"You don't need a stereophonic Blaupunkt, what you NEED is a CURVEBALL!": Some Personal Notes on Baseball and Film
Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars #25
Hello, readers! This one will be a bit longer than usual. As I write this, the 2024 Major League Baseball season is in full swing. The Pittsburgh Pirates are sitting pretty with an undefeated record of 9-4, and right now Pirates owner Bob Nutting is basking in the glory of good will only afforded to owners who tirelessly provide their cities and fans with winning teams who may end up playing deep into October (and, these days, beyond).
Of course, these are the Pirates we’re talking about, and Bob Nutting. As Cinderella stories go, this is probably going to end up as if the Fairy Godmother is a crusty and unmotivated woman who chain-smokes Parliaments.
But the opening of baseball season always has me thinking about how grand a subject baseball is for creative endeavors. So much wonderful writing and filmmaking (and even poetry and music) have sprung from the lore surrounding this grand old game of ours! In this installment I’m going to run through seven particular instances in which baseball inspired specific instances of film (or videotape, as may be): five movies and two television episodes.
We’ll start with teevee first, with the Season Six episode of The X-Files titled “The Unnatural”.
It's like the Pythagorean Theorem for jocks. It distills all the chaos and action of any game in the history of all baseball games into one tiny, perfect, rectangular sequence of numbers. I can look at this box and I can recreate exactly what happened on some sunny summer day back in 1947. It's like the numbers talk to me, they comfort me. They tell me that even though lots of things can change some things do remain the same.
—Fox Mulder
The episode begins with a flashback to 1947, where a semi-pro team in New Mexico is playing a game. They have a Black player on their roster, which does not please the local Klan—but when the Klan arrives to deal with this, it turns out that the Black player is not human at all. He’s an alien. Cut to present day, where FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder is looking into a curious event he read about in the old sports pages from fifty-year-old newspapers. He contacts a man who was a cop way back then in that New Mexico town who saw the whole thing: a player named Josh Exley, with talent so ripe that it’s unthinkable that he’s rotting away in some backwater semipro league, is attracting attention. Too much attention, apparently—and not just from race bigots, but from other members of his own alien race.
The episode somehow manages to meld a touching baseball story (in flashback, with our present-day cop, played by M. Emmet Walsh, relating the story to Mulder) about how this game inspired one alien visitor to set aside his people’s designs on invasion, just so he could play. The script (written and directed by David Duchovny) gives Exley, our alien-disguised-as-human ballplayer, a wonderful speech back in 1947 about baseball’s appeal:
JOSH EXLEY: See, there's something you got to understand about my race. We don't have a word for laughter. We don't laugh. I don't know if you noticed in between all that fainting you was doing but we have very tiny mouths, so no smiling even.
YOUNG ARTHUR DALES: (the 1947 cop) Wow.
JOSH EXLEY: I tell you, when I saw that baseball game being played this laughter just... it just rose up out of me. You know, the sound the ball makes when it hits the bat?
YOUNG ARTHUR DALES: (smiling) Yeah.
JOSH EXLEY: It was like music to me. You know, the smell of the grass, 11 men-- first unnecessary thing I ever done in my life and I fell in love. I didn't know the unnecessary could feel so good. You know, the game was meaningless but it seemed to mean everything to me. It was useless, but perfect.
The episode ends with a wonderfully romantic moment as Mulder teaches Scully how to swing a bat. Mulder gives one of his typical long-winded speeches that border on the metaphysical, and Scully sums it all up with a perfect closing line: “Shut up, Mulder. I’m playing baseball.”
