Every year, most teams hold some sort of team bonding, social event during spring training. The specifics of the event vary from team to team, but frequently they include renting out a movie theater and showing some cloying, inspirational movie like The Blind Side, Cool Runnings, Rudy, or better yet, a documentary like Free Solo. Regardless of the team’s outlook on the year, the goal is to get the players amped up for the season and ready to compete on the field, even if the competition in question is for fourth place in the division.
But what if instead of taking the clichéd route, teams actually tried to select a movie that fits their current vibe, one that’s thematically on brand with the current state of their franchise? They won’t do this because spring training is a time for hope merchants to peddle their wares, even if they’re selling snake oil to sub-.500 teams. But spring training is over. It’s time to get real. So here are my movie selections for each American League team, sorted by release date from oldest to newest.
Stay tuned for the National League movie lineup in a subsequent post.
Seattle Mariners: The Thing (1982)
The “setting as a character” trope of storytelling is more applicable to the Mariners than it is to any other team in the majors (perhaps even the Rockies). Seattle’s T-Mobile Park is a hostile environment for hitters that presents even less predictable challenges than those faced by pitchers at Colorado’s Coors Field. The Thing is set in Antarctica, and the cold presents some expected challenges, not unlike the marine layer in Seattle, but the frozen tundra has also been preserving extraterrestrial life forms that, when thawed, begin to take over the bodies of as many other life forms as possible. The scientific researchers working in the area are put on their heels, attempting to react to forces they don’t really understand. Like the Mariners, the group is focusing primarily on the defensive side of the ball, as their proactive efforts to take the ETs out on offense largely fall short. They can’t properly fight the monstrous forces attacking them until they understand the how and why behind them. The geographic forces at T-Mobile Park are determined to kill offense, and if they are anything like The Thing, they will have their victory.
Minnesota Twins: Back to the Future (1985)
The Twins’ biggest challenge as they enter the 2024 season is that they run the risk of disappearing from public consciousness if they don’t win the division in definitive fashion or make a deep postseason run. They have the type of roster that analysts and projection systems believe in on paper, but repeated underperformance makes it difficult to sustain that belief. In Back to the Future, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) similarly finds himself in danger of disappearing, but in his case he’s vanishing from his present-day family photo after traveling back in time. If he can’t get his parents to do the thing they already did once and get together at a school dance, he will disappear from existence altogether. It shouldn’t be a tough ask — Marty’s parents are clearly predisposed to have a thing for one another — but his dad (Crispin Glover) plays it too conservatively and his mom (Lea Thompson) gets derailed by, uh, other considerations.
Likewise, the Twins have a talented enough roster to win, but it may take an uncharacteristic, bold move on the part of the front office to punch their adversaries in the face, and further help from an eccentric scientist (Christopher Lloyd) who can harness the power of lightning to keep their roster healthy and make sure the season stays on the optimal timeline for the Twins and their fans.
Athletics: Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
Like the titular Kiki of Kiki’s Delivery Service, the Athletics are being temporarily shipped off to a new locale for their training to become a real witch, or rather, a real baseball team with a real stadium. Upon arriving in her new home, Kiki’s charming demeanor allows her to quickly form a support system that stands by her as she endures growing pains and makes several avoidable mistakes on her path to full witchdom. Likewise, the A’s roster a cast of charming characters such as Brent Rooker, Lawrence Butler, and Mason Miller. And these characters are not to be blamed for the avoidable mistakes of their ownership group. The A’s don’t figure to be a dominant team, and they won’t be without gaffes and errors, but they should make for a charming watch with a bright future ahead, so long as ownership stays out of the way.
Tampa Bay Rays: Groundhog Day (1993)
There’s one of those famous, yet difficult to attribute, sayings that goes something like, “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.” That’s essentially what Phil, the character played by Bill Murray, learns in Groundhog Day. At the beginning of the movie, Phil gets stranded in a nearby town while on a work trip as a TV weatherman because he miscalculated the path of a blizzard. Likewise, the Tampa Bay Rays, who normally play in St. Petersburg, Florida are stranded in nearby Tampa for the 2025 season because they miscalculated how frequently to replace the roof on a stadium that sits in hurricane country. Phil quickly realizes he isn’t just stuck geographically; he’s also stuck in a time loop causing him to repeat the same day over and over. The Rays aren’t literally stuck in a time loop, but they’ve been looping over iterations of the same strategy for many years now — trying to outsmart the teams with more resources while spending as little as possible on player salaries. Sometimes it works in the sense that they’ve made the playoffs nine times since their inaugural season in 1998, but they’ve never achieved the ultimate goal of a World Series title, and thus they remain stuck.
