The start of baseball season is still several weeks away. But in the meantime, your own Spring Training should include watching four particular fabulous baseball films from the 1980’s.
Frankly, it’s hard to go wrong with a baseball film; every decade has had great ones. But for some reason, the ’80s were a particularly golden era for baseball films. Perhaps one of the things that makes the four films below from the Reagan Years so good is that all four have a sub-text that often includes a counterculture perspective and/or class-warfare message (i.e., little guy against greedy capitalists), which was particularly apropos in those days (and is maybe even more applicable now).
And if you still have time on your hands after viewing these, be sure to watch Ken Burns’ great documentary on the history of baseball, which brings to light all the social and racial issues that plagued the sport AND made it great.
BULL DURHAM (1988) – Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins.
This film is, hands down, my favorite sports film ever. Hell, it’s one of my favorite films ever. It’s a film where the minor characters are almost as charismatic as the major characters. And with its sparkling low-key comedic dialogue and the sexual chemistry between the three leads – a career minor league catcher who finds himself demoted to Single-A ball in order to mentor a young fire balling pitcher with a “5-cent head” and the new-agey baseball groupie who loves them both – there’re enough great quotes in this film to fill daily Facebook posts for a month.
More than 25 years later, fans still debate which is the movie’s best scene – Catcher Crash Davis’ “I Believe” monologue, Annie Savoy’s “I’m a Member of the Church of Baseball” prologue, the time-out meeting/group therapy session on the pitcher’s mound where the infielders argue about what what wedding presents to buy for one of the bench players and how to remove a curse from a player’s glove, the visual of star pitcher Nuke LaLoosh wearing a garter belt and confessing that he’s been trying to “breathe out of his eyelids” for good luck, or the instruction about the best sports clichés to repeat during TV interviews. And in the middle of all of it, there’s authentic minor league baseball being played.
“Meeting on the Mound.”
THE NATURAL (1984) – Barry Levinson (Director). Robert Redford, Glenn Close, Robert Duvall, Kim Basinger, Wilford Brimley, Barbara Hershey, Darin McGavin, Richard Farnsworth
Probably the most beautifully filmed sports movie ever made, “The Natural” depicts the eternal decisions we all have to make between a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, lushly indicated in the film by certain characters dressed in varying colors of black or cloaked in shadows, the most shadowy of whom is “The Judge,” a spidery team owner whose web has ensnared many. Other characters are dressed in white or filmed in bright light. (Yeah, the black-and-white contrasts make the themes and characters’ intentions a bit obvious . . . but it’s still beautiful.)
Now, the main character, Roy Hobbs, is a lot like us. Sure, we ALL know the RIGHT THING to do when those devils and angels whisper in our ears. But most of us have never been in the shoes of Roy Hobbes, a natural-born ballplayer who at an early age was on the road leading to fame and fortune but finds his life and career derailed by the oldest of temptations. When he finally makes it to the big leagues many years later at a time in life when most players have retired, he finds that his needs for love and long term security may be as important as his previous desire to be the “best who ever played.”
Despite the eternal themes — or maybe because of them — the storyline is gripping, and the ballgames are lovingly and beautifully filmed. Never mind that the story’s conclusion is different than Bernard Malamud’s award-winning novel. Both are excellent.
“Hit the Cover off the Ball.”
EIGHT MEN OUT (1988) – John Sayles (Director), John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, DB Sweeney, David Strathairn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael Lerner.
“Say it ain’t so, Joe!” was the cry of a young boy in 1920 when he discovered that his favorite player, the great Shoeless Joe Jackson, had received a lifetime ban from playing in the Major League, along with all of Joe’s teammates on the 1919 Chicago White Sox.
By all accounts, Shoeless Joe and the Sox are considered one of the greatest baseball teams ever. But the team and players were tainted by the so-called Black Sox Scandal, in which several players took bribes from gamblers as payment for intentionally losing the World Series. But it was fewer than a handful of players who took the bribes. And though neither Joe nor most of his teammates took the bribes, the entire team received lifetime bans from the Major Leagues, and in the almost 100 years since then, all remain ineligible for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. This truly is a story of greedy gamblers and unscrupulous team owners conspiring against the (then) underpaid ballplayers for whom taking a $100 bribe could guarantee that a player could pay his rent and put food on the table during the offseason.
Like “The Natural,” “Eight Men Out” is a loving and beautifully filmed period piece that shows major league baseball when it was still in its infancy. And though baseball may not be “America’s Pasttime,” anymore, it still remains the best sport to use as a metaphor for the human condition.
“It’s Him.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzjgABHqbYE
FIELD OF DREAMS (1989) – Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, James Earl Jones, Burt Lancaster, Ray Liotta
This is the only film that even tough macho-sports-jock types will admit to shedding tears watching, solely due to one particular scene that I will not give away because of the 1-2 people who have not seen it. Otherwise, this is a liberal-hippie-dream of a film, not something generally associated with sports.
So get this: the lead character is a city boy who has moved to the country to get back to nature, but who then pursues a dream of creating a baseball field in the middle of his cornfield because of new-agey advice he has been given by a ghostly voice — “if you build it, he will come.”
Our dream-pursuer subsequently endures the taunts of local rednecks and a brother-in-law who wants him to “sell out to the Man.” And while that’s going on, the protagonist’s wife fights the good fight of protecting freedom of thought and speech when the locals petition the school board to ban the novels of a JD Salinger-type author, who himself reluctantly becomes a major character in the story.
Other characters include — shades of “A Christmas Carol! — Ghosts of Baseball’s Past.”
Yup, it’s definitely NOT your typical sports movie, but it will tug your heart strings and your sense of all that good and right in the world. And, oh, yeah, it’s once again Baseball as a Metaphor.
Ray Meets His Dad.
