With the best interpretation of their career by Tom Selleck and Ken Takakura, they have created a marvelous film, due to its great script and staging of comic scenes and the world of Baseball.

Mr. Baseball casts Tom Selleck as an aging first baseman for the New York Yankees who is cast adrift by his team when they sell his contract to a Japanese team. Not that it ever has been done in real life, but I can't see why it couldn't happen unless a ballplayer has a smart agent and inserts a clause preventing same.

As early as the Sixties aging ballplayers from the states have gone to Japan when no one wanted them any more in organized baseball here in the USA. Better the Major Leagues in that country than the Minor Leagues here. I recall Larry Doby and Don Newcombe as two players who went to Japan in their declining years when I was a lad. Baseball has been popular there since Babe Ruth led an all star contingent of our best players in 1934 to Japan. It was on that trip that Moe Berg was gathering intelligence. Not even World War II killed the sport, in fact it was a point of contact during the US occupation.

Selleck in Japan has a lot of trouble adapting to the Japanese style where it is considered bad form to argue too much with an umpire or try and take out a second baseman or shortstop to break up a double play. Guys like Earl Weaver or Dallas Green or Billy Martin would have gone nuts there. He's also having trouble adapting to Japanese culture in general. Helping him along is Aya Takanashi who is a public relations person for the club and daughter of the manager Ken Takakura who is a real hard nosed character. Of course when Selleck and Takanashi get to kanoodling he doesn't know she's Takakura's daughter.

Takakura learns something from Selleck, that organized baseball is a bunch of men being well paid to play a game that they are skilled at and an element of fun must be involved. I remember a lad when Stan Musial retired after the 1963 season he said that he knew that he would retire when he no longer got any enjoyment out of putting on the uniform of the St. Louis Cardinals and playing the game. When it was just work and the body aches out lasted the enjoyment it was time to quit. Selleck has that same philosophy.

So many of Japan's baseball stars now play in the states that their leagues almost serve as a super minor league for our's. And this review is dedicated to one of the best of them, Ichiro Suzuki. Japan integrating the American baseball scene truly arrived when Ichiro broke the long standing record of George Sisler for most base hits in a single season.

As Babe Ruth and his all stars showed the Japanese about baseball, Ichiro shows us now how well they learned the game. And if it wasn't for that trip, Mr. Baseball would never have been made.

Jack Elliott (Tom Selleck) used to be a great baseball player. Now he's an apathetic over the hill slugger who's bigger in his own mind. One day he's dumped onto the Chunichi Dragons of the Japanese Central baseball league. There he falls for his liaison Aya Takahashi, and learns from her father the coach (Ken Takakura). Dennis Haysbert plays the only other American on the team.

It's a well done rom-com. Plus it's a well done redemption film. The clichés and the formulas are all here. And they're all expertly done by Fred Schepisi.

Tom Selleck is perfect as the aging baseball player. Not only does he look the part, he projects that sense of entitlement and was able to grow the character to his redemption. This has all the elements of a feel good movie.