Baseball and Star Wars

Today is May the 4th. No I will not say "May the 4th be with you." (Dammit. I just did.)

I wasn't reminded of the "holiday" by anything on social media. I mean, it's not even that day in the U.S. yet, so the social media barrage will probably not come until tomorrow.

No, I was reminded of it just by watching a weekend's worth of baseball.

I can't give you specific examples because I watch a lot of different games, and I can't remember what I saw where. (You may recall I play fantasy baseball, so I don't watch any one specific team. In fact, I don't have anyone on my fantasy baseball team from my own major league team, the Red Sox, so I might watch them just about the same amount as I watch any other team where I have no players on my team. The Red Sox have won four World Series in the past 22 years and that's good enough for me, so now I'm basically all fantasy baseball, all the time.)

But the point is, I don't need to try to remember where because pretty much every baseball park seems to have some sort of May the 4th tie-in.

In fact, they have it even if their team isn't going to be home on May the 4th. The ones I saw this weekend were probably for teams who were home over the weekend, but are going on the road for the actual May the 4th with the series that begins on Monday. Either that or they just think a promotion night works better if you also do it on a Saturday.

I just think it's kind of funny. What do Star Wars and baseball intrinsically have in common?

I guess they are both extremely popular, but maybe less so for both. Baseball used to be America's sport, but it has been surpassed by basketball and football for several decades now, as those sports seem to speak to a wider demographic. Star Wars used to be American's favorite franchise, and it might still be, but The Mandalorian and Grogu will break a seven-year drought between films as the TV shows are also getting fewer eyeballs, even when they are of high quality (like Andor). 

In theory, athletes and space fantasy geeks don't overlap very much in the Venn diagram. You are probably more likely to find baseball fans who like Star Wars than Star Wars fans who like baseball, because a sport is probably always going to be a bit more selective in its appeal than a cultural phenomenon that speaks to people the world over. As just the most obvious example, American football may be the biggest sport in the U.S., but people generally don't care about it in other parts of the world. 

So each year I scratch my head a bit when I see them going to great lengths at baseball stadiums around the country to bring Darth Vader on the field to throw out the first pitch, or give away bobblehead figures where one of the players on the team is dressed up like a Jedi.

Look, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of both. They can intermingle however they want. But I just find it strange.

The real answer?

Baseball teams play 81 home games a year. That's a lot of games. They need to do something to jazz up an average Tuesday night game (or in this case Monday night, or maybe even the Saturday before). Which is also why you might see them celebrating Christmas in July, or Flag Day, or -- well there aren't any holidays in August. But you better bet the big other holidays during the baseball season -- Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Independence Day, Labor Day -- get plenty of play at the stadium. Baseball players even use pink bats on Mother's Day. 

But I think the reason I also get "annoyed" about it -- "annoyed" enough to write a blog post like this, anyway -- is that I've never really embraced May the 4th. It was clever that one guy 20 years ago (or whenever it started) realized that May the 4th sounded like "May the Force," and it could have ended there. Instead each year people are given a reason to post memes or put on a flowing robe or go to some other great lengths to show you that they are more of a Star Wars fan than you are.

Maybe there's a part of me that feels like the real Star Wars nerds -- those of us who saw the first movie in the theater when we were three years old, and played with the action figures for ten years after that -- need to be distinguished from these johnny-come-latelys who haven't really earned it. And when I hear 65-year-old baseball broadcasters talking about "Chewbacky" as they are forced to incorporate into their telecast that night's Star Wars mania at the ballpark, it just reminds me that there can sometimes be too much of a good thing.

Ringing in the season with a previously unknown baseball movie

I'm starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of baseball movies I can watch to psych myself up for the season, assuming I'm not keen on repeating myself too much. (Speaking of which, it may now be time for another Major League viewing, as my last one was in 2021.) It's a tradition for the night before the baseball season begins, dating back at least a decade and possibly longer. 

I was supposed to watch a movie from just after my childhood, when I was in college, which I wouldn't have watched at the time because I didn't get to nearly as many movies in the early 1990s as I would after graduating. Or maybe I just thought always Angels in the Outfield (1994) looked a little babyish. 