Sticking with science fiction, baseball plays a key role in “The Emissary”, the pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In this complex story, the Federation is taking control of a former Cardassian space station in orbit near the planet Bajor, which has just won its freedom from Cardassian oppressors. The Federation has put Commander Benjamin Sisko in charge of making the station ready for Federation use, but soon it turns out that the situation is very complicated, as there is a stable wormhole nearby to the other side of the galaxy, and the wormhole is controlled by extra-dimensional beings called “The Prophets” by the Bajorans. Got all that? That’s not the important part. Along the way, Sisko finds himself having to convince the Prophets to allow the regular use of their wormhole, but they have no experience at all with humans or other beings and they simply do not understand any of what’s going on. They keep transporting Sisko into and out of various “visions” as they try to understand the human perspective, which for Sisko keeps coming back to the linear march of time.
And one of those visions takes them to a baseball diamond, where Sisko tries to explain this game to them:
“The rules aren’t important. What’s important is that it’s linear! Every time I throw this ball, a hundred different things can happen in a game. He might swing and miss. He might hit it. The point is, you never know. You try to anticipate, to set a strategy for all the possibilities as best you can, but in the end it comes down to throwing one pitch after another, and seeing what happens. With each new consequence, the game begins to take shape.”
“And you have no idea what the shape is until it is completed?”
“That’s right. In fact, the game wouldn’t be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen.”
“And you value your ignorance of what is to come?”
“That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives day by day, and we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge. And that is why I am here. Not to conquer you with weapons, or with ideas. But to coexist... and learn.”
Heady stuff, I suppose…using baseball to make a definitive statement about the nature of time and how humans relate to it! But Mulder did the same thing, in a different way, in that X-Files episode, when he pointed out that each box score captures, at least in the context of a single baseball game, the key events of a day long gone by.
Time always seems to be a key theme in just about any baseball story I know, and that applies to the movies too. Let’s look briefly at five movies: one slob comedy, two comedy-dramas, one docu-drama, and one outright fantasy.
We’ll start with the slob comedy: Major League, in which a mean-spirited gold-digging woman inherits the Cleveland Indians from the rich old guy she married for his money. She has no intention of living in Cleveland, so she hatches a plan to move the Indians to Florida. (This movie came out before the Marlins or Rays existed.) She can’t legally move the team unless attendance drops below a certain threshold, so she sets out to put together the worst baseball team in history. And for a while, she does—these guys are terrible, as several groups of fans to which we return throughout the movie assert (including two Asian groundskeepers who tell us, via subtitles, “They’re shitty”)—but then, as you might guess, they get wind of her plan and decide, in the words of their crusty old catcher, “to win the whole fuckin’ thing”.
Major League is exactly what you’d expect, really, from this plot, and it comes down to the Single Big Game when the Indians have to beat the dreaded Really Good Team that has had their number all season (meaning, all through the movie). Of course, it’s the Yankees, though it would have been funny if they’d made it the Orioles or some other long-suffering team. We get to see the hilarity of the team being very, very bad, like when their leadoff guy, who is incredibly fast, slides on his chest into first…but he mistimed the slide so he stops about six feet shy of the bag. Or the relief pitcher who can’t find the plate because he can’t see, so he ends up wearing really ugly glasses to pitch. And yes, I called this a slob comedy, so there’s crude sex stuff along the way and a lot of predictable stuff about this Indians squad being a few players’ very last chance at baseball, and some other predictable stuff about maturity and making up with old girlfriends. But the movie is still a ton of fun with real laughs along the way.
The fantasy movie is none other than Field of Dreams, which uses time again as a theme to be illuminated by baseball: time as the chances we had to make the impacts we needed to make as humans, time as the chances we had to keep our relationships healthy when they were right there in front of us. The story is, I suppose, famous enough: Kevin Costner is an Iowa corn farmer who out of the blue hears a voice telling him “If you build it, he will come,” and he gets a vision of a baseball field where his corn once stood, and Shoeless Joe Jackson, of all people, getting a chance to play some redemptive baseball again. So begins a very strange kind of story where the supernatural fantastic element is there the whole time, but never explained or dwelt upon in any way, and in the end all of this plays out with some mystical events that are all grounded in the reality of a baseball field under the hot Iowa sun. James Earl Jones delivers the single best speech about baseball ever written, and when the ending comes, somehow it’s still a wallop after all these years.
