No matter where you look, Christmas movies are everywhere at this time of year.
In a similar vein, baseball films dominated this past summer, thanks in large part to Major League Baseball’s first Field of Dreams Game, a nationally-televised event in which the Yankees played the perfect villain role for the country by losing in heartbreaking fashion.
Earlier this week, while I was waiting for the bus home from work, I was thinking about how Hawkeye has reignited debates about what it means for something to be a “Christmas movie” when it occurred to me that we haven’t seen a Christmas movie that’s also a baseball movie .
Could it be done? Is a baseball Christmas movie possible? To do that, I sat down at my desk, brought up all the lists of baseball and Christmas movies that I could find, and set out to find the answer.
Then, there are the movies like Die Hard and Iron Man 3 — the films where fans will endlessly debate whether to categorize them as Christmas movies or movies that take place at Christmastime.
To see what these stories have in common, I’d like to take a quick look at two narratives that, in essence, bookend the genre in 2021: the aforementioned grandfather of the modern Christmas story, A Christmas Carol, and Marvel’s Hawkeye, a story that is deliberately trying to hit as many Christmas tropes as possible.
Although A Christmas Carol is primarily centers on Scrooge learning about the harm that his miserliness inflicts and becoming a better man, his relationship with his family is at the center of it all.
The story of Hawkeye is a little bit more straightforward, at least through the four episodes that have been released.
In each of these two stories, we see two types of family relationships: the family you are connected to by blood and the family that you find along the way.
Even Moneyball does not escape the genre’s focus on family, as the scene in which the Athletics sign Scott Hatteberg is marked by Hatteberg’s young daughter crashing the meeting, while Billy Beane’s decision to decline the Red Sox GM job is juxtaposed with Beane playing a CD made by his daughter.
A story surrounding a Major League Baseball team in the month of December by definition cannot include games, and while you could try to make a movie about a front office executive at the Winter Meetings trying to juggle free agency and spending time with his family at Christmastime, you’d essentially end up with a version of Elf where the father works for the Yankees, not a publishing company.
In order for a baseball movie to take place at Christmas, the genre needs to drop something that has been intrinsic to how American audiences, the primary target for baseball films, see the game — namely, as America’s pastime.
Unfortunately, given how risk-averse Hollywood has been in recent years even prior to the pandemic shutting down the industry last year and reducing movie crowds in 2021, it’s unlikely that we will see the pairing of winter league baseball and Christmas any time soon.