No, But I Saw the Game

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 down 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 grown-ups, willing to strip away the clichés 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.

Bull Durham came out last year, but it feels like a classic already, and probably needs little recapitulation here. The story—Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), an experienced but beaten-down catcher, a career minor leaguer, is brought down to the Class A Durham Bulls in order to educate and smooth up a great young scatter-arm pitching prospect, Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), who’s headed for the majors if he can only get his stuff and his head together—has a nice balance to it, because it allows its veteran hero to show us, along with Nuke, how the game should be approached and held in mind as well as how it should be played. “Don’t hold the ball so hard,” Crash says to his crazily impatient kid battery­mate. “It’s an egg.” In a later scene, Crash says, “You gotta play this game with fear and arrogance”; Nuke murmurs, “Fear and ignorance,” and of course Crash loses his temper again. But Nuke isn’t really dumb—just careless and in a hurry. He doesn’t have a clue when Crash tells him that strikeouts are fascist and to throw ground balls because they’re more democratic, but in time he begins to pitch better, and slowly he begins to get it, too. Near the end, he listens with sad affection when Crash drunkenly expatiates about the trifling one extra hit per week—a flare, a ground ball with eyes, a dying quail—that separates a major-league hitter from a lifelong minor leaguer: the edge of talent that he will never possess.