Was this the strangest all-time mismatched-celebrity elevator ride?
Salon / Caitlin Shamberg
Wong Kar-wai, director of “My Blueberry Nights.”
So there I was, waiting for the elevator in the Regency Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The Regency is pretty much a generic New York luxury hotel, but for whatever reason it’s become home-away-from-home for the global media biz, and you’re always liable to bump into somebody who looks familiar and not feel sure if that’s really Ryan Seacrest or Barry Diller or Gong Li or Atom Egoyan.
In this case, I was riding up to the 18th floor to meet the Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai, so when a handsome Asian man with close-cropped hair and dark, rectangular sunglasses strode up with a small retinue of handlers, I was on pretty safe terrain. A publicist introduced me to Wong and his wife, Esther, and we made some customary small talk on the way up. They needed to go to their room so Wong could have a cigarette and a cup of tea, and then they’d be ready for our interview.
None of us paid much attention to the middle-aged African-American man who was with us in that crowded elevator, wearing a baseball cap and a warmup jacket. He asked me if it was raining outside and I said it was. But after I looked at him, I had that reaction: That guy looks familiar somehow. When we reached his floor, he excused himself and got out. I was standing next to one of the publicists for Wong’s new film, “My Blueberry Nights,” and we both noticed that the man had the number “44″ stitched in small numerals just below the neck of his custom-made jacket. We looked at each other. How were we going to explain to Wong Kar-wai who Reggie Jackson was? And how were we to keep living in a universe that contained both of them, the Chinese art-film god who makes waking dreams and the onetime Yankee superstar who seemed to single-handedly save a dying city in the late ’70s?
For me, anyway, it was an impossible collision between manhood and boyhood, between disparate realms of dream. My memories of Reggie Jackson go back to the legendary feuding, fighting, colossally underpaid Oakland A’s championship teams of the early ’70s — his later feats of Yankee heroism occurred impossibly far away, on a mythic stage. Wong Kar-wai represents something as far away from that as you can get, a gorgeous, self-consciously romantic version of cinema that fused Western and Eastern art in an unlikely fusion.
All we did was tell Wong that the man who had just departed was “a very famous American baseball player.” I didn’t think of mentioning Spike Lee’s film “Summer of Sam,” a movie Wong may well have seen in which Jackson plays a crucial symbolic role. Someone quicker on the draw might have tried to introduce them to each other, but toward what end? Not all competing universes are meant to be harmonized.
After I got to Wong’s room, his wife offered me and Salon’s videographer cups of delicious green Oolong tea, from a tall green tin marked “103.” (If anybody knows where to find it, I’m eager to know.) They were so hospitable and charming that I repented of my uncharitable feelings toward “My Blueberry Nights.” I’ll have further comments on the film — and, more important, the actual interview with Wong Kar-wai — in tomorrow’s post.
The Marlins’ bizarre new look
The team's revamped logo involves a whimsical rainbow swoosh. The effect is anything but intimidating
So far the biggest story to come out of baseball’s early off-season isn’t some splashy free agent signing or the abrupt retirement of St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, but that of the logo and uniform redesign of the Florida Marlins. The new look was officially announced on Friday, and if you haven’t seen them already, you might not believe your eyes. In fact, when some of the images of the new logo were leaked there was such shock and disbelief by the baseball world, most people assumed it was a farce, calling the look everything from “Hawaiian Shaved Ice” to “Push-up Pop” to “Rainbow Bright.”
The rebrand was planned as part of the team’s big move to their new stadium, New Marlins Ballpark (which also sports a logo with a rainbow motif), a baseball-only park with a retractable roof to keep the tropical rains away. With a name like New Marlins Ballpark, the powers-that-be decided the team needed a new identity as well. So not only are the uniform colors radically different, but the team will now be called the Miami Marlins.
Gone is the teal, silver and black color scheme the team has worn since its inception in 1993 (and in which it won two World Series), and in its place, as you can see, is a curious combination of oranges, yellows, blues and assorted other bright hues. Gone too is the detailed illustration of the eponymous fish, bursting around and through the logo with furious determination. Instead there is now a whimsical suggestion of a marlin swooshing from some unclear source out of the Aztec-influenced M letterform. Whatever its origin, one thing is sure: The overall effect is anything but intimidating.
In addition to the new logo and color scheme, new uniforms will also be revealed. Again, this look isn’t certain to be the one unveiled on Thursday (and in light of all the backlash, it’s entirely possible the Marlins’ design team has gone back to the drawing board) but this is what has been floating around the ether and seems to make sense based on the logo. White home jerseys with black caps. Away grays with a radically out of place blue cap (that strangely echo the original Tampa Bay Devil Rays uniforms). And some assortment of combinations for Fridays and other games.
