The Books: Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader, ‘No, But I Saw the Game,’ by Roger Angell

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader, by Roger Angell.

What are your favorite baseball movies?

Baseball movies is the topic of this 1989 essay by Roger Angell. People can get passionate about this stuff, as any baseball fan/movie fan will know. To state right off the bat: Angell did not care for Field of Dreams. He also couldn’t get past Gary Cooper’s non-baseball-player swing in Pride of the Yankees (and honestly, I have an issue with it too). This essay is fun, though, because it’s about baseball but it is also a work of film criticism, purely from the standpoint of a rabid baseball fan. (Speaking of Field of Dreams, which I love, here’s a long piece I wrote about the wife in Field of Dreams, played by Amy Madigan.)

Now. The movies are fiction (even when they are based on real-life events). I am extremely tired of the “Here is what is wrong about the science in Gravity” or “Here is what Interstellar gets wrong about quantum physics” so-called “think”pieces. Honestly, you don’t get a cookie for watching movies in a literal way like that.

In other words:

However. When I see an actor who clearly is NOT a baseball player, swing the bat, or throw a pitch, alarm bells of wrong-ness go off in my mind. I can’t help it. It’s really refreshing when an actor is good enough at the sport (and that’s all you need to be is good enough) that he can suggest that he is awesome at it, and deserves to be in a major league game.

Baseball is a great game. Baseball is also a good metaphor, and a container of memories. Automatic nostalgia is activated: it’s there if you need it for your story. But if you also are into the game as a game, then it’s difficult sometimes to watch a baseball movie fudge the details and hope we just suspend disbelief. I need a ballplayer to look like a ballplayer. I need his swing to feel right. I need his pitch to feel right. I thought Moneyball did an excellent job of casting actor/athletes for that Bad News Bears-ish ball club – and I believed they were all professional athletes. David Justice (played by Stephen Bishop) hacking at the ball in the batting cage. That looked like a major league swing. As much as I love Gary Cooper (and I do), he was not a baseball player, could not swing, and they reversed the film so Gehrig would be a southpaw, and I wince every time I see it. I don’t share others’ nostalgia/love for that film. It comes up often on “Greatest Baseball Movies” list but I think there are far superior baseball films.

Other good baseball movies: Bang the Drum Slowly, The Sandlot, The Rookie (although I could live without the mystical malarkey in the prologue), Field of Dreams, 42, Moneyball (which felt like the nerdy baseball movie I have been waiting for all my life), Eight Men Out. I like Fear Strikes Out, too, although that is more of a Freudian psychodrama than a baseball movie: it’s very bizarre, it stars Anthony Perkins and Karl Malden, and it is about Jimmy Piersall’s mental health issues, his breakdowns sometimes taking place on the field. But it’s also about baseball: how it bonds fathers and sons, how it’s a way for men to communicate openly (they can’t express their love for one another in words, the way they do that is by participating in baseball together: this is a huge problem for Piersall, in terms of his own father). But still: it’s an interesting look at the stresses of the game.

Anthony Perkins, “Fear Strikes Out,” 1957

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts about what baseball movies they love.

And, for me, the grand pooh-bah of baseball movies is Bull Durham, a movie that could not be made today, and certainly not with two actors approaching middle-age. A really radical film. Not once do I believe that Tim Robbins’ ridiculous pitching style would be major league material, but I forgive it, because of the spirit of the film. Baseball fans are CRAZY, you understand. I include myself. We revere the game, and we have all kinds of mystical existential FEELINGS about it, and Bull Durham taps into that. Also, it includes a woman … and her sexual feelings about the game … which is PART of the baseball experience as well, like it or not, boys. It’s wonderful to be included in the action, and not just as a wife, or a misty-hued muse. It’s nice to have a baseball movie where a woman is a passionate participant. A driving force for the team. Bull Durham has it all. A love triangle, comedy, an awe-inspiring script, great performances … AND it really understands that minor-minor-league circuit. A landscape of broken dreams, still holding on, still committed, still hopeful.

Bull Durham had just come out when Angell wrote this essay. He saves it for last, after discussing other movies. Here is an excerpt.

Excerpt from Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader, ‘No, But I Saw the Game’, by Roger Angell

Now and then when I emerged from the dark this spring, I asked some baseball people and some players which baseball movies they preferred, and it came as a shock to me that some of them disliked Bull Durham. They thought that there was too much sex in it, and that it was bad for the image of the game. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. I always have to keep reminding myself that there is as much variety of opinion and taste and private preference among sports people as there is in any other profession; we fans must give the players the last word about baseball authenticity, to be sure, but an opinion poll of their favorite baseball movies wouldn’t tell us much. One doesn’t need Bat Masterson to make up one’s mind about Red River or Shane. But I don’t care what anyone else says about Bull Durham, which is a comic delight and maybe a miracle. It’s the first baseball movie that gets things right without trying: there isn’t a line in it that feels reverent or fake-tough or hurriedly explanatory, or that tries to fill in the uninitiated about what’s going on out there. It assumes you’re going to stay with the game, even in its dreariest, dusty middle innings, when the handful of folks in the stands are slumped won on their spines waiting for something to happen, even a base on balls. It’s an adult homage to the game (“There’s no guilt in baseball, and it’s never boring,” Susan Sarandon says in her now celebrated “Church of Baseball” voice-over), and it’s about people who have been around and have come back to baseball as grownups, willing to strip away the cliches and the uplift and the mystical crap to find how strong and funny and rich the sport remains at its center. Its characters talk about the game lightly but with avid pleasure, and they back away a little after they’ve said something sharp or freshly appreciative about it, as if they were asking themselves if it’s really true – is baseball really this great? This is the way a few friends of mine talk about baseball at times – not idle sometime fans, or macho males who are simply sustaining their year-round sports guff, but men and women who have suddenly or slowly attached themselves to the game, usually through some particular team, and then can’t quite believe how wonderful baseball can be, how baffling and heartbreaking, and how rewarding.