A head start on my annual baseball movie

There are many wondrous and glorious things about Richard Linklater's Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood. It makes me nostalgic for a late 60s Texas childhood I never had, and it brings back the vastly underappreciated artistic form of rotoscoping, of which Linklater is the primary practitioner. 

But it also has baseball.

I've spent the past week knee deep in the upcoming baseball season -- yes, they finally came to an agreement on the next collective bargaining agreement -- as part of my roles as commissioner in two different sorts of fantasy baseball leagues. 

A very busy rush leading up to a deadline for one of these leagues on Wednesday afternoon left me yearning to blow off steam with a form of movie escapism, before I watched a baseball movie the next night as my annual Opening Night Eve tradition. (I've got the movie picked out, now I just need to figure out if it's streaming anywhere.)

Linklater's movie -- which I only just learned existed last Friday night -- gave me both escapism and baseball. 

(If it contained baseball, one might ask if it's really an escape?)

The movie involves recollections of the weeks and months leading up to the moon landing in 1969, when Linklater was about nine, though the character seems a wee bit older in this film. It also sets the scene of Houston at that time so perfectly, you'll feel like you were there itself.

Among those things is his memories of the newly opened Houston Astros ballpark, the Astrodome, as well as games of little league and games of indoor baseball, involving baseball cards, when the weather outside wasn't cooperating. 

Baseball, memory, nostalgia, it's all wrapped together in one thing, and Linklater's film delivered me untold amounts of bliss on this front.

And when I wake up tomorrow, there will be baseball on TV.