Field of Dreams came out in 1989, just when I was wrapping up high school and getting ready to go to college…in northeastern Iowa, where the movie itself takes place. I would come to get to know that landscape very well over the next four years, and there’s one scene in Field of Dreams that always hits me in a particular way, not so much because of what’s going on or what’s being said, but because of where they are. Ray (Kevin Costner) and Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones) are finishing their road trip and are almost back to Ray’s farm, and they’re driving through darkness along two-lane back Iowa roads, when Ray points to his ballpark, the one he built, off in the distance, and sure enough they can see it because the land is flat and the lights are on. That’s what it’s like, driving through Iowa at night: the towns are often not on the main roads, but offset a bit from the roads because that’s where the trains run, so as you drive across that flat landscape, you often see lit-up athletic fields—baseball fields in spring, football fields in fall—lit up in the distance.
Now, as wonderful as baseball is as the root for a meaning-of-life fantasy, maybe it’s refreshing to step back and look at baseball’s history in a loving and comedic story with a ton of heart. That’s A League of Their Own, in which during World War II, with Major League Baseball shut down because so many players are off at war, someone comes up with an idea to keep baseball alive: let the women play it.
I haven’t seen A League of Their Own in years, so I’m probably due for a rewatch, but I remember its careful balancing of comedy and emotion, and the way it juxtaposes those elements often in the same scene. It’s a surprisingly involving movie, and about the only real complaint I’ve ever had with it is that I wish it had managed to avoid the standard “big sports movie climax”, in which the two sisters who entered the League together have their sibling rivalry come to a head when they’re on opposing teams playing for the championship. That’s the only real “false” note in the film, as I recall; the rest of it feels particularly authentic, even down to the moment when one of the ballplayers receives the telegram, the one you never want to get when your husband is deployed during a war. A League of Their Own is ultimately a terrific movie about an under-known chapter of baseball history. It also has quite a touching postscript in which the film shifts to the present day as an exhibit opens at baseball’s Hall of Fame for the women’s league, and here we learn what has become of all the women who played in the 1940s. Quite a bit of this is bittersweet.
Next up is a docu-drama film. (I’m not even sure it should be called a “docu-drama”, but I’m sticking with that.) The film is Moneyball, and I like it lot, though I have some reservations about the script. Moneyball takes us away from the field (mostly) and into the area of the front offices where the team’s management dwells. The drama in Moneyball deals mostly with team executives, focusing on Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (played here by Brad Pitt). The film is a dramatization of events described in a famous book of the same name (by Michael Lewis), that explored Beane’s efforts to keep his team competitive in a league without revenue-sharing, where rich teams are able to hoard all the good players and where poor teams have to get creative if they want to stay competitive.
As the film starts, the 2002 season has just ended and the A’s best players have all been signed away by other, richer teams, and the A’s never even had a chance in those contract negotiations, if they even tried. They’re entering 2003 needing almost to rebuild, and there’s a scene where Beane meets with his scouts to try to figure out who might be on the team in 2003, and Beane quickly becomes frustrated as his scouts just talk about “This player has a good body” and “This other guy has an ugly girlfriend so obviously he has confidence issues.” Beane snaps and tells his scouts that they’re not even looking at the real problem confronting them:
The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us. It's an unfair game. And now we've been gutted. We're like organ donors for the rich. Boston's taken our kidneys, Yankees have taken our heart. And you guys just sit around talking the same old "good body" nonsense like we're selling jeans. Like we're looking for Fabio. We've got to think differently. We are the last dog at the bowl. You see what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies.
The response is a bunch of blank stares.
