this is one I have not seen. My sister keeps telling me I have to watch it.

You have to...

But baseball movies are great!

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-- Mal

When Portland, Oregon, lost its longtime minor-league affiliate, Bing Russell-who briefly played ball professionally before enjoying a successful Hollywood acting career-bought the territory and formed a single-A team to operate outside the confines of major-league baseball. When they took the field in 1973, the Mavericks-the only independent team in America-started with two strikes against them. What did Deputy Clem from Bonanza know about baseball? Or Portland, for that matter? The only thing uniting his players, recruited at open tryouts, was that no other team wanted them. Skeptics agreed that it could never work. But Bing understood a ballplayer's dreams, and he understood an audience. His quirky, unkempt castoffs won games, and they won fans, shattering minor-league attendance records. Their spirit was contagious, and during their short reign, the Mavericks-a restaurant owner turned manager, left-handed catcher, and blackballed pitcher among them-brought independence back to baseball and embodied what it was all about: the love of the game.

Havana Heat and If I Never Get Back both by Darryl Brock. The first is about a deaf baseball player from Kansas, who in 1911 or so tries to make a comeback in major league baseball. He goes with the Giants to Cuba on the kind of exhibition thing that was apparently more common back then.

In the second, a sports writer suddenly finds himself in 1869, and travelling the country with the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Wonderful.

I'm not a huge fan, have literally attended exactly three professional baseball games in my life, and I just loved those books. I should probably reread them both.