I had it all tee'd up, to use a tee-ball if not a baseball term, having done my due diligence a few days earlier and seen it was playing on AppleTV. The Play button was active, which is usually only the case when there is no obstruction or rental necessary to start watching a movie.

But when I clicked on that Play button on Wednesday night at nearly 10:40, it just took me to a Disney+ search area. And searching Angels in the Outfield on Disney+ was no use, as it was something I'd already done when I did my initial search of all my streaming services.

What I think happened is that my AppleTV is integrated enough with my other streaming services enough to know which other services I have and whether a movie might be playing on them, but not integrated enough to realize that I straddle two different countries in my streaming services. So while AITO is likely streaming on Disney+ in the U.S., it isn't here in Australia. And there was no option to rent it either. 

Quick pivot. 

In my previous fruitless searches for the movie on my other services, I'd seen a movie called You Gotta Believe offered up as something with similar subject matter. I could tell from the picture that Ty Roberts' 2024 film featured Luke Wilson and Greg Kinnear, both actors I like. And I certainly suspect I was lured in by the title, which was a slogan for one of my Red Sox' four world championship runs since 2004, though to be honest I can't remember which one. Not that having to believe is unique to any particular sports team in any particular championship run. 

It being under 100 minutes helped, since it was now closing in on 11 p.m. 

I didn't finish until nearly 3 a.m. after a nearly two-hour nap, but don't worry, I'm not working today. (Off to a four-day baseball tournament in Ballarat, so likely no posts from me in the next few days.) 

You Gotta Believe is based on a true story of a Texas Little League team that in 2002 made it to the Little League World Series. The exceptional detail that made it worth turning into a movie is that one of the coaches, the one played by Wilson, had terminal cancer, and watching his son play baseball was one of the few things that gave him joy as his body went through its process toward the inevitable. (I thought that "believing" enough might cure his cancer, but it's probably a good thing, from a narrative perspective, that that wasn't the case.) 

If I had known the movie was about this heavy subject matter, I might not have selected it. Like, I probably wouldn't watch Pride of the Yankees, about the first person with Lou Gehrig's disease (that being Lou Gehrig), to get psyched up for the season.

But there's enough good baseball stuff in here, and just enough filmmaking skill, to make me glad I watched it. 

There are some bits of clunker technique, for sure. These kids often speak more like screenwriters than like children, and they rarely seem to have the appropriate emotional reaction to the cancer of their coach. I mean, there are an array of possible emotional reactions to death for a teenage boy, but that's not what I'm talking about. Their reactions often didn't seem to fit anywhere in that array.

I was also sometimes baffled about the true details of how far this team made it, considering that they are initially portrayed as sort of a Bad News Bears type team, hopeless and hapless on the field. There may have been some artistic license taken there. 

But this is a pretty good inspirational sports movie, and it doesn't end the way you think it would. I suppose when I say something like that, in trying to be vague, I'm telegraphing the fact that the team doesn't win. So I'll just say it: the team doesn't win. Which is not a huge spoiler because a) it's in the historical record, and b) I doubt you are racing out to see this anyway.

When I'm watching a baseball movie prior to the season starting, what I'm really looking for is seeing baseball players run around the bases and catch balls, and You Gotta Believe certainly has that. I might prefer major leaguers, as I would have gotten with Angels in the Outfield, but any port in a storm.

And that means I have a year to try to properly source Angels before 2027 opening day -- if there is one. (There's a potential work stoppage in baseball looming after this season.) It also allows me to consider watching the original, which came out in 1951, and then saving the remake for another year.

As I type these words, we are about two hours from the first pitch of the 2026 baseball season. And after that, there will be baseball on nearly every day for seven months, including the playoffs.

Hallelujah, and play ball! 

I finally saw: The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings

And oh by the way: Happy Opening Day.

Of the baseball season, silly.

I had to watch my Opening Day Eve baseball psych-up movie a night early this year, which was two nights ago now, because I'm out of town on another baseball-related endeavor: a three-day tournament for over 40 players. This is just a once-a-year thing for me since I no longer play regularly, and we'll see if it's just a one-off or actually once-a-year since it's my first time.

You've figured out the movie I watched if you're good at reading movie posters. Or in this case, DVD covers.

