What Sports Can Teach Filmmakers About Storytelling
A Braves–Phillies case study in rivalry, anticipation, emotional stakes, and the art of recreating reality
As filmmakers, we’re in the business of replicating reality with lies. The better we understand reality, the more convincing our lies become.
That might sound contradictory. We create fictional characters, fictional worlds, fictional conflicts, and fictional outcomes. In a very literal sense, we’re lying to an audience for a living. But the emotions we’re trying to create aren’t fictional. Fear is real. Love is real. Jealousy is real. Grief is real. Anticipation is real. Rivalry is real.
If we’re trying to make an audience feel something, shouldn’t we spend more time studying the places where those emotions are already happening naturally?
That brings me to sports, and more specifically, the Atlanta Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies.
Sometimes the best storytelling lesson isn’t sitting inside a screenplay. Sometimes it’s happening on a baseball field.
Sports Are Stories Happening in Real Time
Think about what a good story needs. You need characters, conflict, something at stake, uncertainty, escalation, reversals, anticipation, and eventually some kind of resolution. Sports already contain all of those elements.
The difference is that nobody knows the ending. A screenwriter can spend months constructing a third act, while a baseball game has to arrive at one in roughly three hours. The audience watches the story unfold in real time without knowing which version of the ending they’re going to receive.
That is powerful because sports don’t have to manufacture stakes in the same way fiction does. The stakes already exist, and the audience brings its own emotional investment to the story. That is one reason rivalries become so compelling.
The Rivalry: Braves vs. Phillies
First, if you don’t follow baseball, let’s establish what we’re talking about.
The Braves and Phillies are both Major League Baseball teams in the National League East. They have played in the same division since the 1994 realignment, although the 1994 season ended early because of the players’ strike and produced no official division champion. From 1995 through 2026, Atlanta and Philadelphia have combined for 25 NL East division titles.
That repeated proximity matters. These aren’t two teams meeting once every few years with no context. They share a division, play each other regularly, compete for the same postseason opportunities, and carry years of previous encounters into every new season.
Then there’s the postseason history.
Philadelphia defeated Atlanta in the 1993 National League Championship Series, winning four games to two. The Phillies then eliminated the Braves again in the 2022 and 2023 National League Division Series, both times winning three games to one.
So when the teams met again in the 2026 National League Wild Card Series, the matchup already had a story attached to it. Philadelphia had won the previous three postseason series between the franchises, while Atlanta had another opportunity to change that history.
And this time, the Braves did.
Atlanta won the 2026 Wild Card Series 2–1, taking the decisive Game 3 by a score of 6–2. Michael Harris II, Ozzie Albies, and Matt Olson all homered in the clincher, while Chris Sale closed the game by striking out Bryce Harper and recording a scoreless ninth.
And yes, we over here at AIL are Braves country.
That personal investment actually makes this an even better storytelling experiment because when you’re emotionally invested in a story, you experience its mechanics differently. You don’t simply observe the conflict. You feel the consequences of it.
Rivalry Is Conflict With Memory
This is where filmmakers should pay attention.
A rivalry isn’t simply two teams that don’t like each other. It’s two teams that have done things to each other before.
That distinction changes everything.
Every new encounter carries the weight of previous encounters. The audience remembers. The players remember. The organizations remember. The fans definitely remember. Suddenly, something that would otherwise be a routine game has context.
A single pitch can feel bigger because of what happened three years ago. A celebration can be interpreted differently because of what happened last season. A player can become a villain or a hero not because of one isolated moment, but because the audience has watched their story develop over time. That is continuity.
Filmmakers spend enormous amounts of time trying to create continuity because audiences need to feel that characters existed before the scene began and that their choices will continue to matter after it ends. Sports get this almost automatically.
The Braves–Phillies postseason history demonstrates how previous events can become part of the emotional architecture of a new story. The 2023 series, for example, produced moments that continued to shape how fans and media discussed the matchup afterward, including the confrontation surrounding Bryce Harper and Orlando Arcia.
That isn’t just baseball drama. It’s character development happening in public.
The Audience Has Something to Lose
Here’s another lesson filmmakers can take from sports: the audience is rarely emotionally neutral.
If you’re watching your team, you don’t simply want to know what happens. You want something to happen, and you desperately don’t want something else to happen.
That creates one of the most important ingredients in storytelling: emotional stakes.
A filmmaker can write, “The protagonist might lose,” but the audience needs to believe that losing actually means something.
Sports demonstrate this beautifully. When the Braves were playing the Phillies in the 2026 Wild Card Series, Braves fans weren’t simply watching runs appear on a scoreboard. They were watching a team attempt to break a postseason pattern that had favored Philadelphia for years.
Game 1 gave Atlanta the lead in the series. Game 2 flipped the momentum when Philadelphia won 4–3 in 10 innings on an Alec Bohm home run. That forced a decisive Game 3, turning the final game into a genuine elimination scenario for both teams.
Then Atlanta won 6–2.
The emotional significance came from the context surrounding the game. The Braves weren’t simply winning another baseball game. They were finally changing the outcome of a story that had repeated itself across multiple postseasons.
That is a dramatically useful concept. If you want an audience to care about what happens next, give the moment a memory.
The Ninth Inning Is Basically a Third Act
Think about the structure of a baseball game. The opening innings establish the world. We learn who is pitching, who is hitting, what appears to be working, and what might become a problem.
Then the middle innings introduce complications. A team falls behind. A pitcher begins losing control. Someone gets injured. A bullpen gets involved. A defensive mistake changes the momentum. One team begins to pull away, only for the other to respond.
Eventually, the game enters its final innings, and everything becomes compressed. Every pitch matters more, and the margin for error gets smaller.
