A look at the Boston Red Sox's 2003 season, from Spring Training to their meeting with the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series, and the team's relationship with their fans.
Manny Ramírez
as Self
David Ortiz
When a young boy makes a wish at a carnival machine to be big—he wakes up the following morning to find that it has been granted and his body has grown older overnight. But he is still the same 13-year-old boy inside. Now he must learn how to cope with the unfamiliar world of grown-ups including getting a job and having his first romantic encounter with a woman.
Ray Kinsella is an Iowa farmer who hears a mysterious voice telling him to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond. He does, but the voice's directions don't stop -- even after the spirits of deceased ballplayers turn up to play.
When young computer genius Rudy inherits his father's business his avaricious uncle has him kidnapped and held hostage until the boy signs off all rights to the lucrative enterprise. Not wanting the uncle to control, a pair of corporate executives happen upon a youth who looks just like the missing heir. In hopes of keeping the business afloat, they substitute him at the board meetings.
At Koshien, Hyuma shows a great match with Toyosaku Samon and Mitsuru Hanagata. In addition, a work that condenses important episodes until Hyuma grabs the giant star in his hand, such as the "Blood-dyed Ball Incident" that changed his fate and the Giants Army Joining Test with the addition of a new rival Hayami.
Trying to find his own game of baseball, and not that of his brothers, Tatsuya moves to America and pitches for a poor, struggling minor league baseball team called the Emeralds. Meanwhile, Minami is still in Japan, trying to find her own path after quitting gymnastics. Inspired by a photograph of her final performance, she becomes the photographers assistant.
A man named Shiki has been sent to a company in Matsuyama. Since Shiki was famous as a baseball club member at a previous company, there is a story about baseball clubs in the company. Ken, who was a player in high school, participated without being reluctant, supported by his lover Michiko.
Aging baseball star who goes by the nickname, Mr. 3000, finds out many years after retirement that he didn't quite reach 3,000 hits. Now at age 47 he's back to try and reach that goal.
The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.
While investigating a young nun's rape, a corrupt New York City police detective, with a serious drug and gambling addiction, tries to change his ways and find forgiveness.
Jim Morris never made it out of the minor leagues before a shoulder injury ended his pitching career twelve years ago. Now a married-with-children high-school chemistry teacher and baseball coach in Texas, Jim's team makes a deal with him: if they win the district championship, Jim will try out with a major-league organization. The bet proves incentive enough for the team, and they go from worst to first, making it to state for the first time in the history of the school. Jim, forced to live up to his end of the deal, is nearly laughed off the try-out field--until he gets onto the mound, where he confounds the scouts (and himself) by clocking successive 98 mph fastballs, good enough for a minor-league contract with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Jim's still got a lot of pitches to throw before he makes it to The Show, but with his big-league dreams revived, there's no telling where he could go.
Here is a Follies tape that will delight you time and time again. Greatest Sports Follies gives you an insider's view of the hilarious, sometimes insane, side of sport.
True story of Kent Stock, who in the early '90s gives up a job and ditches his wedding plans to take over as head coach of the Norway High School baseball team. Kent must win over his players and convince them and himself that he can fill their former coach's shoes and that they can go out winners. In the summer of 1991 Norway High's baseball tradition ended on a triumphant but sombre note.
A disturbed young man threatens violence at the World Series after failing to make the Houston Astros.
This 100-year celebration has rare footage of Red Sox southpaw Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove. This superb documentary bridges the gap to Ted Williams, whose hitting heroics are captured in living color along with the history of Fenway Park itself, from Opening Day, 1912, through the "Impossible Dream" season of 1967.
Masaki, a baseball player and gas-station attendant, gets into trouble with the local Yakuza and goes to Okinawa to get a gun to defend himself. There he meets Uehara, a tough gangster, who is in serious debt to the yakuza and planning revenge.
Acclaimed Florida novelist Randy Wayne White travels to Cuba with former pitchers Bill "Spaceman" Lee (Boston Red Sox) and Jon Warden (Detroit Tigers), and a band of baseball enthusiasts to find and revive the children's baseball league founded by American writer Ernest Hemingway in the days before Fidel Castro came to power.
Billy Wyatt, a former high school and minor-league baseball player, receives a telephone call from his mother revealing that his former child-sitter, and later in his teens, his first love, Katie Chandler, has died. Wyatt returns home to deal with this tragedy, reminiscing over his childhood growing up with his father, Katie, and best friend Alan Appleby.
Jack and Jerry are doing okay between profession baseball and Vaudeville. That is, until love and gold-diggers get in the way.
Like many young men in the Dominican Republic, 19-year-old Miguel "Sugar" Santos dreams of winning a slot on an American baseball team. Indeed, his talents as a pitcher eventually land him a slot on a single-A team in Iowa, but culture shock, racism and other curveballs threaten to turn Sugar's dream sour.