Yes it's John Badham's The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976), and if you're wondering why I'm saying that I've "finally" seen this movie you may have never heard of, well, I'm about to tell you.

Nearly 30 years ago, in the second of an eventual four fantasy baseball leagues in which I've participated -- this is the 16th year of my current one -- a friend from college named his fantasy baseball team after this movie. His last name was, still is, Bond, so he called his team The Bondo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings. (Yes, I believe the software we used gave him a sufficient character count to fit the whole thing.) 

Like you, I had never heard of the movie, but the naming of his team after it certainly piqued my interest. 

And then I proceeded to do nothing about that for the next three decades.

But this year I thought "I like baseball" and "I need a movie to watch the night before the baseball season starts, and I've watched a movie I'd already seen in that slot like three straight years, and this is a movie I have not seen" and I put two and two together.

There were a lot of things I enjoyed about this story of a barnstorming Negro League baseball team in the late 1930s/early 1940s, and it starts with the cast. Especially with the recent passing of James Earl Jones, it was great to see him up there on the screen with the long-passed Richard Pryor and the still-with-us Billy Dee Williams. I bet the first of that group and the last of that group would never have guessed they'd appear on screen together, of sorts, in one of the most iconic movies of its era, The Empire Strikes Back, just four years later. Maybe if Richard Pryor had played Lobot, we could have had a full reunion.

Right away I knew I was where I wanted to be with this movie -- and that the fact that I have never seen a movie that properly focuses on the Negro Leagues is an oversight I seriously needed to correct. Then again, maybe they just do not exist. Yes, movies like 42 spend some time in a Negro League context, but a movie about the Negro Leagues generally or any specific Negro League team? Other than this, I can't name one. 

Before Williams' title character forms the titular team, the players he amasses are either on other Negro League teams or not on any team at all, working regular jobs despite their ample talent. We see Long, a pitcher, facing off against Jones' slugger Leon Carter in one game, and we are immediately immersed in all the on-field rituals: players leading chants with the crowd, people juggling baseballs and otherwise clowning, sass flying freely between players on opposing teams (or sometimes even the same team) without the umpires interfering. In other words, it was a joyous environment in which competition was taken seriously but fun was never sacrificed. I would have loved to be there in those stands. 

And if I was, I would have been one of the only white faces. Because the other thing this movie immediately reminded me was how much Black Americans used to love baseball. We see how much the crowd adores these players and this pastime, and then we go out to the sandlots outside the park to see young kids pitching and swinging a makeshift stick to approximate their heroes. The fact that a sport that was once somewhere around 50% Black, probably reaching its height in the 1970s and 1980s, now has 5% or less players fitting that demographic is sad indeed. I wish Black kids still fell in love with baseball at an early age the way they obviously did back then. This could also be why we haven't had a younger Black filmmaker make the definitive Negro League baseball movie, which could be an excellent project in the right hands.

But let's not get sidetracked by the negative. This is a highly enjoyable, episodic adventure in which the titular team travels through the south in a couple fancy cars bearing their name, which they parade down the streets of the towns they are visiting to great interest by the locals, sometimes even getting out of the cars and hot-stepping it down main street in a synchronized group. At least, that is, when the cars are not being repossessed as payment for hotels and the like, as the team becomes cash poor through mishaps and usury by the people they encounter. Since they are trying to fight the Negro League owners who use and abuse them -- one of whom docks from their salary in order to pay for team financial needs for which they are not responsible -- they are constantly playing David to someone else's Goliath, even as they are always putting on a great show and presenting a great brand of the sport.

Even as this movie is always fun, it doesn't shy away from the realities of racism in the south and elsewhere in the U.S. at this time. We hear the N-word dropped on multiple occasions here, though because it was a different time, the usage is more incidental than employed specifically to drive home these racists' perniciousness. Badham and company want to show what these guys were up against, but also that it did not overly dampen their spirits. After all, it was just their reality, nothing exceptional.

As I watched this team go through its antics and have a hell of a lot of fun out there -- plus employ "novelty" players like a one-armed first baseball and a little person catcher (who is actually credited as "Midget Catcher") -- I was reminded of what the Harlem Globetrotters provide us nowadays. (Yes, I believe they are still touring, though obviously with new membership.) Black athletes have a history of being great entertainers, and if we ever see one of them showboating in a way that may seem out of sync with our modern ideas of how athletes should comport themselves, we should remember the sort of lovely history we see in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, and that they came by it honestly. 

