As a special edition of Film on the Internet, I give you three Kevin Costner baseball movies, all currently streaming. Two are excellent, and one is pretty decent.

Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham is the one everyone can agree on*, and with two previous Solute articles on it already (Grant Nebel’s Film on the Television piece from 2015 and James Williams’s Year of the Month essay from 2022) and a Paste Magazine retrospective by our own C.M. Crockford, I’m in very well-worn territory when I give it my wholehearted recommendation. It’s smart, earthy, and funny, with career-highlight performances from Costner, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins.

Costner stars as Crash Davis, a minor league catcher nearing the end of his career; he’s brought in to mentor flailing, all-over-the-place rookie pitcher Nuke LaLoosh (Robbins), who has “a million-dollar arm and a five-cent head.” Both of them are drawn in by Annie (Sarandon), an English professor and spiritual seeker of the “Church of Baseball,” who takes one player as her lover every season. Crash balks at “trying out” for the spot, so Annie goes with Nuke–but she and the world-weary Crash have the deeper and more unmistakable chemistry, and we know what will happen when the season is over and cocky-but-sweet Nuke is promoted to “the show.”

Essentially everything here works. Low-key, beautifully handled romances are rare, and even rarer are comedies that are not only “adult” but mature, that deal with sex and jokes (and even sex jokes) without a juvenile har-har attitude of assuming sex constitutes a joke, that throw in the melancholy ache of outliving your dreams and falling short of them, that talk about Susan Sontag and William Blake and expect the audience to understand. But the best part may just be the scruffy realism of minor league life (Shelton was himself a former minor league player): the beaten-up clubhouses, the restaurant billboard (or “bullboard”) that promises a free steak to any home-run hitter who smacks one into it, the casual eccentricities, the easy back-and-forth between the stands and the players. It’s convincing as routine, workaday magic, both a low-paying job and a spiritual experience for its adherents.

Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams, on the other hand, goes straight for the spiritual. It does it with a mellow, nostalgic magic-hour glow, but that suits its soft-focus fantasy: if Bull Durham is partly about resignation, Field of Dreams is all about reconciliation, where the Church of Baseball offers actual miracles. I understand that this doesn’t work for some people, and I do give the edge to Bull Durham, but honestly, I think Field of Dreams is lovely in its own right. You can accuse it of corniness and probably not be wrong, but I think it’s more sincerity, a kind of unabashed earnestness that knows that even oft-evoked sentiments have their own weight and power. And that earnestness comes for us all in the end, because it’s hard to have much ironic distance from the love that grounds you or the regrets that keep you up at night. (It’s also an unavoidable side effect of this kind of optimistic fantasy: the proper response to a miracle is awe, which is inherently kind of dewy-eyed.) Corniness only happens when art conveys that sincerity cheaply and generically.

I don’t think that happens here, though, in part because the famous “if you build it, he will come” through-line that leads never-got-over-the-sixties Ray Kinsella (Costner) to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond for Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) and his pals doesn’t only lead to the famous tearjerker of an ending.* The magic lets Ray mend his relationship with the father he disparaged and then lost, but it also sends him on a quest to heal reclusive–and initially belligerent–writer Terence Mann’s (James Earl Jones) battered idealism. (“It’s not my fault you wouldn’t play catch with your father!” Mann says, in one of the best lines.) In my favorite subplot, it also lets him follow along a kind of life and afterlife story of baseball never-was Moonlight Graham (Burt Lancaster, Frank Whaley) who became a small-town doctor.

Graham, whose baseball career was a meager half of an inning, tells Ray: “It was like coming this close to your dreams and then watch them brush past you like a stranger in a crowd. At the time, you don’t think much of it. You know, we just don’t recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they’re happening. Back then I thought, ‘Well, there’ll be other days.’ I didn’t realize that that was the only day.” It’s heartbreaking, but Graham can live with it. He can, and does, turn down Ray’s offer to return to the past, knowing that it’ll mean undoing the present, the so-called second-best career that’s actually been his purpose in his life. Field of Dreams gives him a miracle anyway, letting Ray meet the younger Graham and take him to the magical baseball diamond where he can play forever–and then that Graham, too, makes a choice. This is all openly emotional, but it’s a bittersweet, grounded emotion. It’s not the fantasy of escaping or undoing all melancholy, it’s about acceptance, purpose, and perspective, about knowing that we inevitably close off our way to some possibilities when we reach for others, and that’s okay. It provides the realistic backdrop we need to accept Ray Kinsella getting one of his closed-off possibilities back again.

The movie may not perfect (the Rewatchables podcast rightly points out that there’s a major gap in it where the Negro league players should be, if this field is all about restoring baseball players’ lost chances), but it does what it’s doing extremely well, with openness, humor, and performances–especially from Costner, Jones, Liotta, and Lancaster–that can convey both humanity and a sense of grace.

The third Costner baseball movie is For Love of the Game, directed by Sam Raimi–I could not have told you that before I watched it–and while it’s the lone non-masterpiece here, it’s absolutely solid. Here, Costner plays Billy Chapel, a Detroit Tigers pitcher who reviews his life and career on what turns out to be his last day on the mound. (I watched this with a friend, and you can bet we broke out a Walk Hard reference: “Billy Chapel has to think about his whole life before he plays.”) In particular, he keeps circling back to his complicated and bumpy relationship with Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston, something of a weak link here), splitting the movie’s genre identity between sports film and romantic drama. It’s a contemplative, somewhat autumnal film with Costner doing an excellent job, making Billy prickly and self-contained, believable as both a star athlete and a man worth falling in love with and coming back to.

That is quite a good line-up, and it’s especially impressive that despite Costner doing three baseball movies–with Bull Durham and Field of Dreams only a year apart, no less–you can’t get them mixed up. It’s not just the difference between catcher, pitcher, and Iowa farmer, or between the minor leagues, the major leagues, and heaven. It’s about nostalgia vs. looking back vs. moving forward, about humor, idealism, glamor, and where the magic happens. None of the Costner characters are interchangeable. Neither are their love interests and supporting casts. The only constant, as James Earl Jones’s Terence Mann would say, is baseball.

* I am, of course, a liar.

Bull Durham is streaming on Tubi, Field of Dreams is streaming on Peacock, and For Love of the Game is streaming on Peacock.