Keanu signs up for baseball film

Keanu Reeves is ready to play "Hardball."

Variety says the actor has signed on to star in "Hardball," a new film by "Ready To Rumble" director Brian Robbins about inner-city baseball.

Based on the Daniel Coyle book "Hardball: A Season In The Projects," the story will cast Reeves as a directionless man whose drinking and gambling lifestyle is challenged by a friend who promises to loan him money if he agrees to coach a little league team in Chicago's Cabrini Green housing project.

Reeves is currently working on a remake of "Sweet November" with director Pat O'Connor and had been looking for another movie to complete before he begins a marathon stretch of filmmaking with planned back-to-back sequels to "The Matrix."

Originally, Reeves had signed on to star in "The Ottoman Empire," a comedy about a furniture salesman with a porn-movie past, but Variety reports that the studio, Columbia, backed out of the big-budget sex comedy after the failure of Mike Nichols' recent "Which Planet Are Your From?"

Other Reeves projects in the pipeline include a football comedy called "The Replacements" and the Sam Raimi-directed "The Gift," the tale of a crime-solving psychic that co-stars Cate Blanchett, Hilary Swank, Katie Holmes, Giovanni Ribisi and Greg Kinnear.