Apparently the team’s (and stadium’s) colorful new look is meant to reflect the multicultural heritage of the many diverse ethnic groups living in the area. But you have to wonder if the Marlins’ head honchos learned nothing from the atrocious Houston Astros uniforms of the mid-1970s (known as the “rainbow era”) that made even Nolan Ryan and J.R. Richard, at left (two of the era’s most dominating pitchers), look a tad sheepish.
Not to say orange is a bad choice for a sports team (the Giants, Orioles and Tigers pull it off pretty well), but it does require some tasteful design skill and a healthy grasp of workable color palettes.
Perhaps it’s not the worst logo ever (for some ideas on that front click here); there are always the Chicago White Sox shorts and collared unis from the ’80s to claim that distinction. But if this is indeed the look of the new Miami Marlins, my guess is it won’t be around long.
Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
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Exonerating Bill Buckner
25 years after the Red Sox infielder's infamous World Series error, we look at what really happened that October
(Credit: AP)
Bill Buckner’s error in the 1986 World Series – 25 years ago today, a day of infamy for Red Sox fans — is one of the two most famous plays in World Series history. (Willie Mays’ catch in the 1954 fall classic is the other.)
Like Mays’ over-the-shoulder catch, Buckner’s booboo is entrenched in American folklore. Jimmy Fallon’s Red Sox fanatic in “Fever Pitch,” distraught over breaking up with his girlfriend, watches Buckner’s play over and over on his VCR. During congressional hearings in 2008, U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., called former Treasury Secretary John Snow, then-SEC chief Christopher Cox and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan “three Bill Buckners.” On “Curb Your Enthusiasm” this season, Larry David loses a softball game when a ball rolls between his legs; his coach screams, “You Buckner-ed me!”
Everyone knows that Buckner lost the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox. But what everyone knows is wrong.
At the time, the Red Sox were burdened with 68 years of frustration; their last championship was in 1918. Leading three games to two against the New York Mets, Boston was ahead by a score of 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning. Red Sox pitcher Calvin Schiraldi got two quick outs. In the Sox locker room the champagne was iced, and the scoreboard flashed “Congratulations Red Sox.”
Gary Carter, Kevin Mitchell and Ray Knight all singled, and the score was 5-4 with Mitchell on third. Reliever Bob Stanley came into the game to pitch to Mookie Wilson and threw a wild pitch that brought Mitchell home and tied the score. But it’s the next play that still has Red Sox fans screaming in the middle of the night.
Stanley threw a sinker-ball, designed to produce ground balls to infielders. What was supposed to happen did happen—Mookie Wilson tapped a slow grounder at Buckner at first base. But the ball rolled between Buckner’s legs, and the Mets won in the most incredible finish to a World Series game ever. (See it with commentary by the inimitable Vin Scully.)
Buckner’s career changed in an instant. Up to that moment, he was one of the game’s great unsung hitters. He’d batted better than .300 seven times in his career, winning the 1980 American League batting title. He led the league four times in assists. During that crucial September 1986 playoff run, he carried the team, hitting .340 with eight home runs. All that was soon to be forgotten.
The scholar Stephen Jay Gould (in Natural History magazine) called him “a gallant first baseman and a veteran with a long and distinguished career.”
“For weeks,” wrote Gould, “manager John McNamara had been benching Buckner for defensive purposes during the last few innings of games with substantial Red Sox leads, but after a long and hard season, Buckner’s legs were shot … he could hardly bend down.”
Plagued with chronic ankle soreness—he was the first player to wear high-top baseball cleats to ease the pain— Buckner had been relieved in three previous series games by Dave Stapleton. Why was he still playing when Wilson hit the ground ball? Because McNamara was sentimental; he wanted his regulars on the field when the Red Sox won the series.
But Buckner’s error did not lose the championship for the Red Sox; it didn’t even lose Game 6 for them — the Red Sox had already blown their two-run lead. Two nights later, with another chance at the ring, Boston lost 8-5.
(Buckner, incidentally, had two hits in four at-bats and scored a run in Game 7.)
Red Sox fans cried “Curse of the Bambino”—the punishment Boston supposedly merited for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919—but the focus of the curse that season was Buckner. Yet Buckner did not put the tying runs on base. He didn’t throw the wild pitch that made it 5-5. He did not make the decision to keep his defensive replacement on the bench. Had he made the play, the Red Sox could have lost the game anyway.
