Summer has ended. Fall is here, and that means the World Series, the Fall Classic, is coming. And with it comes the inevitable listicle of baseball movies you should be watching when you're not puzzling out Major League Baseball's increasingly arcane cycle of wildcard games and divisional series. While baseball isn't quite the national pastime it once was, it has given us around a century of celluloid oddities and forgotten films to make things interesting.
So forget about a mullet-headed Kevin Costner musing about the cosmic significance of "the game," or Tom Hanks blurting, "There's no crying in baseball!" You won't find them on this list. Instead, I bring you movies where Babe Ruth frees feral dogs, a golf-ball stealing tomcat inherits a Brooklyn ball club, and a Japanese high school team takes the field against baseball-playing zombies! I'm not going to tell you that all of these late-season call-ups are major league material, but more than a few of them are definitely diamonds in the rough.
Bob Calhoun used to wrestle guys in sasquatch suits while drunks threw food at him. His latest pop culture memoir, "Shattering Conventions: Commerce, Cosplay and Conflict on the Expo Floor" (Obscuria Press, 2013), has a chapter on WrestleMania in it, along with passages on Comic-Con, a Portland "Twilight" con, gun shows