On Screen, Bases Are Loaded : Baseball: America’s national pastime is enjoying a renaissance in Hollywood-- ‘Major League II’ is in theaters and six more projects are on their way. But a decade ago, the game wasn’t a hot topic.

Let’s get this over with quickly: Critic and former Columbia University provost Jacques Barzun once wrote: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America better learn baseball.”

Ever since he pronounced this curse 40 years ago, there has been no end in the supply of twinkly-eyed Barzun-clones who arrive with spring to fill the airwaves with woody essays about baseball being what Homer had in mind when he wrote the Odyssey.

“There are many who see in baseball the entire fabric of American life,” Vice President Gore said last May in the kind of speech politicians love to give to the Baseball Hall of Fame. “During the jobs bill debate,” he said, “we kept reminding ourselves Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times.”

In short, if you need to renew your romance with the national pastime you’re in luck. There are seven baseball movies on deck to trot around the nation’s base paths starting immediately.

First up is “Major League II,” David S. Ward’s current-release sequel to his raucous 1989 clubhouse hit about the funky losers-turned-champion Cleveland Indians.

William Dear’s remake of the 1951 film “Angels in the Outfield” features an 8-year-old who rouses the deadbeat Angels to believe in themselves after he sees “real” angels winging around you-know-where. (Opens July 8.)

“Little Big League,” by Castle Rock producer-turned-director Andrew Scheinman, concerns a 12-year-old who inherits the derelict Minnesota Twins and manages to inspire the overpaid bankers on-field to “play” baseball again for fun. (Opens July 20.)

Ron Shelton’s “Cobb” stars Tommy Lee Jones as Ty Cobb, the great Detroit Tiger of the 1920s, at the end of his life remembering in flashback how he tormented the opposition on-field with his slashing spikes and rationalizing his personal losses off the field.

And Michael Ritchie’s “The Scout” stars Albert Brooks in a middle-age, middle-management career crisis comedy (just completed filming).

On the documentary front, Washington-based filmmaker Aviva Kempner is working on “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg.” Kempner (“The Partisans of Vilna”) hopes to release the film by Sept. 19, the 60th anniversary of Greenberg’s taking Yom Kippur off during the 1934 pennant race with the Yankees.

And Ken Burns (“Civil War”) is readying a nearly 20-hour history titled “Baseball” to air in nine “innings” of two or more hours each on PBS in the fall.

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For all this activity, baseball was a subject that almost nobody in Hollywood could get funded a decade ago, before Ron Shelton’s “Bull Durham” (1988) parlayed an $8-million investment into a $50-million domestic box-office gross. Now everyone in town seems to be stepping up to the plate.

The baseball genre began with simple biographies like “The Pride of the Yankees” (1942) with Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig, “The Babe Ruth Story” (1948) starring William Bendix, and even “The Jackie Robinson Story” (1950) starring Robinson himself. These are World War II-era baseball versions of “The Jazz Singer,” patriotic meditations meant to celebrate the American melting pot meritocracy.

When something gets elevated to the film genre the way baseball has, both film and social critics inevitably find fault with what they see on screen. The complaints about baseball movies occur in two forms: Movies Can’t Get Baseball Right; and Neither Can Baseball, Anymore.

“When they showed Shoeless Joe Jackson coming out of the cornfield (in “Field of Dreams”) and going up to the plate as a right-handed hitter, I almost fell over,” says Billy Rogell, who played shortstop for the 1934 Tigers with Hank Greenberg. “They should have sent that kid (Ray Liotta) back into the cornfield and told him to come back as a leftie,” adds Rogell, 89.

“Yeah, and they used an oversize ball to show up better, too,” reminds Roger Angell, the New Yorker writer, who has taken baseball movies to task in “No, but I Saw the Game,” a piece he wrote a few seasons back. “Very few guys get it right,” Angell says.