A little while later Beane has a meeting with the GM of the Cleveland Indians, trying to wheel and deal for some bargain-basement players, and it’s here that he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young stat-head just out of college who seems to have an odd amount of weight in those negotiations. In a parking garage, Brand gets to start to outline his beliefs in a speech of his own:
Okay. People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn't be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. You're trying to replace Johnny Damon. The Boston Red Sox see Johnny Damon and they see a star who's worth seven and half million dollars a year. When I see Johnny Damon, what I see is... is... an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. The guy's got a great glove. He's a decent leadoff hitter. He can steal bases. But is he worth the seven and half million dollars a year that the Boston Red Sox are paying him? No. No. Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions. And if I say it to anybody, I'm-I'm ostracized. I'm-I'm-I'm a leper. So that's why I'm-I'm cagey about this with you. That's why I... I respect you, Mr. Beane, and if you want full disclosure, I think it's a good thing that you got Damon off your payroll. I think it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities.
The Moneyball script is partly by Aaron Sorkin, so you should expect a lot of speeches. (Script credit is to Sorkin and Steven Zaillian.) And they’re often good speeches, as Sorkin’s tend to be. But they can also be frustrating, because there’s always the awareness that people simply don’t walk around with these speeches written in their heads, ready to go when prompted, and some of them ring a bit false, like this very first one by Peter Brand, who is a major character in the film.
Take his observation about Johnny Damon: “Is he worth the $7.5 million?” Well…thing is, the year after they paid him that much, Damon was a key player the Red Sox win their first World Series in eighty-something years, so I very much doubt anyone thinks they “overpaid” for him. There are quite a few points at which Moneyball’s narrative rings false, such as its closing title card that implies that the Red Sox’s World Series win was partially based on the principles Beane pioneered the year before, which always seems to me something of a stretch.
Additionally, Moneyball makes more than liberal use of license and rewriting of the actual events of that season to get its drama across. Manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) comes off worst in all of this; he is depicted almost as a villain, constantly refusing play the team’s line-up the way that Beane designed it. Howe himself later expressed deep disappointment in the film’s portrayal of his relationship with Beane.
Throughout the movie, Beane butts heads with everyone, because nobody understands what he’s trying to accomplish or what his new approach to team-building is. This is what frustrates me most about the movie, because it wants to be the kind of story where the one guy knows best and everybody else is clueless, but at no point is Beane shown trying to actually explain himself to his underlings upon whom he is imposing his brand-new worldview. His head scout is particularly enraged by all of this, and it’s hard to not see where he’s coming from. The film depicts the As that year as the 100-win team that happened because of the genius of Beane’s ability to find value in cheap players, but it doesn’t acknowledge that the 2003 As were the beneficiary of a lot of players who had career years, and pitching is almost never mentioned in the film.
But even with all those caveats, Moneyball is a deeply entertaining movie, and what’s more, it looks and feels right. That’s a very important thing. My favorite scenes are the ones that take place in Billy Beane’s office, with its kind-of crappy Office Max furniture and the chairs that squeak a bit as Beane always tilts back all the way. One scene, depicting Beane’s wheeling-and-dealing during the trade deadline, is one of those oddly frantic office-talk scenes that Aaron Sorkin excels at writing; if you watch this scene, note how Beane switches from his desk phone to his cell phone and back again as he calls other GMs, sometimes barking at his secretary—”Get Shapiro on the phone!”—and then, in the same breath, yelling “Never mind, I got him right here!”
Since Moneyball is based on real events and real lives, and because the season it relates ended in disappointment for the As, it doesn’t so much end as it concludes as Beane is just starting to contemplate gearing up for the 2004 season. That’s a nod to one of baseball’s deepest realities: that no matter what happens in the season, whether you win the World Series or finish dead last, when the season’s over there’s another one coming up soon, and you’d best be ready for it. Moneyball ends with the reality that baseball just keeps on going.