A bunch of Bull

The late 1980s were the heyday of baseball movies that starred or could have starred Kevin Costner. He was in both Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, of course, and couldn't you just imagine him playing the Tom Berenger role in Major League?

Well, it's a problematic heyday for me in certain ways. I had a major negative reappraisal of Field of Dreams a few years ago, I was never that warm on Bull Durham in the first place, and, well, Major League, which is my favorite baseball movie of all time and in my top 200 on Flickchart, does not actually feature Kevin Costner.

But a Bull Durham viewing has been brewing for a couple years as a possible choice to watch on the eve of baseball's opening day, as per my annual tradition. Even though it was never a favorite -- as evidenced by the fact that I have only seen it that one time in the early 1990s -- I did generally feel fondly toward it, and thought that its general vibe would be a perfect thing to usher me in to six months of baseball.

I did feel fondly toward it.

I said I liked Durham's general vibe, but the movie is more of a vibe than an actual story. And it turns out I don't like its vibe all that much.

Let's start with Costner as Crash Davis. In my memory, this was sort of a Han Solo of baseball, a wiseass who's flawed but charming, and has the best personality in the room. In fact, I found Crash to be a bitter asshole. He's not as funny as I thought, he doesn't have an instinct for kindness in his body, and he's not above the fray like a Han Solo, falling into an immediate petty rivalry with his charge, Tim Robbins' Nuke LaLoosh, getting into as many as three fights with him, at least two of which he bears the lion's share of the responsibility for starting. We are supposed to want Crash to succeed and to win the heart of Susan Sarandon's Annie, and the trajectory of the narrative and the development of Nuke is supposed to confirm that she was wrong to pair up with Nuke. Instead, I thought Nuke seemed like the more deserving suitor by the end -- a credit to Crash helping mature him, sure, but not something we are supposed to be thinking as the narrative reaches its end.

It occurs to me that rooting for the wrong person was actually a problem with both of these Costner baseball movies in the late 80s. Part of the reason I turned on Field of Dreams (you can read that post here) was because I realized the movie is trying so hard to make a villain out of Timothy Busfield, when in fact his pleading with them not to build a baseball field on their property is the most sane action by any character in the movie. I felt similarly toward Nuke here. Although I loathed him at first -- the movie makes it impossible not to -- I ultimately found Nuke easier to like than Crash, who reaches his bitter low point when he refuses to congratulate Nuke on his promotion to the majors, and then tries to start a fight with Nuke, throwing a billiard ball at Nuke with his back turned while Nuke is walking away. Classy.

And that makes a good transition into the many ways this movie gets baseball wrong. When Nuke gets his call-up to the majors at the end, he's skipping two levels of minor league ball in order to get there. The titular Durham Bulls are a Triple-A team today -- meaning the stop just below the majors -- but in the 1980s they were a Class-A team, which means that both AA and AAA stood between them and the majors as logical stopping points for players on their ascension. It's not unheard of for a major league team to call up someone in the low minors when rosters expand at the end of the season, but it would be pretty rare -- and certainly not immediately after a stinker of a game by the player.

So let's talk about that stinker of a game. As narrated by Annie -- and there is a lot of random narrating in this film that follows no pattern -- the game "got out of hand" once Crash was ejected for arguing a call at the plate. We see one of the fielders make three errors with his cursed glove (more on that later) and a number of other hits sprayed around the park against LaLoosh. And yet when she wraps up her narration of the game, she reveals that the Bulls lost the game 3-2. How is that game "out of hand"?

It would be one thing if we were supposed to believe that Annie just doesn't understand very much about baseball, which would be a bit sexist but at least would explain her sub par assessment of the dynamics of the game. But no, this is a woman who offers players advice on their swing and attends every game. It's writer-director Ron Shelton who doesn't seem to understand baseball, not Annie. (Which is a strange charge to make as Shelton made a handful of baseball movies, including the one I started the 2023 baseball season watching, Cobb.) 