The audience knows the story is approaching its resolution, but it still doesn’t know what that resolution will be.
That is the sweet spot of storytelling: the audience understands the rules and the possible outcomes, but the actual outcome remains uncertain.
Good stories do this constantly. We know the confrontation is coming, but we don’t know what someone is going to say. We know the protagonist has to make a choice, but we don’t know which choice they will make. We know the third act is coming, but we don’t know what the character will have to sacrifice to reach the other side.
Sports make this mechanism impossible to ignore because the audience is watching it happen in real time.
What F1: The Movie Can Teach Us
This brings us to F1: The Movie, because the production demonstrates another important principle: audiences can feel when filmmakers have done the work to understand the reality they are portraying.
Director Joseph Kosinski and his team built the fictional APXGP cars around real Formula 2 chassis. The production bought six Dallara Formula 2 chassis, modified their wheelbases and bodywork, and equipped the cars with custom camera systems designed specifically for filming racing sequences. Brad Pitt and Damson Idris drove the modified cars themselves.
The production also filmed at real Formula 1 venues, including Silverstone, Monza, Suzuka, Spa-Francorchamps, Zandvoort, the Hungaroring, Mexico City, and Abu Dhabi. The APXGP cars even appeared during formation laps at several actual Grand Prix weekends, giving the production access to the visual language and environment of real Formula 1 events.
That matters because the movie wasn’t simply asking the audience to believe that racing existed. It was placing its fictional story inside an environment that already had credibility.
The production borrowed reality’s texture and then built fiction around it.
That is one of the most useful lessons for filmmakers. Authenticity isn’t necessarily about reproducing every detail perfectly. It is about understanding enough of the real world that the fictional version behaves as it belongs there.
Don’t Just Watch Movies. Watch Life.
This is where filmmakers can sometimes limit themselves.
We study movies to learn filmmaking. We watch films to understand structure. We read screenplays, study cinematography, analyze performances, and listen to directors explain their processes. All of that matters.
But if art imitates life, why wouldn’t we study life itself?
Pay attention to how people argue, how friendships change, how families communicate, and how people behave when they’re embarrassed, grieving, celebrating, falling in love, or trying to hide what they are feeling. Watch what happens when somebody wins, but pay just as much attention to what happens when somebody thinks they are about to lose.
Sports are particularly useful because they place people in highly visible situations where pressure, identity, competition, loyalty, disappointment, and celebration are all happening at once. But the same principle applies outside a stadium. A family dinner can reveal years of unresolved tension through a seemingly harmless conversation. A workplace can reveal ambition and hierarchy through something as simple as who gets interrupted in a meeting. A concert can reveal how quickly individual identity can become collective experience. A courtroom can expose the ways people use performance and persuasion when the consequences are serious.
The point isn’t to collect situations as potential movie scenes. It’s to understand behavior.
These environments contain something fiction is constantly trying to reproduce: human beings under pressure.
That is where filmmakers can find material that a screenplay alone cannot provide.
Replicating Reality With Lies
This is the strange paradox of filmmaking.
We create something artificial in order to make people believe something is real.
A fictional character doesn’t actually exist, but their heartbreak has to feel real. A fictional rivalry isn’t actually happening, but the audience needs to believe it has history. A fictional world doesn’t exist, but we need the audience to believe they could walk into it.
That is why reality is such an important reference point.
The more we understand how people actually behave, the better we become at constructing believable fictional behavior. The more we understand real conflict, the better we become at writing fictional conflict. The more we understand real anticipation, the better we become at creating cinematic suspense. And the more we understand why people care about something, the better we become at creating stories that make people care.
The lie becomes more convincing when the filmmaker understands the truth underneath it.
Storytelling in the Wild
Sports are only one place to study this.
The world around us is full of situations that reveal character, conflict, hierarchy, desire, identity, and emotion. A political rally can show how people respond to collective identity. A concert can reveal the rituals people create around fandom and belonging. A family dinner can expose years of affection, resentment, and history without anyone explicitly explaining what happened. A courtroom can demonstrate how people behave when persuasion has real consequences. A wedding can reveal the expectations people carry into relationships, while a funeral can reveal how differently people process the same loss.
Even ordinary environments can become useful observations. A classroom can reveal authority and insecurity. A workplace can reveal ambition and social hierarchy. A fandom can show how quickly individual identity becomes connected to something larger than the individual. The filmmaker’s job is to notice these things.
Not simply to consume life, but to observe it, understand it, dissect it, and eventually translate it.
What Are You Watching That’s Teaching You to Tell Better Stories?
What real-world stories have influenced the way you think about filmmaking? Tell us in the comments, then subscribe to the AIL newsletter for more conversations about film, culture, storytelling, and the world that inspires them.
Art Imitates Life
Maybe that is the entire philosophy behind the name Art Imitating Life.
The phrase isn’t just about making art that resembles reality. It is about recognizing that life itself is source material.
The Braves–Phillies rivalry isn’t a screenplay, but it contains conflict, history, character, stakes, anticipation, reversals, and catharsis. Most importantly, it contains people who care.
That is something every filmmaker should pay attention to.
Because if we’re in the business of replicating reality with lies, we should probably become really good students of reality first.
Don’t just watch movies. Study people. Study culture. Study sports. Study the environments around you. Pay attention to what makes people laugh, what makes them angry, what makes them stay, what makes them leave, and what makes them care.
The goal isn’t to copy reality exactly. It is to understand it well enough to recreate the emotional truth of it.
Because the more closely we understand life, the more convincingly we can imitate it. Art imitates life.
So why wouldn’t we study life itself? Life is our greatest writing room.
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