When so many others contributed as much or more to the Red Sox defeat, why has history made Buckner the goat? Perhaps Gould said it best when he suggested that in the collective minds of Red Sox fans, “If Buckner fields the ball properly, the Sox win their first World Series since 1918 and eradicate the Curse of the Bambino. In this scenario, Buckner’s miscue marks the unkindest bounce of all, the most improbable trivial little error sustained by a good and admired man. What hath God wrought?”
What God wrought, perhaps, was a curse on both teams. The New York Mets have not won another World Series since; their greatest stars on that 1986 team —pitcher Dwight Gooden and slugging outfielder Darryl Strawberry—saw their careers cut short by drug abuse. In 2007 and 2008, the team crumbled down the stretch and missed the playoffs. And this year, the Red Sox, who seemingly broke the Curse by winning the World Series in 2004 and 2007, suffered the all-time worst collapse in baseball history, losing 20 of their last 27 games.
But that was kid’s play for what God had in mind for Donnie Moore. Red Sox fans were quick to forget that they never would have had a crack at their own little tragedy had it not been for Donnie Moore. Boston made it to the World Series by beating the then-Anaheim Angels in the American League Championship Series. After four games, they were in better shape against the Red Sox than the Red Sox ever were against the Mets.
On Oct. 12, 1986, playing in Anaheim, the Angels were up three games to one with a 5-2 lead going into the top of the ninth. Then, a real curse revealed itself. Don Baylor hit a two-run homer to make it 5-4. Moore had been a fine relief pitcher that season, tallying 21 saves. With two outs and the tying run at second, Moore got two strikes on Dave Henderson, then tried to slip a fastball by the Red Sox outfielder. The pitch changed his life. Henderson slammed it to deep left field for a two-run homer. On TV, Al Michaels screamed, “Unbelievable! Astonishing! With one strike away Anaheim Stadium was one strike away from turning into Fantasyland! You’re looking at one for the ages here!”
Like Buckner, Moore was damned for losing the big one. What was forgotten is that the Angels came back to tie it, and Moore, still in the game, induced Jim Rice to ground into a double play. But in the 11th, the Red Sox scored another run off Moore on a sac fly by – of course – Dave Henderson. The Angels lost 7-6.
But that still left them with two chances to win their first-ever pennant and trip to the World Series. The Sox blasted the Angels pitching for 19 runs over two games and went on to meet their destiny against the Mets, without the slightest thought that they owed a great big ugly debt to sheer luck – one that would soon be repaid with interest.
Still, to Angels fans, it had all come down to the pitch that Donnie Moore threw to Dave Henderson. All the subsequent chances that they lost were the evil spawn of that one pitch.
For the next two years, Moore couldn’t walk out on the field without being booed, crushed and heckled. When he left the ballpark, fans were lineup to scream insults, even when he won. Moore began to drink heavily and his talents eroded. On July 18, 1989, Moore got into a shouting fight with his wife at their home in Anaheim Hills. He went to his closet, got an automatic pistol and, in front of his children, shot his wife and one of his daughters. The daughter drove herself and her mother to the hospital; they survived. Moore did not. Back in the house, with his son pleading for him to drop the gun, Moore shot and killed himself.
Now that is tragedy. That puts Bill Buckner’s error in perspective. It’s only a game, unless you choose to regard it as something more.
Meanwhile, the infamous Buckner ball, once owned by Charlie Sheen, is up for auction on eBay, asking price $1 million. The bid will close at the exact minute of the 25th anniversary of the play.
Now a successful businessman, Buckner has lived down the error by turning the joke on himself. On “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” he won the cheers of a New York crowd by catching a baby dropped from a burning building.
In 2008, he threw out the first pitch of the Red Sox home opener and got a standing ovation from the sell-out crowd. Somewhere, one has to feel, the Bambino himself was applauding.
What baseball tells us about racism
Most home-plate umpires are white -- and they seem to be hurting the careers of minority pitchers
Despite recent odes to “post-racial” sensibilities, persistent racial wage and unemployment gaps show that prejudice is alive and well in America. Nonetheless, that truism is often angrily denied or willfully ignored in our society, in part, because prejudice is so much more difficult to recognize on a day-to-day basis. As opposed to the Jim Crow era of white hoods and lynch mobs, 21st century American bigotry is now more often an unseen crime of the subtle and the reflexive — and the crime scene tends to be the shadowy nuances of hiring decisions, performance evaluations and plausible deniability.