And let's also talk about Crash's ejection. It takes ages to happen. While arguing an out call at the plate -- which he does to try to fire Nuke up -- Crash is nose to nose with the umpire for minutes of intimate shouting before he's thrown out. He even bumps chests with the umpire early in the argument, to which the umpire lamely responds "Don't bump me!" (Physical contact with an umpire is an automatic ejection, and likely suspension, today, but even back then it would have been unusual and warranted an immediate response.) Finally only after the umpire baits Crash into calling him a cocksucker does he get thrown out. No self-respecting umpire would put up with that much crap before ejecting a player.

It's clear that Bull Durham does not fancy itself a conventional sports movie building toward a conventional climax. I mean, it is the anti-Major League in that way. The loveable losers in that movie work their way up to winning the big game -- not the World Series, but the single game that decides who is going to win the A.L. East, which is still pretty big stakes. The loveable losers in this movie have a winning streak that's underpinned by Nuke's abstention from sex -- as though Nuke might pitch every game the team plays, another misunderstanding of how baseball works -- but then I don't even remember if we find out what becomes of that season. The movie sees fit to end on Nuke getting promoted and Crash getting released, with post scripts that have to do with Crash trying to set the minor league home run record on a different team (a big deal, you'd think, but the movie considers it an afterthought) and with him finally bedding Annie.

I know these are different times, but if a player were about to take the all-time lead for minor league homers -- a dubious honor, of course, because it means you're just good enough for a lot of at-bats in the minors but few if any in the majors -- it would be celebrated and the player's pursuit would be monitored. Instead, the Bulls release Davis even though he's having an indisputably good hitting season. We know he needed 20 homers at the start of the season to set the record, and you don't release a player who is having that sort of productivity at the plate. Especially because you want to "call up" a young catcher. Um, Class-A is pretty much as low as it gets, though technically, rookie ball is one step lower. 

The movie views Crash Davis as some great tragedy, because Crash views himself as some great tragedy. I didn't feel sorry for the guy in the slightest. He's a jerk to everyone and he had a minor league career in which he hit 247 homers. In a season in which you've already hit 20 homers, there would be no reason not to keep playing next year. Instead, the movie makes it seem as though he has no other option than to consider a coaching gig the following season. I'm sorry, any player who can hit 20 homers is going to be wanted by somebody.

But Vance, you say. It's just a movie.

Yes, I'm probably doing it wrong if I am scrutinizing every detail of a baseball movie. But a baseball movie needs to be good enough in the other things it's doing to make me relax my tendency toward this sort of scrutiny. I'm sure there are things about Major League that don't add up, but they don't distract me the least from my love of what that movie does. Here, I'm muttering and distracted constantly.

Even if Bull Durham wants to be more of a hang-out movie than a sports movie, it needs to do that better. The "fun" sequences don't even strike me as such because I don't care much about the main characters and they didn't do much to introduce me to the supporting cast, another way this falls short of what Major League accomplishes. 

I was frankly shocked at how labored this script is. I can't remember any examples off the top of my head, but there were moments here where a dialogue exchange goes on for any number of words longer than it should have because Shelton failed to excise clearly superfluous material, like little semantic exchanges about what someone said, or needless repetitions of things not heard properly. If the semantics are the point, a good script can make that funny. This script is not good, from the overall story structure to the inconsistent use of voiceover to the details of the dialogue. 

I don't want to say I hated Bull Durham. That's too strong. I do enjoy certain isolated parts of it, though I don't ever think it's funny. I think it thinks it's funny, which is really unbecoming.

Oh I mentioned earlier that I was going to come back to the fielder who thought his glove was cursed and made three errors, a guy named Jose, played by Rick Marzan. This guy is always rubbing beads on his bat and is a believer in voodoo. I thought that was funny because the character of Pedro Cerrano in Major League, played by Dennis Haysbert, is basically an expanded consideration of this plot. While that would sound as though Bull Durham finally has the advantage over Major League on something, again I can spin this in Major League's favor. Major League takes something that was ventured tepidly by Bull Durham and makes it big and richly comedic, if probably a little culturally insensitive by today's standards. What's more, it's another example of how we know the characters better in the later film and better appreciate their specific traits and foibles. We don't know anything about Jose. Heck, we barely even know anything about Crash.

