There are many, many reasons why 41 years later “The Natural” remains the gold standard for baseball movies (and probably for sports movies as a whole). Three are so many things to like across its 122-minute running time. 

I like that Joe Don Baker completely hams it up as The Whammer, and doesn’t even pretend like he’s anything other than a (verrrry loosely) fictionalized version of Babe Ruth. Buford Pusser has company in JDB’s personal hall of fame. 

I like that the movie was shot at War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo, and that the ballpark’s nickname was “The Rockpile,” a term of both affection and derision proffered by the locals. (I saw a baseball game there once. It was a dump. But it felt like you’d walked right into 1938.). 

I like Robert Duvall, even if he made a lot of people automatically despise sports columnists. If it wasn’t already taken, I might’ve actually used “Max Mercy” as my newspaper pseudonym. And it makes me wish I’d taken a stab at being a cartoonist, too.