Thankfully, though, we now have baseball to help shine a light on the problem so that everyone can see it for what it really is.
Today, Major League Baseball games using QuesTec’s computerized pitch-monitoring system are the most statistically quantifiable workplaces in America. Match up QuesTec’s accumulated data with demographic information about who is pitching and who is calling balls and strikes, and you get the indisputable proof of how ethnicity does indeed play a part in discretionary decisions of those in power positions.
This is exactly what Southern Methodist University’s researchers did when they examined more than 3.5 million pitches from 2004 to 2008. Their findings say as much about the enduring relationship between sports and bigotry as they do about the synaptic nature of racism in all of American society.
First and foremost, SMU found that home-plate umpires call disproportionately more strikes for pitchers in their same ethnic group. Because most home-plate umpires are white, this has been a big form of racial privilege for white pitchers, who researchers show are, on average, getting disproportionately more of the benefit of the doubt on close calls.
Second, SMU researchers found that “minority pitchers reacted to umpire bias by playing it safe with the pitches they threw in a way that actually harmed their performance and statistics.” Basically, these hurlers adjusted to the white umpires’ artificially narrower strike zone by throwing pitches down the heart of the plate, where they were easier for batters to hit.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the data suggest that racial bias is probably operating at a subconscious level, where the umpire doesn’t even recognize it.
To document this, SMU compared the percentage of strikes called in QuesTec-equipped ballparks versus non-QuesTec parks. Researchers found that umpires’ racial biases diminished when they knew they were being monitored by the computer.
Same thing for high-profile moments. During those important points in games when umpires knew fans were more carefully watching the calls, the racial bias all but vanished. Likewise, the same-race preference was less pronounced at high-attendance games, where umps knew there would be more crowd scrutiny.
Though gleaned from baseball, these findings transcend athletics by providing a larger lesson about conditioned behavior in an institutionally racist society.
Whether the workplace is a baseball diamond, a factory floor or an office, when authority figures realize they are being scrutinized, they are more cognizant of their own biases — and more likely to try to stop them before they unduly influence their behavior. But in lower-profile interludes, when the workplace isn’t scrutinized and decisions are happening on psychological autopilot, pre-programmed biases can take over.
Thus, the inherent problem of today’s pervasive “post-racial” fallacy. By perpetuating the lie that racism doesn’t exist, pretending that bigotry is not a workplace problem anymore, and resisting governmental efforts to halt such prejudice, we create the environment for our ugly subconscious to rule. In doing so, we consequently reduce the potential for much-needed self-correction.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota
What's the best baseball movie?
And why are great films about the national pastime so rare? As "Moneyball" hits theaters, baseball writers weigh in
Tim Robbins and Kevin Costner in "Bull Durham."
If two of America’s biggest pastimes (and industries) are baseball and the movies, why are there so few truly great baseball films?
That’s the question we posed to several experts — novelists, sports journalists, even a former baseball commissioner — as “Moneyball” hits theaters. We also asked each to name a favorite baseball movie (“Bull Durham” turns out to be, as one writer put it, “the gold standard”), and discuss whether baseball is better suited to prose — fiction or journalism — than it is to the big screen. Below are the responses we received.
John Thorn
[My favorite baseball movie is] “Bull Durham,” because it is gritty, real, and smart about the subculture that only baseball professionals know. Not to mention that it is funny, as is “Major League,” which stands up to repeated watching. Not funny but also with much to recommend them are “The Natural” (better than Malamud’s dreary novel) and “Field of Dreams,” a three-hankie weeperoo for guys.
Baseball movies are hard to get right, as are baseball novels, as are novels or films about the worlds of film or theater. The writer or filmmaker tackling baseball always starts off at one remove from reality, and is always playing catch-up. Baseball is not about baseball, at least not entirely, even if you’re playing it. It is about past glories, power transference, surrogated combat and unconscious contests of generation and gender. Some of this is acknowledged in “Bull Durham,” along with the humor and the realism, which makes it, for me, the gold standard.
John Thorn is the official historian for Major League Baseball. His most recent book is “Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game.”
Nicholas Dawidoff
The best baseball movie I have seen is “Bull Durham” — so funny! so sexy! — but my favorite is “Field of Dreams.” I know, I know! So uncool! But while it’s undeniably sentimental to the point of mawkishness, much of the joy of pretty good movies has to do with what the viewer brings to them. I grew up without a dad in the house and because that was just the way it was, this was also just something we didn’t talk about in our family. As a younger person I only thought about the situation obliquely, through mediums like movies and baseball players. I think the film gets exactly right that primary feeling of longing for an absent father, and the mysterious way baseball can express so much about how people romanticize the things they don’t have but very much want. I remember sitting in that dark theater in my very early 20s, getting choked up and trying to be stoic in public, when suddenly all around me I heard the sound of grown men weeping in the dark. That was a huge moment in my life — there were others! — and I haven’t since been able to separate the film and the moment. I also liked the cornfield and James Earl Jones.