So Bull Durham did not really psych me up for the season, which is my stated reason for this little Cerrano-like ritual of mine over the past decade or so. (My wife even referred to it as a ritual last night.) But that does not matter, because baseball itself psychs me up for itself. 

Happy opening day, everyone. 

Getting psyched up for the baseball season with ... Cobb?!?

I can't have already run out of movies to watch at the start of the baseball season, can I?

Per tradition, I always watch a baseball movie the night before opening day, though this year, two nights before worked out better for my schedule. I've watched Major League more than once, but I need to give that a rest for a few seasons. Two years ago it was my first-ever watch of The Natural, and last year I rewatched Eight Men Out for the first time in 25 years or more. Bull Durham is a good candidate for a rewatch one of these years, because I sense I'd feel a bit more favorably toward that on a second viewing.

It would seem like I don't have too many other choices than those, though, because this year I settled for ... Cobb.

And it wasn't even a first viewing.

The reason I say "settled for" is that I don't think Ron Shelton's 1994 film is very well liked. In fact, I know it's not. What's more, it deals with journalist Al Stump (Robert Wuhl) writing a biography of the legendary ballplayer and legendary asshole Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones) in the year before his death in 1961, when he was over 70. In other words, there isn't that much actual baseball in it.

But I'd always liked this film, and 2023 was the time to revisit and judge the younger version of me to see if he was crazy.

Here's what I wrote about it in my review for AllMovie, written probably sometimes in 2001:

Ron Shelton could not have painted an uglier portrait if he'd made a movie about Adolf Hitler. But with one of the most notorious personalities of the 20th century as his subject, it doesn't even feel like caricature. Cobb is a triumph of original thinking in many respects: a baseball movie with very little baseball in it; a biopic that focuses on the last year of its subject's life, sparing the viewer his "greatest hits," both literally and figuratively; and a career-best performance from a small-time actor (Robert Wuhl) who holds his own alongside Tommy Lee Jones at his blistering best. The dynamic Shelton explores between the legendary ballplayer and Al Stump, his harried biographer, is thoroughly engrossing, eliminating the need to rely on re-created old-time footage that might have served as a crutch. Several scenes perfectly capture the reckless, spiteful essence of the man, including a trip around the bases in which he spikes no less than three fielders, and one in which he drives down a mountain at 60 miles per hour in a blizzard. Counterbalancing this, however, is the gracious treatment given Cobb wherever he goes, which demonstrates the empty flattery accorded celebrities by starstruck fans who don't really understand who they are. Shelton's adaptation of Stump's book makes Cobb and his biographer more similar than either would like to admit: each exploits the other for his own self-aggrandizing purposes, even if Stump's are sanctioned under the guise of journalism and the slippery quest for "truth."

Ultimately I still stand by most of that. Where I don't stand by it, it's a matter of degree.

First off, calling this "a triumph of original thinking" seems like a stretch. The things that surprised me about the movie back then don't feel like such a surprise anymore. Also I've probably seen 300 more biopics today than I had back then, so the approach doesn't seem as fresh. Of course, you shouldn't fall into the trap of subsequent pieces of art rendering earlier ones less distinctive, but that's not what I think I mean here. I just mean I've seen more biopics so I don't think the approach Cobb took was quite so unique, even at that time.

Also, I called it a "career-best performance" by Robert Wuhl, and that may be true, but again that is just relative to his own career. Wuhl has his moments, but I actually found some of his scenes to be a bit awkward. He has a dumb bird-like look on his face a fair bit in this movie.

The ugliness of the portrait was something I got right. It was interesting to watch Cobb only a few days after hearing an interview in which the subject was talking about telling someone's story being an act of making us sympathize with them, no matter how nasty they may be. I didn't really sympathize with Cobb, though Shelton does allow a very rare flicker of his humanity to seep through. That's probably the right amount.

Still, my review back then was rather too glowing. I'd still say I like this movie, but it's more in the three-star range. That reads more like a four-star review.

The question really should be: Did it prime me for the baseball season?

I suppose it did, yes. But then again, I don't need much help. I've got my real baseball team and two different formats of fantasy league teams about to take to the field tomorrow. Mentally, I'm already there.

