The Winning Team (1952)

What a beautiful movie!

Very Cool!!!

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

I remember renting this movie with my mom. She'd recently recovered from a vertigo attack, and I reassured her, "Don't worry, this movie won't make you sick. It's from 1952!" Low and behold, I happened to pick the one film from the silver screen that actually triggered my mom's vertigo; Ronald Reagan's character had a problem with his eyesight and the camera blurred and swirled. After I told her the famous, "Don't look, Mom!" we had a good laugh about it.With that big build-up, the movie had better be good, right? I'm sorry to disappoint you, but this baseball movie starring Ronald Reagan and Doris Day isn't very good. If you're a die-hard baseball fan and happen to love Ronald Reagan, go right ahead. I always get a kick out of seeing him in his young, handsome glory-he looked like my old sweetie pie from high school! Besides the eye candy, it's a pretty mediocre movie. It's a biography of Grover Cleveland Alexander, and shows his midwestern roots, his courtship and marriage to small-town sweetheart Doris Day, his medical problems, and his overwhelming obsession with baseball. He puts the sport above everything else in his life, including Doris, but she steps up to the plate as the "long suffering wife" and supports him through his neglect. The Winning Team doesn't really hold a candle to The Pride of the Yankees, so you're better off just sticking with that one.DLM Warning: If you suffer from vertigo or dizzy spells, like my mom does, this movie might not your friend. There are times when the camera swirls and blurs, and that will make you sick. In other words, "Don't Look, Mom!"

When film began, Grover Cleveland Alexander was a teenager--while Ronald Reagan was almost 40! singing?! This is a biopic about the career of one of the greatest pitchers in major league history, Grover Cleveland Alexander. If you look at the man's statistics, they are staggeringly impressive. Because of this and Alexander's later medical issues, it's not at all surprising they made this film. What is rather surprising, however, is that they chose Ronald Reagan to play the man. When the film began, he was supposed to be a very young man--while Reagan was nearly 40! He did fine in the role, however.The first half of the film sticks reasonably close to the facts. If anything, it underplayed the greatness of the man (such as not even mentioning his three consecutive 30 win seasons and winning the triple-crown three times). However, around the middle of the film, the story gets hokey--and deviates very far from the truth. While Alexander did have problems with epilepsy and alcohol following his stint in WWI, the film made it look like his life and career fell apart. It also shows him being out of major league ball for some time until he cleaned himself up--but this just isn't true. He never had a losing season and still had excellent statistics until his final season in ball (when he was 43)--and the lengthy downward spiral in the film just never happened. With a career record of 373 and 208, he clearly was no bum! Overall, "The Winning Team" is a highly enjoyable and highly inaccurate and sensationalized film. While I do recommend it (it's well made and interesting), it seems sad that a great man's life was so distorted just to see a few extra tickets. But, that was pretty common for Hollywood during this era.

Ronald Reagan as Grover Cleveland Alexander, a telephone lineman and would-be farmer in early-1900s Nebraska who harbored one of the best pitching arms in baseball history. First pitching for the Phillies, and later the Cubs and the Cardinals, Alexander was sidelined continually in his career by a baseball accident, the war of 1917, and finally blackouts which were falsely attributed to alcoholism. This Warner Bros. throwaway isn't especially well-written or well-made, with archival footage and false backdrops making up the final third, however Reagan is very appropriate for the lead. Top-billed Doris Day (as Grover's saintly, determined wife) is around for moral support and romantic uplift; Day does what she can with the role, though the part as written is fairly preposterous. **1/2 from ****

You don't have to be a baseball or a sports fan to enjoy this film about Grover Cleveland Alexander, one of baseball's great figures in history. Ronald Reagen and Doris Day star in this entertaining and fast moving film that describes Alexander's life before stardom, his own personal demons, and eventual comeback into the world of one of America's most beloved pastimes. Even though some have said, it's not totally accurate in the facts, the movie reflects Alexander's love of the sport, and the movie "The Winning Team" is a testament to Ronald and Doris that we feel we're seeing the real thing. While this film has remained virtually unknown, it has come out on a Ronald Reagen DVD set and deserves to be seen by those who appreciate old movies and who love biographies of any kind.