The town where I grew up had no sporting franchises beyond high school, and most of that energy was taken up by football. Football was the dominant sporting passion of everyone I knew, and the closest major league baseball franchise was a 5-hour drive away in Atlanta. Consequently, I had no passion or interest in baseball until I moved to Houston, where the Houston Astros are loved and at least for now, a winning team.
My youngest son certainly follows the Astros closely, and since he and I watch a lot of movies together, we decided to watch a few of the more famous baseball films from the past. I knew about these movies but didn’t love them and had never gone out of my way to share them with my kids, even though we’ve watched many films together. I use films as a sort of philosophy and history lesson with my kids, and we pick our movies carefully, and discuss afterwards.
After three films, my appreciation for baseball has grown, and now I know where the game sits in the American sporting consciousness.
These movies rely on all manner of supernatural forces to drive the film forward. The dead walk and only the faithful can see them. A woman gives her body over to the men who have the God given magic of baseball talent. Lightning strikes define when the mojo is ready to be harvested. All these plot in these movies rely on signs, wonders, Talismans, and rituals that make the game go one direction or the other.
Other sports movies don’t work like that. Rocky is one of the most popular sports movies of all time, and the most popular fight movie ever made. Rocky had a ‘heart’ that made him stand up to incredible beating and still win. His heart drove him into battle and his skill was honed through hard training, but God had nothing to do with it. Football is a complicated game of hard strategy. There are fewer football movies than virtually any other sport in part, I suspect, because the rules are complicated and outside the United States, inscrutable. The football movies that do exist are about the team dynamic or about inspiring coaches, or about life lessons learned under pressure. Friday Night Lights is my favorite in this regard, but in that film, the player with the greatest native talent is sidelined so the actual story can take place.
Baseball movies tell the story of man’s relationship to the Gods, or ‘Gods of Baseball’ as Susan Sarandon’s character puts it in Bull Durham. The Gods don’t explain why they do things, and it’s the player, usually a minor figure, who must endure what the Gods have set in motion.
Field of Dreams
Kevin Coster has occupied the place in the American consciousness once held by Jimmy Stewart. He is a stand in Everyman who is compelled to do things by both vision and personal conviction. As such, Coster was the perfect pick to play Ray Kinsella, a farmer in Iowa who is visited in his cornfields by a disembodied voice that whispers “If you build it, he will come.”
Field of Dreams was released in 1989 and there were many films in that period, as well as TV shows, that portrayed what happened to the activist anti-war college students from the sixties. The leading Boomer class was middle aged back then, raising their Millennial children. Ray and his wife were good liberals back in the day, and now, they live close to the earth on their farm, when suddenly, Ray is consumed by a vision inspired by a whisper in the field. He must plow under a portion of their limited corn fields and build a baseball diamond so a long dead baseball player, ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson, can appear.
Ray builds the field, of course, and sure enough, ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson appears out of the corn and eventually, Jackson brings with him from the Beyond other players who were tainted by the 1919 Black Sox scandal. This field in the present allows the players of the past, the ‘boys’ as they are often called, the chance to train and play ball innocently in the field constructed by Costner for just this sort of redemptive purpose.
The story evolves further into redemption when Ray drives to New York and tracks down an activist author from the sixties, Terrance Mann, and they are inspired to travel to Minnesota to find a doctor who made it briefly to the major leagues but never up to bat. Ray travels back in time to 1972 to meet this man, long deceased, but who is an elderly doctor when Ray meets him. The doctor was once Archie “Moonlight” Graham, and the only thing that haunts him is what might have happened had he gotten to bat, at least once, when he was a true up and comer.
Ray, Mann, and a hitchhiker that is the younger ‘Moonlight’ Graham all travel back to the farm where Mann and Graham are allowed to play ball with Jackson and the boys. These cathartic games allow for the releasing of demons and the completion of arcs. ‘Shoeless’ Joe invites Mann to join him in the disembodied cornfields, but deliberately excludes Ray. Ray finally finds his purpose on the Field of Dreams he built when he can play catch with his deceased father from whom he was estranged.
In baseball, we see the possibly for forgiveness extended to the characters from 1919, the fulfillment of a childhood dream on the part of Mann, the ability to let go of a regret on the part of ‘Moonlight’ Graham, and the power to reconnect with the dead on the part of Ray and his dad. All of this occurs within the context of a simple pastoral game, done in the middle of America, and in a way inconceivable with any other American sport. There may be ‘Hoop Dreams’ in basketball, or gridiron dreams and there are plenty of psychological elements to all combat sports, but only baseball has been used to tell a story of such specific healing purposes. The voice Ray hears, the instructions to manifest his vision, are never explained or justified. They are faith-based, and Ray’s calling, his purpose, is simply to follow his destiny and build the sacred space for the game to happen.
Bull Durham
Of the three baseball films noted here, Bull Durham is the only one without an overtly supernatural theme, but it is still about God given talents and the belief that there is something beyond the natural world about the game. The 1988 film is about a minor league team, the Durham Bulls, and a baseball groupie that hangs around them.