Bull Durham would be more the mood I'm going for in 2024 ... though after three straight years of rewatching something I'd already seen -- I rewatched, and was disappointed by, Field of Dreams in 2020 -- maybe I need to dig deep for unseen baseball gems that may have eluded me. 

The right year to rewatch Eight Men Out

Less than a month ago, baseball owners and players stopped fighting with each other, ending a lockout that started at the beginning of December and ended up pushing back opening day by a week. Their beef? The inability to reach a deal on the next collective bargaining agreement, and all the profit-making possibilities that agreement would entail for each side. 

Everyone seems to think the owners got the better deal. Ain't that how it always is.

So it feels particularly appropriate that on the eve before this year's opening day, as per my tradition, I watched an old favorite about ballplayers and their owner fighting with each other, and the owner winning.

The ballplayers were the 1919 Chicago White Sox, the owner was Charles Comiskey, and the movie is, of course, John Sayles' Eight Men Out, which I've seen about three times, but not since the early 1990s. 

The reason eight players on the White Sox famously agreed to throw the World Series for $10,000 apiece, which would make untold amounts more for the crooked gamblers who put them up to it, was that they felt used and abused by Comiskey, who gave them flat champagne as a "bonus" for winning their division, and refused to pay them contractually obligated bonuses, adjusting their playing time downward to make it impossible to reach the statistical milestones those bonuses depended on. (I always think of how starting pitcher Eddie Cicotte, played by David Straitharn, was denied a $10,000 bonus that he would have received if he'd reached 30 wins. He was stopped at 29, largely because the manager didn't play him for a two-week stretch, on orders from the owner.)

As evidence of how history always remembers the winners and not the losers, only one name from that group of players (Shoeless Joe Jackson, who also appears in Field of Dreams) ever made it to household name status when the players were banned for life by new commissioner Kenesaw "Mountain" Landis. Comiskey? That baseball park bore his name for 80 years until it was demolished in 1991, and I'm sure the casual fan thinks he was just swell.

I can't say the movie left me "pumped" for opening day like these movies are designed to do, as it's a pretty solemn and somber affair. However, to be honest, I did not require much pumping. I was already as pumped as I needed to be.

The movie itself probably didn't hold up quite as well for me as I was hoping, though much better than my disastrous revisit of the aforementioned Field of Dreams a few years ago. Over the years I'd built it up as this stately example of prestige filmmaking, but I found parts of it hokey and obvious and dependent on unsubtle exposition. Fortunately, by the end it did land in that same profound space of feeling sorrow and confusion for everyone involved, as no one really got out of that unscathed. Even as an apparent "winner," Comiskey looks at the end like it took years off his life. 

Two takeaways:

1) I had forgotten Charlie Sheen was in this. He's of course one of the stars of my favorite baseball movie, Major League, and him appearing in this and two Major League movies made me wonder if we should think of him a bit like we think of Kevin Costner in terms of being typecast as a baseball player. I even thought of a blog post comparing Sheen's and Costner's baseball outputs, but a) you don't need a third straight baseball-related movie post on this blog, and b) Costner probably has him beat just for sheer quantity of baseball movies -- I count four for Costner, and none is a sequel. 

2) I had also forgotten the director was in it, and in fact, I didn't actually know what he looked like so I had to look him up afterward. Strange that I wouldn't know how John Sayles looked considering how long he's been making movies. His role as one of the guys investigating the possible fix is an all-business turn that convinced me he's pretty good at this here acting thing. 

In the past, my movie watching would suffer a bit once the baseball season started. But one benefit of moving to Australia is that the games play in the morning/early afternoon, and most of my movie watching is at night. So, expect my usual stream of new viewings, and regular posts whenever I think of something actually worth saying. 

A 47-year-old really can play baseball

My annual baseball Opening Day Eve movie, The Natural, was a personal first-time viewing of the classic baseball movie, and boy do I have some thoughts.

But I ought to start out with the thought that I referenced in the subject of this post. 

When I started watching the movie, not knowing what the scope of the narrative would entail, I found it laughable that Robert Redford plays his character, the immortal Roy Hobbs, at age 19. Hearing other characters refer to him as "kid" made me laugh. When The Natural was filmed in 1983, Redford was a 47-year-old "kid." Redford makes more sense in the role when the action shifts ahead 16 years, but he's still ten years older than the elder statesman version of Hobbs is supposed to be. It reminded me a bit of John C. Reilly playing his character as a 12-year-old in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, though in that case the laughs were intentional.

