Mr. Baseball

1992
PG-13
1h 48m

IMDb RATING

6.0/10

12K

YOUR RATING

Comedy Romance Sport

Jack Elliot, once a great baseball player, is forced to play in Japan where his brash, egotistical ways cause friction with his new teammates and friends.Jack Elliot, once a great baseball player, is forced to play in Japan where his brash, egotistical ways cause friction with his new teammates and friends.Jack Elliot, once a great baseball player, is forced to play in Japan where his brash, egotistical ways cause friction with his new teammates and friends.

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

6.0/10

12K

YOUR RATING

See production info at IMDbPro

Awards
- 1 nomination total

Trivia
At one point in the movie, when the pitchers refuse to pitch to Selleck's character because they don't want him to break the home run record, Selleck turns his bat the other way around and challenges pitchers to pitch to him as a sign of protest. This comes from a real-life incident a few years before the movie in the Japan Leagues when Hanshin Tigers slugger Randy Bass was on the verge of breaking the single season home run record there and pitchers refused to pitch to him. Bass similarly turned his bat upside down to protest.

Goofs
The American bar Max takes Jack to in Japan to meet other American players is actually a Sports Bar in Los Angeles. All of the patrons and bartenders/servers are American and all of the beer signs and posters are in English and if you look outside the window you can clearly see it's Los Angeles and not Japan.

Quotes
[Jack just found out that Uchiyama is fluent in English]
Uchiyama: I am the Japanese manager for Japanese baseball team that you agreed to play for. It is your duty to learn my ways, not the other way around!
Jack Elliot: [to Hiroko] Different language, same attitude! Let's go!

Alternate versions
The Japanese theatrical version had three additional scenes. The first additional scene is following Jack and Hiroko's first dinner together, where she drops him off at his apartment building. The second scene is an extension of Jack and Hiroko visiting a shrine. The third has Jack and Uchiyama at a graveyard.

Connections
Featured in Siskel & Ebert: The Last of the Mohicans/Innocent Blood/Mr. Saturday Night/Glengarry Glen Ross/Laws of Gravity (1992)

User reviews65

Featured review

8/10

I liked this movie

I liked this movie, not because Tom Selleck was in it, but because it was a good story about baseball and it also had a semi-over dramatized view of some of the issues that a BASEBALL player coming to the end of their time in Major League sports must face. I also greatly enjoyed the cultural differences in American and Japanese baseball and the small facts on how the games are played differently.

Overall, it is a good movie to watch on Cable TV or rent on a cold winter's night and watch about the "Dog Day's" of summer and know that spring training is only a few months away. A good movie for a baseball fan as well as a good "DATE" movie Trust me on that one! *Wink*