One of the problems with baseball movies is that baseball itself is so exciting and so dramatic and also real. Most baseball films feature play that seems lame and contrived. That is also true, by the way, of baseball novels. They try to match the reality and can’t compete. One reason that Chad Harbach’s new novel, “The Art of Fielding,” is so successful is that it really understands the game. The book takes the time to address the nuances in persuasive and insightful ways that would be very challenging to express on film, and it uses baseball as a backdrop for big subjects like college life, coming of age, the search for beauty, etc. I think that the life in full of a small college baseball team might make an excellent film, especially if the baseball was kept to a minimum. Baseball films that are just about baseball don’t work. The reason the television program “Friday Night Lights” is the best fiction ever filmed about football is that there isn’t much football — it’s the story, among other things, of a distinctive community in small-town Texas and the most convincing marriage I’ve ever seen portrayed on-screen. “Field of Dreams” may be sentimental, but it’s also a very smart commentary on sentimentality. And by making no attempt at all to seem real, it feels real and true to something original and meaningful.
Nicholas Dawidoff’s books include “The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg” and “The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball.”
Jane Leavy
[My favorite baseball movie is] “Bull Durham” — because it gets the language of baseball right, the studied obfuscations and the native dugout patois. Because I want to be Susan Sarandon in a bathtub with Kevin Costner. Because Ron Shelton, the one-time minor leaguer turned filmmaker, allowed a woman to be the apostle of that old time baseball religion without getting all religious about it. Remember the gospel of Annie Savoy: “I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn’t work out between us.”
I don’t know why there aren’t more baseball movies. My funny friend Norman Steinberg, who wrote “My Favorite Year” as well as the unproduced screenplay of my baseball novel, “Squeeze Play,” says: “There’s a common belief among studios and distributors that baseball movies don’t put asses in the seats the way Mickey Mantle did. Then, every once in a while, one comes along to explode the popular negative belief as ‘Bull Durham’ did and ‘Squeeze Play’ woulda’. Damn.”
Maybe it’s locker room verisimilitude they can’t handle. The studio exec who passed on our film told Norman, “Take the penis off the cake” — a marzipan likeness I had situated on a post-game buffet table. It was her only note.
I do think I know why baseball writes so well. The pace of the game, so infuriating to the gigabyte generation, is writerly. The pauses between innings and pitches, and all those goddamn pitching changes, allow for imagination and the play of words. In fact, writing is a whole lot like the rhythm of baseball: long periods of hair-pulling inaction waiting for the right word to explode into consciousness like a 95-mile-an-hour heater. And when it does, you feel, for just an instant, like the man on the mound with electrifying stuff.
Jane Leavy’s books include the bestseller “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy.” Her acclaimed biography of Mickey Mantle, “The Last Boy,” is out in paperback Oct. 4.
Roger Kahn
I’m not a critic, nor was I meant to be, but I do have favorites. From a non-critical perch my favorite baseball movie is “Bang the Drum Slowly,” based on Mark Harris’ moving novel. A double-edged success: the film is faithful to the book and the actors look as though they actually had played some ball. (In truth they had, under a coach the producer hired.)
Worst baseball movie? For reasons too numerous to list, a tie between “The Babe Ruth Story” and “Pride of the Yankees.”
More than five different producers have bought options to make a movie of my book, “The Boys of Summer.” None has succeeded, although we had scripts by such talented writers as Mark Harris and my late friend Ring Lardner Jr. Why not? Funding never materialized and if I understood that I would understand capitalism, which I don’t.
Roger Kahn’s many books include “The Boys of Summer,” which James Michener called “the finest American book on sports.”
Joe Posnanski
[Choosing a favorite baseball movie is tough] for me. I’d say it’s either “Bull Durham” or “The Natural,” depending on my mood at the moment. “Bull Durham” is the funniest baseball movie ever made, I think, and so I’d probably go with that one three out of four days.
I do think a baseball movie is hard to get right … but only in the same way that everything is hard to get right. I was just talking about this with a friend. I suspect lawyers would tell you that most law movies get it really wrong. I suspect doctors would tell you that most medical movies get it really wrong. And so on. I don’t think movies, in general, are meant to get it right … I have yet to see a movie that gets sportswriters right.
