Editor’s Note: In the spirit of seeking sunshine during a gray winter, and to help usher in the upcoming baseball season we will be featuring baseball movies every Monday between now and Opening Day. Today we fall in love with the game and visit the first side of the Kevin Costner baseball triangle.

Kevin Costner has made three baseball movies in his career. In those movies Costner has played a Minor League catcher who creates rain delays and catch phrases, a farmer who hears voices in the corn and builds a ballpark, and a Major League pitcher who dates John Travolta’s wife.

Today, we are focusing on the movie where he played a pitcher, For Love of the Game, which also happened to be the newest of the three Costner baseball movies.

By the time the third leg of the Costner baseball triangle rolled around, like an old journeyman pitcher who has bounced around from team to team it was clear that he did not have much left in the tank.

While Bull Durham and Field of Dreams provided entertainment from start to finish, along with a few tears, For Love of the Game has moments where it turns into that extra inning game that you just want to end so you can fight the traffic and go home.

Still, it is hard to not count the complete Costner trilogy in a listing of baseball movies, since each one contributes pieces to the entire picture.

The movie focuses on Costner as a 40 year-old pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. Throughout the course of pitching what could be the final game of his career Costner flashes back to various points of his career both on and off the field. Each of these flashbacks force Costner’s character to think about the events that made him the person that he became.

The movie is helped by the presence of Vin Scully calling the on-field action as only Vin Scully can.

When the day comes where Vin Scully is no longer able to call baseball games, it is nice to know that his voice will live on not only through his massive archive of actual games called, but also through a few silver screen games as well.

There truly is no one left in the world of baseball who calls a game like Vin Scully.

For Love of the Game is not just a baseball movie.

Like the previous movie on our countdown, Fever Pitch, For Love of the Game probably could also fall into the romantic “Rom Ball” category. However, as Fred Savage’s character in The Princess Bride comes to learn, you likely won’t mind the “mushy stuff” as the movie draws to its conclusion.

For the most part, the baseball action is strong,  and the flashbacks do not seem to water down the present day action.

Not to give anything away for those who have not seen the movie, but viewers are rewarded in the end of the film in much the same way that a fan is rewarded with a walk-off home run after watching a 21-inning game into the wee hours of the morning.

Again, For Love of the Game is not Kevin Costner’s strongest baseball movie, but it does deserve a place on the shelf next to the other two sides of the Costner baseball triangle if for no other reason than to say that you own the complete triangle of Kevin Costner baseball movies.

And, like I said, there is Vin Scully to listen to so one really can’t go wrong there.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to listen to some vintage Vin Scully broadcasts.

Copyright 2015 R. Anderson