As Phil’s journey progresses, he develops feelings for his coworker Rita (Andie MacDowell), who initially rejects his advances because he’s kind of a jerk. Phil realizes doing the same thing every day is getting him nowhere, so he tries other approaches. First, he opts to act like even more of a jerk. It goes about as well as Tampa Bay’s unwillingness to compromise with the local government on a new stadium deal. No one is attempting to force Phil to sell his baseball team, but his behavior causes Rita to like him even less than she did before. It’s not until Phil decides to try and be a better person that he wins Rita over and breaks free from the time loop. I’m not saying the Rays are a bad baseball team, but they could try to be a better baseball team and see where it gets them.
Cleveland Guardians: Hocus Pocus (1993)
In Hocus Pocus, three witches known as the Sanderson sisters (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy) return from the dead, with the goal of sucking the youth from the children of Salem, Massachusetts in order to preserve their own lives. When a player doesn’t suit up for your favorite team for a prolonged amount of time, it can sort of feel like they’re dead. And now, the Sanderson sisters are returning to Cleveland in the form of Carlos Santana, Shane Bieber, and Nolan Jones. The trio return to the Guardians in much better shape than the three sisters, but as he enters his age-39 season, Santana would probably love to regain some of his youthful energy. Meanwhile, Bieber turns 30 this season, so he doesn’t need to go sapping strength from minor league camp for the standard aging reasons, but as he progresses through recovery from Tommy John surgery, his elbow has to feel like it belongs to an 89-year old, so he probably wouldn’t mind rewinding to the elbow he had at 24. And though 26-year-old Jones retains much of his youth, he’d surely agree to turn back the clock to 2023, when he posted a 137 wRC+ and played a pretty solid left field defense.
Shifting the metaphor slightly to let the Sanderson sisters represent Cleveland’s front office, the Guardians tend to do just enough to reach their goal of a deep postseason run, and sometimes it works. Like last year when they made the ALCS, or at the beginning of Hocus Pocus when the witches successfully work their magic on a young girl in the village. But other times, a division rival with roughly 84 wins edges them out of first place on the last weekend of the regular season and they miss the playoffs completely, like Winnifred Sanderson (Midler) frantically trying to suck the youth out of a teenager and promptly turning to dust as time runs out on her spell. When operating with such thin margins, it’s too easy to die the villain rather than live to see yourself become the hero.
Detroit Tigers: Armageddon (1998)
Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting that a meteor is hurtling toward Detroit. I’m suggesting that the Tigers have one Bruce Willis type in Tarik Skubal and one Ben Affleck type in Riley Greene, with a whole lotta Steve Buscemi and Will Patton filling out the rest of the roster. In the case of Armageddon and Detroit in the 2024 MLB season, it worked. Willis, Affleck, and the rest of the oil rig workers convert themselves to astronauts and save the world; meanwhile, Skubal, Greene, and the rest of the Tigers made a last-minute postseason run and handled some Astro(naut) business pretty well themselves. (This analogy isn’t perfect, though, because the Tigers didn’t win the World Series, the baseball equivalent of saving the world).
Like the NASA bigwig played by Billy Bob Thornton, Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris probably isn’t thrilled that his critical mission rests on the shoulders of a group of guys who excel in hyper-specific ways but can be a bit volatile in other contexts. Rockhound (Buscemi) is a great geologist, but his motion sickness makes him a tough hang on a space shuttle. Kerry Carpenter crushes right-handed pitching, but he probably shouldn’t face a southpaw. Chick (Patton) knows his way around a drill, but he isn’t to be trusted in a casino. Tommy Kahnle throws a mean changeup, but he doesn’t tend to throw much else. The Armageddon crew pulled off the impossible once, but would you trust these guys to do it again? Maybe things go smoothly a second time around; maybe things go boom. Maybe we get another blockbuster; maybe we get another Ben Affleck Dunkin’ commercial. Maybe the Tigers win the World Series; maybe they miss the playoffs. However things turn out, hopefully they’ll at least have us on the edge of our seats.
Toronto Blue Jays: 500 Days of Summer (2009)
It’s rare for a romantic comedy to ask its viewers to spend two hours invested in the fate of a couple and then serve up an ending where the couple is no longer together, but 500 Days of Summer pulls it off. The Blue Jays have less than 500 days remaining with Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Toronto fans have become invested in the relationship between Guerrero and their favorite team. But like Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), Vladdy and the Jays have different wants and needs and views of the world they inhabit. Thus, they enter the phase of a relationship where both sides know a breakup is the most likely outcome, but they’re still kind of trying to make it work. There might be pockets of happiness, reminiscent of how things used to be and could be again. They might call it quits sooner than expected and send Vladdy out of town at the trade deadline, but then consider rekindling things when they meet up at a wedding or the Winter Meetings. The Blue Jays and Guerrero are not Tom and Summer, so maybe they’ll get their happy ending yet, but even if not, 500 Days of Summer works because it ends on a note of hope. After enduring heartbreak, Summer is married and Tom finds himself feeling optimistic about a new woman named Autumn (Minka Kelly), demonstrating that even relationships that feel meant to be but ultimately aren’t can give way to something better.