The trouble is that baseball — unlike the law, or medicine or sportswriting — is enjoyed by millions and millions of fans. And so getting it wrong in baseball can crush a movie. John Goodman is a very funny and likable actor, but there’s no way he could swing a bat like Babe Ruth. Ray Liotta is a wonderful actor, but most baseball fans know that Shoeless Joe Jackson swung left-handed and threw right-handed, not the other way around. It isn’t that movies get baseball wrong more than they get other things wrong … it is that it matters in baseball.
Joe Posnanski is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, and was sports columnist at the Kansas City Star from 1996 to 2009. He blogs here.
Fay Vincent
It is difficult to make a good movie and it is difficult indeed to make a wonderful movie. No one should ever underestimate the challenges of filmmaking. For every memorable film there are dozens of failures. Indeed the definition of a “good film” is tricky. Is it a film that makes lots of money or a film that meets with great critical acclaim but only appeals to a thin slice of the general audience?
My favorite baseball films are “Bang the Drum Slowly” — also the choice of Bart Giamatti — and “Eight Men Out.” A close competitor is “Bull Durham.” These films were about basic human failures and issues but set in a baseball context. The drama and themes of these films are much broader than baseball. The effort to show the game as part of the film, as in “The Natural,” often defeats the film maker. Nothing is so false as fake baseball footage.
It is not that baseball defeats the filmmaker. Filmmaking is just a difficult art form in an even more difficult industry.The miracle is not that there are so few great baseball films. It is, rather, that there are so few great films on any topic. Or as someone once said, there are only four story lines in all of film making and every film is predicated on one of those stories. Baseball is the background. It can not overcome the realities of the business.
Fay Vincent was MLB Commissioner from 1989 to 1992. He was president and CEO of Columbia Pictures when TriStar made “The Natural.” His books include “The Last Commissioner: A Baseball Valentine.”
Allen Barra
There is no question that the greatest baseball movie ever is “Bull Durham.” It’s the best written. There are phrases in there that just went into the American lexicon. … [Director] Ron [Shelton] was a former minor league ball player and he knew all the stuff from the ground up.
[So] clearly, “Bull Durham” is the best. But the other night, there was a radio show and Bob Costas called in, and I was curious to see what Bob was going to say as to the second-best film. In the past, [when] we have talked about this, he’s either picked “The Natural,” which I loathe (it completely falsifies the end of Bernard Malamud’s novel), or “Field of Dreams,” which also sentimentalizes and falsifies the Kinsella novel, “Shoeless Joe,” that it was made from. [Costas] had the guts to say “Major League” — [a] much maligned [film] — which is terrific fun: it’s vulgar, it’s crass, and it’s very, very true in a lot of ways. … It’s got good baseball in it; Charlie Sheen has a terrific cut fastball. I mean, if he’d devoted himself to it from his college career, he could have been Mariano Rivera. He’s got a nice windup too. You see balls and strikes — in what other baseball movie do you see a guy picked off first base? When do they ever bother with that? Also, every other movie ends with a big home run; how do they end it with this? A bunt. I have to say, very seldom do you see a sports movie where you’re surprised at the end [as you are with "Major League"]. I’ll take “Major League” for my second best. …
[One] reason they don’t make more [baseball movies] is that there aren’t more natural ideas out there. Ron Shelton said to me once, “They always end these sports movies with a ‘big game.’” He said, “In real life, there is no big game. There’s always a game coming up after.” And that’s really the problem. I mean, he made one of the best baseball movies ever, and hardly anyone went to see it — “Cobb,” the biography of Ty Cobb — with Tommy Lee Jones, a fabulous performance. And it wasn’t a commercial success. It’s hard to find new variations upon an old theme.
George Plimpton once said, “The smaller the ball, the better the book” — which is why no one’s ever written a good book about beach ball. And I think baseball, if it’s done right, is a better cinematic subject than anything else. … Frankly, baseball doesn’t lend itself to television. Have you ever been to a game with somebody who’s there for the first time? “Oh my God, I didn’t realize the ball was hit so hard! Oh, it’s hit so fast!” The routine things in baseball are absolutely amazing. … If done right, [baseball] works better than anything else on the movie screen.
Salon contributor Allen Barra is author of “Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee.” He writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal and other publications.
