The Weekly Screed (#878)

“The hard…”

by David Benjamin

“JUST a bit outside.”

               — Bob Uecker, as Harry Doyle, Major League

MADISON, Wis. — As long as Japan, Korea and the Dominican Republic keep sending talent to the Major Leagues, no one can credibly claim that baseball is exclusively “America’s pastime.” However, the U.S.A. — specifically, Hollywood — can still boast that the baseball movie is a uniquely American craft. Who but a die-hard Mets fan could ever think up a character like “Wild Thing” Vaughn?

 

While watching 42:The Jackie Robinson Story on a flight from Paris, it occurred to me that a surprising number of baseball flicks are among the most engaging films in the AFI canon. You don’t need to know much baseball to get emotionally involved in, say, Field of Dreams, or in Jackie Robinson’s bat-shattering rage against the massed forces of Jim Crow.

I think baseball films are so insidiously universal because, unlike most other sports, baseball goes on and on. It blankets three seasons of the year, insinuating its lazy rhythms and autumn climax into the national psyche. Its long lulls and sudden crises mimic the vagaries that afflict real people living real lives. James Earl Jones’ peroration in Field of Dreams expresses poetically the timelessness of baseball (which is also our most literary sport):

“… The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again…”

Pondering all this, I inevitably got around to deciding which, among the twenty-odd worthwhile baseball flicks produced since The Pride of the Yankees (1942) — which didn’t make my rotation — are the most… well, fun.

 

First, my rejects. Pride of the Yankees (1942) is dated, shmaltzy and the baseball doesn’t look authentic. The same flaws affect other early “classics,” including The Stratton Story (1949), Angels in the Outfield (the ’51 original with Paul Douglas) and It Happens Every Spring (1949). Fear Strikes Out (1957) is famous, but who’d ever watch it twice? Besides, if ever there was an actor who didn’t look like he belonged in center field at Fenway Park, it’s Anthony Perkins.

 

Moneyball (2011) is acclaimed by the critics. But, like Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) and For Love of the Game (1999), it’s somber. You watch it once and that’s enough. I sent The Sandlot (1993) back to Triple-A, because it’s just too cute. The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976) was the best film about black baseball ’til 42 came along.

Four movies deserve Honorable Mention: The Bad News Bears (1976) because it’s so nicely transgressive, Fever Pitch (2005) because it captures almost perfectly the tortures of unhinged fandom, Field of Dreams (1989) and Trouble with the Curve (2012). Field of Dreams, always fun to watch, misses the playoffs because of its labored contrivances — not the voice in Kevin Costner’s ear, or the magic cornfield, or the reincarnation of Shoeless Joe and the gang, or even the discovery of Moonlight Graham. This all works. What doesn’t work is the film’s facile and ahistorical evocation of the Sixties, a narrative shroud that would have suffocated a lesser actor than James Earl Jones.

 

I really like Trouble with the Curve, especially a cast that includes grizzled old pros Ed Lauter, Chelcie Ross and John Goodman. But the script is just too tidy to make the majors.

 

My final Honor Roll has six flicks and a guilty pleasure. The six are The Natural (1984), Bull Durham (1988), Eight Men Out (1988), A League of Their Own (1992), The Rookie (2002), and 42 (2013). My guilty pleasure: Berenger, Sheen, Russo and the incomparable Bob Uecker in Major League (1992).

 

The best baseball film of all is Bull Durham, in which Kevin Costner, playing the washed-up bush-league catcher Crash Davis, is asked who he is. He replies, “I’m the player to be named later.” Susan Sarandon, as Annie Savoy, the sexual philosopher of minor-league ball, establishes in word and deed the inextricability of baseball with life, love, happiness, sorrow, spiritual fulfillment and the joy of intellectual bullshit. “Why, there are laws we don’t understand that bring us together and tear us apart,” says Annie, in one of her loopy soliloquies. “It’s like pheromones. You get three ants together, they can’t do dick. You get 300 million of them, they can build a cathedral.”

Although A League of Their Own outshmaltzes, in some moments, Pride of the Yankees, it does so with better actors. The baseball is credible, the dance scene in the roadhouse is wonderful and the script contains a host of lines that will live forever. I mean, really: “Are you crying? Are you crying? ARE YOU CRYING? There’s no crying! THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!” This is the film, also, that gave us what might be the antidote for everything difficult in life, from childbirth to nuclear physics. As Evelyn Gardner (Geena Davis) walks away from a game she says is too hard, Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) replies, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great.”

The Black Sox scandal of 1919, which forced Shoeless Joe out of the major leagues, was the biggest true-crime drama in baseball history. By depicting that tragedy succinctly and slipping Studs Terkel into the cast, John Sayles created, with Eight Men Out, the best baseball drama ever on film — just ahead, in my view, of The Natural. In The Natural, Barry Levinson translated to the screen just enough Freudian noir to honor Bernard Malamud’s dark novel, but saved the story for moviegoers by making it stirringly filmic. Levinson realized that, to make a re-watchable movie, he had to light Roy Hobb’s path out of the existential labyrinth of 1950s literature. He did so, with Glenn Close, a white dress at Wrigley Field, and fireworks.

The Rookie is the least famous of my choices. The true story of Jimmy Morris, an aged high-school baseball coach whose players goad him a major-league tryout, somehow manages to achieve heartwarmth without sinking to sentimentalism. Yes, there is crying in baseball, right at the end. I credit the cast, especially an ensemble of young actors on Dennis Quaid’s team — Jay Hernandez, Rich Gonzalez, Chad Lindberg and Angelo Spizzirri — who are athletically credible and professional beyond their years. The scene of Quaid carrying a dirty diaper around while trying out for the majors is, again, one of those priceless vignettes wherein life and baseball inescapably intertwine.

Finally, hey. I know Major League is a silly flick. But its silliness is the grist of good comedy. With an intelligent script and without manipulation, it exploits the natural human affection for the underdog. It patches together a lovable roster of misfits and goof-offs. It reprises, with tongue in cheek, the front-office villains of The Natural and Eight Men Out. It satirizes a hundred sports-movie clichés and goes on to invent new ones. It has Rene Russo! Best of all, writer/director David S. Ward had the good sense to not only use broadcaster Harry Doyle as the glue that holds the silly plot together, he got Bob Uecker, the funniest play-by-play guy in history, to deliver all of Doyle’s lines.

 

Like this one: “This guy threw at his own son in a father-son game.”

Or this one: “Haywood leads the league in most offensive categories, including nose hair. When this guy sneezes, he looks like a party favor.”

Okay, one more: “Haywood swings and crushes this one toward South America. Tomlinson is gonna need a visa to catch this one. It’s out of here, and there is nothing left but a vapor trail.”