And that brings me to my favorite baseball movie of all time, and the other comedy-drama on this list: Bull Durham. This 1988 movie features Kevin Costner as Crash Davis, a career-minor league catcher sent down to the lowest levels so he can tutor a young and raw pitching phenom named “Nuke” LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), who has, we are told, “a million dollar arm and a five-cent head”. The movie is loaded with scene after wonderful scene of the crusty older veteran who doesn’t have much time left (in his baseball life, that is) trying to convey some wisdom to a youngster who is not at all open about receiving it. This is a tried-and-true story trope, after all, and that it’s applied to baseball here is utterly refreshing. Oh, and both men end up involved with the same woman (Annie Savoy, played by Susan Sarandon, a local woman who organizes her entire life around what she calls “the church of baseball”), in a strange three-way dance of sex and attraction that somehow works in the movie despite being utterly unrealistic.
What’s best about Bull Durham is the twofold effect in its realization of its characters (everybody in this movie feels like a real person), and the depiction of its world. It’s a world of old ballparks in small cities where the plumbing is exposed and “renovation” means a fresh coat of paint on the cinderblock walls, and where the ballparks have gimmicks like a big wooden bull with light-up eyes and a tail that wags when a player hits a home run (also with a sign: “Hit the bull, win a steak!”). It’s a baseball world where the players travel from town to town on a single overly-cramped bus, and it’s a world where all these minor leaguers have their ears perk up when they learn that the new catcher that has just been sent down to them actually wound up in the Majors (“the Show”) for a few weeks once. It’s a baseball world of post-game fun in smoke-filled bars where the local girls are accustomed to the fact that there’s a different group of ballplayers every year.
Major League, A League of Their Own, and Moneyball all have winning (or not winning) as a big part of their individual stories, while Field of Dreams and Bull Durham do not. Field is more about baseball as a stage where relationships play out, but Bull Durham is about baseball literally as life. Only once or twice in the film does the movie give us any hint as to how the team, the Durham Bulls, is doing on the field, and that tracks from what I’ve read about the minor league experience in general. Bull Durham is about the fact that a baseball life is harder and harder to sustain the older one gets, and in the end, when Crash Davis finally realizes that his dream is never going to come true and he ends his playing days, it’s almost in the same breath that he wonders if he could “make it to the Show as a manager.” Even then, he’s looking for that road to Yankee Stadium, or wherever.
Where Bull Durham works the best for me is in its depiction of a world that feels utterly real, and the one place where it kind of falters to me is in the rare spots where it feels less real and more like a movie. This is most pronounced in what is probably the movie’s most famous moment, when Crash Davis delivers an impassioned speech of things he believes. It’s a fine speech, I guess, but it never feels to me, in the moment, like something an actual person would say. It always feels to me like something somebody in a movie would say. But other than that, the movie feels so real and gets so much right, especially in its little details, like the way the manager has his speech memorized down to the inflections of the words for when he has to cut a player, or the fact that at the end of the film, if you look closely you’ll see that Nuke LaLoosh’s shower shoes no longer have fungus on them, after Crash berated him for that early in the film (and early in the season).
There are many baseball movies I haven’t seen (Pride of the Yankees), and also many that I haven’t seen in so long that I’m not comfortable assessing them at this point (Bang the Drum Slowly, The Bad News Bears). But that’s a good thing! It’s nice to know that I always have someplace to turn if I’m in the mood for a baseball movie, and that I can find baseball in just about every genre out there. (Has there been a baseball horror movie? Anyone?) And baseball is, after all, a grand metaphor for life. Captain Sisko told us so. As did Agent Mulder. And author Terrence Mann. And Rockford Peaches manager Jimmy Dugan. And Billy Beane. And, most of all, Crash Davis and Annie Savoy. I’ll let Annie have the last word, just as she does in Bull Durham:
Walt Whitman once said, "I see great things in baseball. It's our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us." You could look it up.
See you ‘round the galaxy, folks! Go Pirates!
Exeunt,
-K.
And of COURSE I have an error in the very first couple sentences, where I overlooked the word "undefeated" when I read it through again. When I started writing this piece, the Pirates WERE undefeated. Sigh!