It also turns out that Ron Shelton, in Angell’s estimation, “really knows ball.” In fact, he’s made a Hollywood career out of it, having traded in his cleats as a minor league player to write and direct “Bull Durham” and to write two basketball films, “Blue Chips” and “White Men Can’t Jump” (he also directed the latter). Perhaps that’s why it’s all the more shocking when Shelton, on the set of “Cobb,” spells out baseball’s fall from grace.

“I hardly watch baseball anymore. I’m so upset with a game that’s played indoors and on plastic,” Shelton rails. “Turns out, it’s all big business. You have athletes right out of college representing shoe and soft-drink companies--but God forbid they do anything a 21-year-old normally does and lose their $20-million contracts. We’re asking athletes to be a whole lot of things that they aren’t, including corporate spokesmen, which you cannot be and maintain a point-of-view.

“Ty Cobb was Southern-born, sent his kids to Ivy League schools, listened to classical music, hung out with Presidents and did not accommodate anybody. Nor explain himself, nor ever complain. He took everything head on. He had very clear opinions and expressed them freely. He was a lot of things that were unpopular, but nobody ever called him a liar. He was a man who played as big a game as he talked, who excelled, and who was not ambivalent about all the things modern society is ambivalent about.”

If Shelton is wound up, it’s because people sense that something has gone out of baseball and American life.

“What baseball represents to people--or what writers want it to--is innocence,” says John Sayles, who wrote and directed “Eight Men Out,” about the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919.

Baseball itself, however, no longer seems innocent. “Fans think of baseball as a game played by pampered millionaires and run by exploitative owners,” says Ward, whose “Major League” films take a slapstick look at the game.

Starting in the ‘70s, Hollywood baseball movies--”Bang the Drum Slowly” (1973), “Bull Durham” and even “The Natural” (1984)--dealt with the acceptance of limits, when American men began to face the fact that they would not achieve what they thought was a birthright. Never mind the exhilaration of glory. The comforts of modest success, a respectable job and a home on a tidy street either closed in on baby boomers who had been promised the world or, worse, outright eluded them.

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Unable to face the hard facts, the baseball movie has since slipped into fantasy nostalgia. “The Sandlot,” by David Mickey Evans, is a 1993 film told in flashback to 1962 by a baseball announcer. The movie pines for the days when a kid could dream, and stardom was the goal. “There might be an entire generation out there whose theme song could be ‘I’ll Never Grow Up,’ ” says Sayles.

Baseball has been the prism of what was and was not possible in American life. To understand baseball then is to understand the Old West and the sense of unbounded frontier that was its legacy. Organized professional baseball was a 19th-Century innovation. Its mechanics are about open fields, and its ethos is agrarian, about reaping what you sow. It lent itself to the postwar suburban frontier, where city met country, and baseball was the only game in town.

Now, the dynamic has shifted to basketball and hockey, intensely paced urban sports sandwiched between buildings. Offense switches to defense in the flick of a wrist; a player about to go in for the kill is unmanned in a flash, and the action moves deep into his home turf. It makes sense on the court or the rink because it makes sense in the city--and in the overall pace of the nation, as regulated by the thermostat of TV and cable TV. Films like “Field of Dreams” and “The Sandlot” were made less for contemporary kids than for the last generation to whom baseball made sense, those who came of age in the ‘60s or earlier. But the urgency in these films is gone, because the culture has moved onto something newer and hotter, which better reduces and clarifies experience.

Perhaps that’s why no one expected Michael Jordan, who grew up in Wilmington, N.C., where he played baseball before basketball, to embark on this odd personal journey that resists the very cultural clock he helped reset.

With “Cobb,” the baseball movie may be moving beyond nostalgia and edging toward the major league equivalent of the aging gunfighter saga. This is how “High Noon” with Gary Cooper in 1952 or “Shane” with Alan Ladd in 1953 marked the beginning of the end of the vigor of the Western, once the Old West had vanished as a touchstone in the mental life of the nation.

“Maybe like the West, baseball is just not part of people’s dreams anymore,” adds Sayles, “the way it used to be.”