With pitchers and catchers reporting and the faint smell of fresh grass entering our nostrils, it is once again time to prepare ourselves for baseball season. I can’t think of a better way to gear up for the spring than with a countdown of the best baseball movies ever made. Keep in mind that this is just my humble opinion, but I’m right. Here’s #5.

5. The Natural (1984)

This might be controversial, because this adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s novel of the same name is usually the first film that comes up in a conversation about baseball cinema, but it is a bit jaded. That being said, it’s still the 5th-best baseball movie ever made, and that’s pretty good.

Robert Redford, Robert Duval and Glenn Close highlight a star-studded cast. The film has all of the crucial elements that make a great baseball flick: emotion, great singular moments and bits of the supernatural.

Roy Hobbs (the main character played by Redford) carved a bat, which was called Wonderboy, out of a tree that was struck by lightning and killed his father. The film documents his journey to the big leagues, which includes him getting shot by a young woman.

I won’t go into plot specifics, but the home run scene at the end of this movie is one of the best in the history of cinema. Hobbs’s determination is inspiring and his triumph at the end is something that nearly every great baseball flick has in common, but this story is the one that all subsequent baseball movies have been compared to.

The Natural is fantastic, but it can’t quite measure up to some of the all-time greats that are coming up in the next few weeks.