Joe Lemire
“Bull Durham” is my favorite baseball movie. It gives a taste of minor-league baseball life and a sampling of the eccentric characters that have always populated the game. Nuke LaLoosh is a classic archetype of the all-talent, no-brain ballplayer. So much of baseball — thanks to its long season and short bursts of action following periods of anticipation — is a mental game. And his conversations with the veteran Crash Davis (long on maturity, but with just enough talent to get by) are compelling.
I do think the baseball movie is hard to get right, though I think that’s true of all sports movies. Replicating sports action is difficult. And depending on what you’d call legendary, I think there have been several very good baseball films (all in their own way): “Bull Durham,” “The Natural,” “Field of Dreams” and “Major League,” most notably. At least in my opinion, it’s not like there’s a disproportionate number of great basketball or football or golf movies that have been made. I think all sports are hard to capture on the big screen.
Joe Lemire writes about baseball for Sports Illustrated.
Richard J. Tofel
I can’t say that I buy the premise of your question. Four of my favorite films are baseball movies — “A League of Their Own,” “Bull Durham,” “Field of Dreams” and my personal choice, “The Natural.”
What is noteworthy, and what perhaps your question is getting at, is this: Baseball is a subject serious writers love to take seriously, from George Will to Bart Giamatti, from David Halberstam to Michael Lewis, even from Jacques Barzun to John Updike. Yet, our more serious filmmakers have not been similarly moved by the game, and our best baseball films are not as serious — “Bang the Drum Slowly” aside — as our best baseball writing. Even wonderful baseball films such as “Field of Dreams” feel compelled to take the edge off the writing from which they emerge — in that case, W. P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe.”
“The Natural” is perhaps the most extreme example of this phenomenon, transforming Bernard Malamud’s dark ending into a fantasy of exploding stadium lights. That may not be great literature, but it is the most fun I’ve ever had at the movies.
Richard Tofel is the author of “A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939″ and four other books, none of them about baseball. He very favorably reviewed “Moneyball” for The Wall Street Journal when it was published in 2003.
“Moneyball”: Brad Pitt’s wonk-friendly Oscar contender
A baseball bestseller becomes a lovable star vehicle about a classic American underdog -- and somehow it works
Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in "Moneyball"
I’m damned if I understand how a nonfiction book that’s largely a wonky study of systems and information, and a story about the clash between empirical data and subjective wisdom, became an Oscar-friendly star vehicle for Brad Pitt. But that’s exactly what happened with the long-delayed and troubled film production of “Moneyball,” which has to be described as an example of what Hollywood does best. Baseball fans and statistics buffs will no doubt have numerous nits to pick with this lovingly crafted underdog fable from director Bennett Miller (his first film since the terrific “Capote”), which exists at several removes from journalist Michael Lewis’ acclaimed bestseller. (The screenplay has been through numerous iterations, and a pair of heavyweights, Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, share the official credit.) But what we get in the end is a richly detailed and enjoyable American yarn, built around a warm and expansive performance by Pitt as Billy Beane, revolutionary general manager of the Oakland Athletics.
Indeed, while I’d still argue that this fall’s crop of Oscar contenders looks a little tepid in cinematic terms, the array of potential star power and collective testosterone in the best-actor category surely has the Academy’s broadcast producers and promoters drooling. It seems plausible and even likely that Pitt, George Clooney (for “The Descendants”) and Ryan Gosling (conceivably for “Drive” but more likely for “The Ides of March”) will all be nominated, perhaps an unprecedented Leading Man-apalooza. If Pitt’s role in “Moneyball” is more of a conventional star turn than his career-shifting performance as the stern 1950s father in “The Tree of Life” (for which he emphatically deserves awards but won’t win any), it’s still terrific. He’s on-screen in almost every scene, often filling it up in extreme close-up, and captures the bluff, buff and shrewd Beane, a washed-up jock who embraced an unorthodox statistical philosophy through sheer necessity, with great wit and physicality. (Let me throw in that “Moneyball” is a delirious study of bad early-2000s guy fashions and haircuts, which may elude some of the audience but is definitely conscious.)
Let me hasten to assure you that “Moneyball” isn’t all that much of a baseball movie, although fans of the national pastime will of course rush to see it. It’s a prime Brad Pitt movie — arguably the prime Brad Pitt movie — and an American fable about a battered but lovable divorced dad who defies conventional wisdom and beats the odds. Then it’s a somewhat watered-down retelling of Lewis’ story about how math geeks upended an American institution, and only then is it a sports flick (and probably the most detailed portrait of life behind the scenes in Major League Baseball ever put on-screen). It’s time for me to confess that I’m in a highly unusual position re “Moneyball,” which cannot help but color my reaction. I’m a lifelong fan of Beane’s bedraggled, low-budget team, the A’s, and while I had to follow their remarkable 2002 season, which is chronicled here, from 3,000 miles away, it left an enduring impression. That also means that I view the events of “Moneyball” through a rueful prism, since Beane and the team have struggled through some lean years since the explosive drama of ’02. The rest of baseball has long since caught up to the A’s, who’ve had several losing seasons in a row (including this one), play in a decrepit stadium before a declining fan base, and may not survive in Oakland much longer.