Los Angeles Angels: The Holdovers (2023)
The Holdovers is set over Christmas break at a boarding school in New England, where Paul Giamatti plays a teacher tasked with chaperoning the students remaining at the school over break due to their lack of better holiday options. To describe Paul Hunham (Giamatti), the movie’s plot summary on Wikipedia says, “His students and fellow teachers despise him for his strict grading and stubborn personality.” And were this movie not set in 1970, he probably would have banned cell phones as well. The five students in Hunham’s care are not unlike the Angels’ roster; the players were hot commodities around 2019, so they bear some privilege, but they don’t exactly have teams clamoring to have them around anymore (see: Tim Anderson, Jo Adell, Yoán Moncada, Kyle Hendricks). Some of the holdovers are eventually sprung from school by a student’s dad who drops in on his helicopter and invites them on a ski trip. The baseball equivalent of this is getting traded to a contender at the deadline. Those who remain are left to work through a hodgepodge of bitterness, anger, grief, and any other negative emotion that you can think of, but by the movie’s end they’ve managed a little healing. They develop a better understanding of themselves and one another and they’re ready to bring their fresh perspectives out of their isolated bubble and into the real world when school resumes. So while a season with the Angels might feel like a cruel punishment, there’s an opportunity for growth in there too.
Baltimore Orioles: Dune: Part II (2024)
The Orioles feel like they’re in the middle movie of a trilogy, where a ton of progress has been made toward the larger goal, but we won’t see the protagonists reach the metaphorical mountaintop until the next movie. So for now, we’re left unsatisfied. I’m aware that Dune: Part II isn’t actually part of a trilogy. It covers the back half of the first book in the Dune series. And though Denis Villeneuve, the director of both parts of the most recent Dune adaptation, wants to make a third movie based on the second book in the series, the project remains vaguely “in development.” Just like the Orioles.
Baltimore is reaching the inflection point of its narrative, and it’s unclear where exactly the story is going next. The O’s have a bunch of blonde Timothée Chalamet types, the Chosen prospects, ready to take over as rulers of the universe following a bloody, painful transition of power, which in this analogy is several losing seasons while amassing draft picks and minor league talent. A few of the Chosen Ones have taken over as emperor, just as Paul Atreides (Chalamet) does at the end of Dune: Part II, but there remains considerable tension in Birdland and on Arrakis. There’s no guarantee that a potential third Dune movie is going to end happily; in fact, the subsequent books in the series get quite dark. That possibility makes the comparison all the more fitting. Many challenges could still prevent a successful reign and a satisfying resolution to the rise of a new era in Baltimore, or they could exit the Dune universe altogether in favor of a more Return of the King (or Jedi) type of ending.
Kansas City Royals: Twisters (2024)
After some time away from the playoff race, the Royals are back in, just like Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a tornado savant from Oklahoma, who gets wrangled back into storm chasing after several years observing storm season from afar. Previously, Kate tracked tornados with a group of academics, looking to use science to weaken the power of the storms they opposed, but in Twisters, Kate joins forces with an unexpected collection of oddballs, led by YouTube influencer Tyler (Glen Powell), to get back into the postseason, or storm season, rather. As the Royals prepared for their window of contention to open, they too brought in some unconventional options to supplement their roster. At the time, many public ball-knowers had trouble following the logic behind signing Aroldis Chapman in 2023 and Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha before last season. But then, at the 2023 trade deadline, they flipped Chapman for Cole Ragans, who along with Lugo and Wacha, helped Kansas City starters lead the league in ERA- last year. The Royals may be tearing across the plains in a truck rigged with fireworks, relying on gut instinct rather than high-tech weather radar, but that doesn’t mean they can’t tame the tornadoes that previously kept them home during the postseason.
Chicago White Sox: The Last Showgirl (2024)
In The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson plays Shelly, a dancer in Las Vegas who is arguably the last to make an entire career out of performing as a showgirl. The showgirl industry is disintegrating around her, and no one is really trying to save it. Instead, they’re bringing in different acts and attempting to build a more modern entertainment product. As the White Sox have systematically traded away big league talent to reallocate resources toward the teams that will perform on the South Side in subsequent seasons, the last remaining showgirl of a bygone era of White Sox baseball is Luis Robert Jr. As everyone around him shifts their attention to future development, Robert must stay grounded in the present, focused on performing at his peak to secure a soft landing spot once the last of the 2019-2022 era of White Sox baseball is done for good.
