Marcus Theatres Movie Biz Blog: Spring training is over and it’s time to play ball!

April, the start of a new season. Maybe it’s spring according to the calendar, but for millions of people across the US that new season is baseball season! Why does this game evoke such devotion and have such a prominent place in our national psyche? The answer is simple. Baseball is a quintessentially American game, one that is steeped in tradition and lore. And, even if sports like football have surpassed it in popularity, it remains America’s pastime. It is a civil sport, a mental sport. Yet it demands as much athleticism as it does patience and focus. 

It is also a sport with a long tradition of being celebrated in the movies. It’s difficult to name a truly great football movie, but baseball... Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, Pride of the Yankees, The Bad News Bears, Eight Men Out, A League of Their Own, Major League, The Natural... And the list goes on. There is something about baseball that captures the hearts and minds of moviegoers. Perhaps it is because of the simplicity of the game. As Kevin Costner put it in Bull Durham, “You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.” There is elegance in the simplicity of a game played until somebody wins, a game that is played only when the weather is nice and that you can walk away from for a few innings yet come back to and still enjoy.

For others, baseball is an allegory for America. James Earl Jones put it this way in Field of Dreams, "The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again."

This spring that long tradition continues with a new movie, 42, that tells the story of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in major league baseball. Chadwick Boseman plays the Hall of Famer who made history when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. Before that day in April of 1947 when Robinson took the field in a Dodgers uniform, no African American had ever played for a major league baseball team in the modern era. Robinson was met with derision, insults and threats in ballparks across the country and even in his own locker room. His teammate Pee Wee Reese came to Robinson’s defense saying, "You can hate a man for many reasons. Color is not one of them."

Robinson could have responded with anger, but he did what he did best, he played baseball and was damn good at it. So good in fact that for some the color of his skin didn’t matter if he made their team a winner. And he did almost immediately. Robinson played in six Worlds Series, including 1955 when the Dodgers won the championship.  That was never enough for others who saw Robinson as an intruder on the sanctity of the game. Today, it is impossible to imagine a team in any sport that doesn’t have players from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, but in 1947 it was earth shattering for just one man to break through the color barrier in baseball.  When he retired from baseball in 1956 Robinson left behind a legacy as league MVP, Rookie of the Year, six-time All Star and a batting average over 300. In 1997 his number, 42, was retired across all major league baseball teams.

42 also stars Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, the Dodgers executive who signed Robinson to a Major League contract with the team. The film opens at Marcus Theatres on April 12th.  For more information, show times and tickets, visit MarcusTheatres.com.

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