Annie Savoy is more than just a woman who sleeps with baseball players, however. She has a religious connection to the “church of baseball” as she calls it, and she is knowledgeable about the game. Each year, she takes a player to her bed and under her wing, and the year in which the film takes place, she has chosen ‘Nuke’ LaLoosh, an undisciplined but talented player with a great arm but no control.
The team management doesn’t know about Annie’s coaching, but they know they have gold in LaLoosh if they can bring him under control, so the hire an older player, ‘Crash’ Davis, here played by Kevin Costner, as a catcher who can bring LaLoosh into line and make his gifts translate to wins.
With both Annie and Crash working to redeem him, LaLoosh is, in fact, called up to ‘the show’ as they call the major leagues, but the story is about Crash and his dreams that can’t be realized because he lacks the raw talent, and Annie, who is beginning to realize that the ‘church of baseball’ is preventing her from having a real normal love life with the kind of man, seen in Crash, that would love her back. She’s slept with the Gods, done her duty, and is ready to hang up her habit.
Crash must find his peace as well by accepting that he is a talented knowledgeable player, but not a major league star. He must deal with being a lessor amongst the Gods. He sets a home run record, but since it’s in the minor league, it’s not really a Devine achievement. After he ‘gets his dinger’ and breaks the record, he returns to Annie, who has also realized that the Divine can break many more people than it makes.
The Natural
Before there was Kevin Costner, and after there was Jimmy Stewart, there was Robert Redford. Redford was always a bit too good looking to be a true Everyman, and in his early films, including 1984’s The Natural, he looks like who Brad Pitt would become a couple of decades later. So, Redford is a heartthrob, not an Everyman, but he could do a pretty good Everyman when he needed to, and in The Natural, he plays Roy Hobbs, a farm boy touched by the Gods of Baseball. Magic is in the air around Hobbs, but so is tragedy. He witnesses his father’s death at the base of a tree, and later, when that tree is struck by lightning, Hobbs constructs his own bat from the wood of the now dead tree.
His glorious baseball career is not to be, however. On his way by train to Chicago to play for the Cubs, he enters a foolish and vainglorious trackside contest against a Babe Ruth type character named ‘Whammer’ and strikes the legend out. This act draws the attention of a women in black who was eyeing ‘Whammer,’ but who’s attention now shifts to Hobbs. Hobbs has an innocent girlfriend back home on the farm, but he accepts the invitation from the women in black to visit her hotel room. When he arrives, the woman lowers a black veil over her face and shoots him.
It is a decade and a half later when Hobbs walks into the dugout of the New York Knights, a losing major league team coached by a fat, bitter old man who has an unrealized goal in life to capture a pennant. Hobbs is a middle-aged amateur to the coach, and the coach has no interest in him until he eventually sees Hobbs bat. Hobbs still has the magic, and literal lightning strikes mark the moment when the Gods of Baseball allow Roy to use his magical forces.
Of course, Roy is drawn into another morality tale when it is revealed that if the Knights can capture a pennant, the coach will regain financial control of the team as well as realize his dream. On the other side of that transaction is a disfigured gambler with one strange, enlarged eye, and the gambler has a beautiful mistress who he assigns to cozy up to Roy. Beautiful women are Roy’s weakness, and when Roy takes up with the beautiful but inwardly injured lady, his skills leave him, and the winning streak the Knights were on wanes.
Roy has some reconciling to his past to do, and so he eventually tracks down his old girlfriend. She becomes his Angel in White to the Devil in Black that limits his baseball magic. In the final showdown, after having resisted the cash offers the gambler made to Roy so he’d throw the big game, the lightning strikes, and Roy hits the home run that saves the team, redeems his honor, covers his mistakes, and reconciles him to his True Love who was watching, with the son he didn’t know he had, in the stands.
There is nothing subtle about The Natural, and its morality play of Good and Evil within the context of baseball. Roy is gifted by the Gods, but he also has the hubris that comes with a great gift that wasn’t earned through long hard work. It is through suffering that he is redeemed, and when his magic is approved, there are lightning strikes. Ray in Field of Dreams hears voices which provide a vision, but Roy must feel his way along.
Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad…
It is worth noting that it is never the superstar players that bring redemptive magic, and these stories are not about star teams. A story about a triumphant baseball superstar, a biopic about Babe Ruth, or even Jackie Robinson, would not be a movie better than the Rocky movies. Baseball is about suffering. Speaking of suffering there is one other baseball movie is worth mentioning here. Moneyball is a 2011 film about a coach, Billy Beane as played by Brad Pitt, who just can’t afford the divine players. Guided by a young data scientist, he builds a team that is relentless math driven. The movie is about the coach and his methods and his acceptance of the Gods in the math, not the air, and further, he must overcome his fear that is left over from his superstitious day as a player. Moneyball is about using math to find the players whose gifts, as small as they might be, allow them to get on base but not cost very much. Beane is trying to find enough ‘Crash’ Davis players to beat the stars favored by the Gods, and for a while, it works. A winning franchise, the Oakland A’s, was, for a while, built by finding the small, quiet players and teaming them together.
Moneyball is the exception, however, even if it’s more realistic about how baseball is currently viewed and played. Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, and The Natural are about the quiet redemption of the non-star player who uses baseball as the setting for spiritual renewal and reconciliation. I hope ‘baseball is magic’ genre has not left us for good.
TomRoushOnline 