The Baseball Film to 1920

Abstract

Every motion picture is a time capsule, a moment in the life of a culture. But unless it is two minutes or ten hours long and non-narrative-in other words, decidedly non-commercial-a film is usually produced for one purpose: to make money. In this regard, a motion picture is no different from an automobile, a roll of bathroom tissue, or a can of beer. This profit motive also explains why, in the parlance of the business, individual films are referred to as product.Motion pictures that feature baseball-related settings have been produced since the late 1890s and early 1900s, when moviegoing was as novel as watching television was in 1950 or renting movies on videotape was in 1985. From the very beginning, baseball was depicted in motion pictures primarily because of the burgeoning popularity of the sport. It made sense to filmmakers that fans of the game would fork over their hard-earned nickels to gaze at comedies or dramas depicting speedballing hurlers, ninth-inning heroics, and likable underdogs triumphing against the odds. In particular, in this era before the advent of radio and television, motion pictures allowed moviegoers-especially those who lived outside the major league cities-to see and admire the baseball stars they only could read about in newspapers or hear about while chatting with their cronies at the corner barbershop. Such films generally were newsreels spotlighting major leaguers, or one- and two-reelers featuring ballplayers in what were little more than cameo appearances, or highly fictionalized biographical features in which scenarists transformed ballplayers into fairy-tale heroes. Whether in a story that was fact or fiction, however, seeing Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth up-close on a movie screen in 1917 or 1920 must have been a transcendent experience for the average baseball fan.Despite their growing popularity, motion pictures still were dwarfed by as the most popular form of mass entertainment. On November 8, 1908, the Washington Post described a polite vaudeville program, to be presented at Chase's theater. The bill included Lasky's Viennese production, Love Waltz,' with Alfred Kappeler and Audrey Maple ... Laddie Cliff, the English boy comedian ... Will H. Fox, fresh from London triumphs, in his new single piano act; the Young American Five; the Five Jordans, and so on. The final entertainment cited was a film: 'The Baseball Fan' by the American vitagraph.Yet the storylines found in the earliest baseball films, and the manner in which they portray ballplayers and fans, serve to mirror the now long-extinct American culture before 1920: a time of innocence, a pre-Jazz Age America that was a nation of small towns and small-town types. The prevailing view was that the simplicity of rural life was preferable to the corrupting ways of the metropolis. It was an era when filmmakers could celebrate a pastoral America whose foundation was Victorian morality, while emphasizing the notion that leaving the farm for the city meant going off in search of sin.Whether on purpose or by accident, baseball-playing characters were depicted in such milieus-and their on-field exploits were blended into standard plotlines featuring plainspoken Good Guys who win their true love while fending off one-dimensionally evil villains. If baseball truly was America's national pastime, such baseball players were ideal all-American heroes. Their honesty and good intentions aside, however, it was their onfield exploits that made them lastingly heroic. Before a new reality set in, that of flaming youth and bathtub gin, the Black Sox Scandal and the Roaring Twenties, baseball movies could lovingly-and believably-chart the comic antics of fans attempting to enjoy ballgames despite their bullying bosses or unsympathetic wives, or weave the stories of rural whammers or flamethrowers who overcome obstacles, perform storybook heroics, and win the love of the demure, true-blue heroine while spurning the entreaties of villains to cheat on the field. …