Noah Gittell > Quotes

“Richard Pryor is in it, too, as Charlie Snow, whose whole deal is that he’s learning Spanish so he can sneak into the pre–Jackie Robinson major leagues as a Cuban. It’s a funny bit, and he calls himself Carlos Nevada, which is a cool name.”
― Noah Gittell, Baseball: The Movie

“Broadly put, religion in postwar America wasn’t so much about the divine. It was instead seen as a vital stitch in the fabric of society, a building block of the American Dream. Naturally, the baseball films of this era incorporated religious imagery and themes into their stories, both with the intent to please the religious masses and as a natural extension of their melding of baseball with patriotism. McCarthy, who despised the perceived immorality of Hollywood, surely appreciated baseball movies for their wholesome portrait of American exceptionalism. In cinema, baseball was America’s game, and America was good because it was godly.”
― Noah Gittell, Baseball: The Movie

“Any institution that’s around for a century and a quarter will have to reinvent itself a few times to remain relevant. That’s the story of cinema and baseball. They’re not dying. They’re just in flux, as they always have been.”
― Noah Gittell, Baseball: The Movie

“Baseball is kinda like Hollywood that way. It’s been dying forever. It lost out to football a long time ago. Like Hollywood losing out to TV. The demise is always right around the corner. But it keeps reinventing itself and perpetuating itself, somehow, someway. Baseball is sort of a perpetual motion machine. It gets passed on from generation to generation. You take the baton and pass it to the next. Kinda beautiful that way. Movies and baseball.”
― Noah Gittell, Baseball: The Movie

“There were many rough edges that need to be sanded down for that to happen—Ruth was a drinker and a womanizer for long periods of his life—so the film simply abandons all sense of realism and instead turns him into a saint who could heal the weak and, in the end, died so that others could live. No joke.”
― Noah Gittell, Baseball: The Movie

“Confronting your nostalgia is a key part of growing up, for people, for baseball, and, most especially, for baseball movies.”
― Noah Gittell, Baseball: The Movie

“If we do A, they’ll do B, which leads to C,” Rany Jazayerli told me. “That’s the essence of analytics. Intelligent decision-making based on the data, not just based on a set of inflexible rules.”
― Noah Gittell, Baseball: The Movie

“Pride of the Yankees invented the visual grammar of the baseball film, discovering and employing editing techniques to turn a movie star with little baseball experience into a reasonable facsimile of one of the most talented players of all time. In later years, these techniques were used to make actors as disparate as John Cusack (Eight Men Out), Rosie O’Donnell (A League of Their Own), and Bernie Mac (Mr. 3000) look like they’re zinging line drives all over the field.”
― Noah Gittell, Baseball: The Movie

“The aforementioned Teresa Wright shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in the water. Neither may she be photographed running on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose in any of the following situations: In shorts, playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal; attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the Fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at a turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf; assuming an athletic stance while pretending to hit something with a bow and arrow.”
― Noah Gittell, Baseball: The Movie

“Look closely at the baseball film and you’ll see the American experience in microcosm; an institution grappling with its own values, wrestling its contradictions into a reasonable facsimile of what the Founding Fathers called “a more perfect union.”
― Noah Gittell, Baseball: The Movie