JUPITER, Fla. • This past week as the Cardinals worked on “first-and-third” plays with the infielders on one of the back fields at the Roger Dean Stadium complex it was hard to miss the crackle of familiar chatter. First baseman Paul Goldschmidt and his teammates peppered the drill with commentary and play-by-play and grins and wisecracks and hey, wait, could that be …

Yes.

"Major League."

“We were just quoting it,” Goldschmidt said.

From "juuuuust a bit outside” to more colorful phrases from the 1989 comedy, phrases from that movie have become as common and ingrained in the game as OPS. And “Major League” is hardly alone. “There’s no crying in baseball” even when “you’re killing me smalls” because later we’ll “wake up at night with the smell of the ballpark in my nose, the cool of the grass on my feet” and realize “it’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.”

Movies are the best thing to happen to baseball since Cracker Jacks.

Before the arrival of this weekend’s 91st Academy Awards – go “Black Panther” – I canvassed the Cardinals clubhouse for favorite movies and favorite movie moments. How interwoven they are in baseball became clear. John Gant had just watched “The Sandlot” a few days ago. Miles Mikolas was of course nicknamed Nuke LaLoosh in college. Cardinals manager Mike Shildt had some real issues with the lineup in "Bad News Bears" and the late-game decisions made by coach Buttermaker. Alex Reyes and Genesis Cabrera had some serious picks as their favorite movies (comments below). And Tyler Webb had just watched his favorite, “Bull Durham.” The lefty mentioned how well that movie captured the minor-league life and the cadence and phrases used there. I asked if it’s possible that the movie had been around so long now that the minor-league life was reflecting it, not the other way around.

So it goes with baseball movies. We a think a line or phrase has been in the game all along, but it really came from the silver screen to the green.

“How can you not get romantic about baseball?”

That quote is from 2011.

With guidance from some of the players’ comments, I’ve ranked my 10 favorite baseball movies. If a player had the same favorite movie, I included his explanation. Not included is “Fever Pitch,” though I admit to watching it more than a few times to see if the time Jimmy Fallon, Drew Barrymore and the film crew shoved me out of the way at the 2004 World Series at Busch Stadium is somewhere in that curious ending.