THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I admit...I kind of enjoyed Summer Catch

APV: don’t take this as an offense, just as informational: how old are you?

Speaking of Ken Burn’s baseball documentary… the 10th inning debuts tonight on PBS. I can’t wait to see it, but I still have to wait ‘til tomorrow night to watch it.

Nice list.  I’ve seen six of the nine, though I barely remember “Bad News Bears”.  I don’t have a problem with the five that I do remember being in a top ten list.

The one movie that I can think of that probably should be there but is missing is “Pride of the Yankees”.

Additional material added by Ken Burns for his Baseball series will be broadcast tonight and tomorrow night.

Of the top 15 or so, the one I haven’t seen or even heard of is Sandlot. I’ll have to put that on the Netflix queue.

Pride of the Yankees is 11…

Any list without 61* as either #1 or #2 is wrong.

Eric: in head-to-head matchups with the other 33 movies, 61* was preferred 59% of the time.  It’s fair to say that you are in the minority, and that you shouldn’t care about that (seeing that you are happy about your choice).

Mettle: Sandlot should appeal to the kid in you.  Don’t expect too much.  I’m actually surprised it is so high.

I’ll do the head-to-head with just those with the top 9 movies.  I’ve got to think that Sandlot won’t even come close to what log5 would say.  The Odds Ratio method would say this, if I limit the universe to these movies:

0.597 Major League
0.560 Bull Durham
0.540 The Natural
0.506 Eight Men Out
0.493 Field of Dreams
0.493 A League of Their Own
0.476 Baseball: a film by Ken Burns
0.442 The Sandlot
0.415 Bad News Bears

I just can’t believe that.  I’ll be back later to tell you what the results are if limited to those 9 movies.

This is similar to the hockey win% of the powerhouses (Canada, Russia, Sweden, etc) against nobodies (Italy, Korea, etc), and how we can get some information out of that.  I don’t think we will, and I think this might be a good example.

Stay tuned…

I greatly enjoyed Artie Lange’s Beer League, though it was an awful and offensive movie with poor acting and even worse production value.  I guess Artie Lange is just that funny to me.

i havent seen beer league yet but artie lange is the man so i hope to eventually. 

if 61* wasnt about the yankees i bet it would have finished higher.  and had it been seen by more people. 

if the first season of Eastbound and Down could be considered one 2 hour + movie it would easily be my #1.

What does it say about the baseball movie universe that the favorite, Major League, is a spoof of two other movies on the list (the Natural and Bull Durham, along with some incorporation of Slap Shot)?

I hear from a lot of friends that Major League is their favorite baseball movie--and my friends are hard core fans. For the record, I ranked ML second, after Bull Durham.

Those two movies came up head-to-head only 9 times, with ML leading 5-4.

Between Bull and Field of Dreams, it was 7-4 for Dreams.

Do you not consider “The Slugger’s Wife” or “Bang the Drum Slowly” baseball movies?  Because as much as I love “The Naked Gun”, that’s not really a baseball movie (it just has baseball scenes).  So by that logic, you also missed “Taking Care of Business” (which features a Cubs-Angels World Series).

So yeah, LIST FAIL.

Latrell.. I don’t consider The Slugger’s Wife an actual movie, let alone a baseball movie. Now if by baseball movie you meant total load of crap, then I’m on the same page.

Latrell/12

Both of those movies were voted on as whether readers of this blog had seen them - click on my name for the link.

Only 9% and 18% of the respondents had seen those movies, respectively, and thus they were not widely seen enough to make it into the competition for best baseball movie.

I agree: “The Slugger’s Wife” is a piece of crap and should be recognized as such.  So imagine my dismay when it wasn’t listed.

Perhaps my LIST FAIL was a little harsh tho; Mr. 3000 was voted third worst.  That movie was truly awful and I see others agree.

Latrell, you obviously came a bit late.  The initial list of 205 movies are here:

http://www.tangotiger.net/movies/index4.php

Because of the way the process was setup, you would get ALOT of choices where you wouldn’t have seen at least one of the two movies.  So, to whittle down the list, I asked people which movies they’ve actually seen.

So, I came up with this list:
http://www.tangotiger.net/movies/index52.php

Any movie that was seen by at least 25% of the readers made the cut.

Yes, Bang the Drum is a good movie, but not enough people saw it to make my cut.

I don’t mind the harsh remarks at all, because, frankly, who the hell are you anyway, but I would much prefer that they come if I deserve them.

Tango/2

I am 31 and hold a Ph.D.  I know, it is a bit embarrassing.

I like watching new episodes of SpongeBob and iCarly with my kid.  So, we all have some weird watching habits…