranged daughter-in-law (Jennifer Lopez)—whom he blames for his son's death—and the granddaughter he never knew he had when they flee an abusive relationship. Despite solid acting, the film, which sat on the shelf for many months while its distributor Miramax was restructured, was generally dismissed as clichéd and overly sentimental. Meanwhile, Redford returned to familiar territory when he signed on to direct and star in an update of The Candidate.