As Shelly rides out her last few shows, she experiences emotional upheaval, at times ripping her costume, missing her cues, and lashing out at those closest to her. She demonstrates how difficult it is for a person to stay locked in on the performance in front of them as their coworkers depart for other jobs and the audiences get sparser and seem to care less by the day. It makes Shelly question her choices and ask if it was all really worth it. She was never as talented at dancing as Robert is at playing baseball, and several teams will be making generous offers to free him from the post-apocalyptic baseball scenes at Rate Field, but it must feel strange to be the last one around to shut out the lights on an era of a team you’d once worked so hard for.
Texas Rangers: The Substance (2024)
The refrain echoing throughout The Substance is YOU NEED BOTH. “Both” refers to Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging Hollywood star played by Demi Moore, and Sue, the younger version of Elisabeth played by Margaret Qualley. Sparkle has taken a black market drug that splits her existence in two, with weeks spent alternating as the aging version of herself that has been discarded by the studio execs, and the younger one that the general public idolizes. In baseball, we too idolize youth and begin to discount players who reach the dangerous part of the aging curve. But Sue quickly learns that stealing the stabilizer substance from the older version of herself does not improve her quality of life; rather, it’s too much of a good thing. A balance is needed between the aged but wise and the youthful but naive. The key contributors on the 2025 Rangers are themselves either an Elisabeth or a Sue. On the Elisabeth side are Marcus Semien, Adolis García, Corey Seager, Joc Pederson, Jacob deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi, Chris Martin, and Luke Jackson. For the Sues, the Rangers have Wyatt Langford, Josh Jung, Leody Taveras, Jack Leiter, and Kumar Rocker, with Evan Carter waiting at Triple-A. The Substance earns its “body horror” label when Elisabeth and Sue fail to strike the proper balance and destroy themselves in the process. The Rangers are hoping to avoid that fate, that the leadership and wisdom of their veterans will contribute just as much as the energy and durability of the younger crowd.
Houston Astros: My Old Ass (2024)
My Old Ass follows Elliott (Maisy Stella) during the summer after her senior year of high school as she transitions from small-town kid who lives on a cranberry farm to young adult who attends college in the city. The Astros find themselves in a bit of a transitional phase themselves. The soul of their team remains, in Jose Altuve, but gone are Alex Bregman, Kyle Tucker, and Ryan Pressly, while on their way in are Isaac Paredes, Christian Walker, and Cam Smith. In the front office, it seems owner Jim Crane and former player Jeff Bagwell are more directly involved in baseball operations compared to how the Astros did things in the past. Current players and modern baseball minds taking advice from an aged version of themselves in Crane and Bagwell is similar to Elliott taking advice from the older version of herself (Aubrey Plaza), whom Elliott sees while she’s high on hallucinogenic mushrooms. Mid-30s Elliott doles out some genuinely good advice, like spending more time with family before you get too busy and move too far away. But she also attempts to rob teenaged Elliott of the most meaningful romantic relationship of her life, simply because it ends in heartbreak. So though it might seem that certain voices are guaranteed to offer good advice because their life experience is so similar to your own, sometimes the pain endured by the old heads have left them risk averse, or just plain out of touch.
Boston Red Sox: Hot Frosty (2024)
Red Sox fans may have lost the hope required to truly love a baseball team after helplessly watching the front office trade Mookie Betts to the Dodgers, followed by the departures of Eduardo Rodriguez and Kyle Schwarber in free agency. Then Trevor Story came to town and contributed excruciatingly little, and if that wasn’t enough, Nathan Eovaldi, J.D. Martinez, and Xander Bogaerts left as free agents, too. Getting Sox fans to reinvest themselves emotionally will be like getting the widow of a cancer victim to open herself up to love again, which is the central conflict of Hot Frosty. To love again requires a dramatic transformation — from a cold-yet-chiseled snowman to a warm and inviting human man. Or in the case of the Red Sox, transforming from a roster that lacks the heat required to contend to one with some fire. Will adding Garrett Crochet, Alex Bregman, and Walker Buehler, alongside the impending arrival of some exciting, young prospects be enough of a transformation to thaw the vibes at Fenway Park this season? To be continued…
New York Yankees: The Monkey (2025)
The Monkey is adapted from a Stephen King short story in which a wind-up monkey decimates a small town at the unwitting behest of twin brothers Bill and Hal (both played by Theo James), who activate the monkey by turning the key in its back. But really, The Monkey is about accepting mortality and processing trauma rather than making it a problem for everyone around you. The Yankees are managing the mortality of Gerrit Cole, Luis Gil, and Giancarlo Stanton (and to a lesser extent, Clarke Schmidt, Ian Hamilton, and DJ LeMahieu) as they deal with injuries. Meanwhile, the Yankees must also process the trauma of their partially self-inflicted World Series loss, followed by the departure of Juan Soto to their crosstown rivals a month later. The Yankees need to resist the urge to express their frustration by continuing to turn the key in that monkey’s back if they want to avoid calamity this season.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com