None of that should affect how ordinary moviegoers react to “Moneyball” in the slightest. Here’s what you need to know, at least as it appears on the big screen: After losing a heartbreaking five-game playoff series to the big-budget New York Yankees in 2001, the A’s faced implosion. Three of their biggest stars were defecting to richer Eastern teams, and Beane’s skinflint team owner, Steve Schott (played by Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, one of several odd cameos in the film), refuses to increase the team’s $39 million budget, about one-third what the Yankees spend. In the course of trying to hustle up some affordable warm bodies to play for his team, Beane runs into a supremely unathletic Yale economics grad named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, proving he can handle a modulated dramatic role), who is buried deep in the Cleveland Indians front office. Brand tells Beane that there’s an “epidemic failure” in baseball to understand the true nature of the game, and that he knows how to use “sabermetric” data to build a cheap team that will be even better than last year’s pricier version.
All of this is reasonably accurate, but if you’re a “Moneyball” reader who already knows what OBP and OPS stand for, you may feel slightly frustrated by the lack of detail, and you’ll realize that Peter Brand is a composite character largely based on Beane’s real-life assistant, Paul DePodesta (later the G.M. of the Los Angeles Dodgers and now a vice president of the New York Mets). In fairness, though, Miller does a nice job of dramatizing the opening shots in the ideological civil war that consumes baseball to this day. In meetings with Oakland’s scouting staff — leathery old guys who’ve spent their lives standing on sun-baked fields in the American outback, watching teenagers throw, catch and hit baseballs — Beane and Brand face a mixture of disbelief, contempt and outright rebellion.
Miller also makes it clear that the surprising success of the 2002 A’s was only partly a result of Brand/DePodesta’s innovative statistical research, which enshrined on-base percentage, slugging percentage and other newfangled stats as being far more relevant to winning than “baseball-card” numbers like batting average or RBIs. Beane had to batter his gruff, combative field manager, Art Howe (wonderfully played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), into compliance, and then saw Howe get much of the credit for the team’s record-setting winning streak. Some of the team’s discount-store pickups, like unorthodox relief pitcher Chad Bradford (Casey Bond) and Boston Red Sox castoff Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) paid off in spectacular fashion, but Beane also relied on old-school instincts at times, as when he traded away future star Carlos Peña (Adrian Bellani) and party-boy Jeremy Giambi (Nick Porrazzo), despite their unquestioned statistical value.
If you’re not a baseball fan, you probably don’t know how the story of the 2002 A’s developed on the field, or how it ended, so let’s finesse that point by saying that they shocked everybody else in the game — Beane’s roster of nobodies was widely mocked when the season began, and the team started very poorly — but the thrilling ride ended with mixed results. “Moneyball” will inevitably be compared to “The Social Network,” and they’re undeniably both long, leisurely, detail-rich stories of Information Age revolutions with long-lasting effects. But that isn’t really fair to either movie; “Moneyball” is meant as a classic tale of Podunk heroism, far closer in spirit to, say, “Hoosiers” than to the ambivalent, Gatsby-hued saga of “Social Network.” I also wouldn’t argue that “Moneyball,” enjoyable as it is, belongs in the same class. At 133 minutes, it’s a fair piece too long, and I mourn for the wonkier docudrama approach we might have seen in the aborted Steven Soderbergh version. But it’s an honorably crafted movie-star spectacle with a generous spirit and enormous popular appeal, and it happens to be about my team’s most extraordinary season. You can’t expect me to resist.
Page 1 of 80 in Baseball
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A Stroll Through the Old Neighborhood 
The "good girl" bites the dust 
Interview With My Bully: When I confronted my bully about racism 
Iran’s Greens aim to rise again 
The prettiest boy in the world 
Should I donate a kidney to my friend? 
America’s billionaire-run democracy 
The bishops go off the deep end 
No, Newt, don’t quit to make room for Santorum 
Whose Wisconsin recall is it? 
Can Greece thwart a complete meltdown? 
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s alternative abortion history 
