10) "Headin' Home" (1920)



9) "Rawhide" (1938)



Babe Ruth plays himself in this mound of apocryphal b.s. where he chops down trees, whittles them into baseball bats and frees stray dogs from the pound. The title cards (credited to Arthur "Bugs" Baer) are littered with lots of oddly-placed apostrophes in an attempt to give this narrative of this silent film a kind of homey Mark Twain feel. There are also racist scenes belittling a garlic-chomping Italian barber for no reason that I can figure. Most of the baseball scenes come via handheld footage of Yankee Stadium when Ruth is daydreaming about his destiny. Ruth played himself in several more films, including the Harold Lloyd romp "Speedy" (1928) and "The Pride of the Yankees" (1942) with Gary Cooper.

8) Kill the Umpire (1950)



Yankee slugger Lou Gehrig (also playing himself) has had it with the crowds and salary negotiations, so he trades in his cleats for a pair of cowboy boots and buys a ranch in this zero-budget Western from 20Century Fox. "The Iron Horse" quickly discovers that the country is just as corrupt as the big city when he gets shaken down by the crooked Rancher's Protective Association. During the prerequisite barroom brawl, Gehrig beans the bad guys with pool balls in the one of the film's "Gymkata" moments. "Rawhide" was released one year before amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) ended Gehrig's baseball career. In an examination of the film published in the journal "Neurology" in 2006, researchers determined that Gehrig did not suffer from what is now known as Lou Gehrig's Disease at the time of filming.

Bendix ends up umpiring in Texas where he has to set fire to a hotel to escape rioting fans calling for his head. This movie begins with "Three Blind Mice" played over the Columbia logo, probably tricking kids into thinking it was a Three Stooges short. Fortunately, writer Frank Tashlin , who was on his way from directing Porky Pig cartoons to Jerry Lewis movies, delivers plenty of Stooge-like slapstick.

William Bendix, in full-on loveable mug mode, lives for baseball, hates umpires and loses his job with the phone company when he accidentally drunk dials half of Palm Beach. Just when Bendix's wife is about to leave him, his father-in-law (Ray Collins) pulls some strings to get him into an umpire school run by William Frawley (Fred Mertz from "I Love Lucy"), who is in nearly a third of the films on this list.