I went almost immediately from laughing at this to feeling really poignant about it. 

You see, I am also a 47-year-old trying to play baseball.

I'm not sure how much I've told you about this on here, but not only am I a huge baseball fan, I'm also a player. Yeah, I played in high school, very badly, for a season-and-a-half. But I mean I'm a player now. At age 47. Living in a country where people don't even know the sport's basic terminology, generally speaking.

What happened was, seven years ago I met a guy I worked with who has now become one of my closest friends in Australia. He'd had baseball love in his family, something uncommon in this country, but had not totally taken to it himself. I got him involved in fantasy baseball, and from there, his baseball love took off. Having played cricket growing up, he already had some of the skills necessary for baseball, and began playing it on a club team that has both a summer and a winter season. Playing, and eventually even managing. 

After a season or two of being tempted to join him, I took the plunge in 2019. I figured, if not now, when? And because I had not been a success when I played in high school, I decided to go for a position switch. Instead of outfield, I would now play third base, and then I wouldn't have the opportunity of misjudging fly balls and having too much time to think about my defense. It turns out I could make the throw accurately, and I was an asset on defense, even if my offense left something to be desired.

In the third or fourth game, my offense caught up. I had a couple of hits and a couple of runs knocked in in that game, with my son watching from the sideline. The future looked bright.

In the very next game, the third Saturday of May, I injured my left shoulder. I was making a dive for a ball through the hole between third and short, and I heard something snap. It turns out there was a small break -- my life's first ever broken bone -- and also a dislocation of the shoulder. Those might not have taken a long time to heal themselves, but I got a frozen shoulder, which plagued me for the rest of the calendar year. Needless to say, I was done for the season.

I was fully healed last year and was all set to play, but you probably know what happened there. Season cancelled by COVID.

So now we are preparing for the 2021 winter season -- it's autumn here, remember -- and I'm trying to prove to everyone else, but mostly to myself, that a 47-year-old really can play baseball.

My situation and the one in which Hobbs finds himself are pretty similar, if you remove the huge gulf in our talents and skill sets. Hobbs misses out on a surefire big league career after he's nearly killed by a crazy woman who shoots him, and tries to give his major league career a go in his late 30s. I never had a baseball future, but I did have a long layoff, just returning to action after nearly 30 years on the sidelines. Like Hobbs, I'm significantly older than most of the other players on my team, the majority of whom are in their late 20s or early 30s, like real baseball players. And my own "comeback" was short-circuited by an injury, just as Hobbs' old shooting injury endangers his comeback due to unspecified medical threats to his life of the bullet having been lodged his stomach for 16 years. (There's a lot of very vague statements you just have to take for granted in this movie.)  

But if Hobbs can come back and hit bombs and make catches in the twilight of his playing days, maybe I can make a few throws over to first and knock the occasional single through the infield. 

So yeah, I didn't like The Natural all that much. It's totally cornball and has a huge number of ridiculous occurrences, such as:

- The woman (Barbara Hershey) shooting Hobbs. There is no explanation for this. I guess she's just crazy, but she shoots Hobbs upon confirming he thinks he will become one of the best players of all time. I thought there was some kind of conspiracy going on, and maybe this woman was hired by a prospective rival of Hobbs, but no. Nothing of the sort, apparently. 

- The fact that he was shot is so "embarrassing" to Hobbs that he refuses to tell anyone his own back story. In fact, he's so reluctant to go into any details that when people ask him where he's from, he says things like "Does it matter?" and "All over the place." It's a decidedly artificial level of disconnection. I almost considered him the baseball movie equivalent of The Man With No Name.

- A player dies by running through an outfield wall. This may be the only scene I had seen of The Natural, other than the climax, as I remembered it from when it was on cable when I was a kid. Even though I'd forgotten I'd seen this scene when I first started watching the movie, when it arrives in the narrative, I remembered that it had had something of an impact on me as a kid. It felt very ominous that a baseball player could die in the outfield. Today, it just feels ridiculous. No, the safety levels were not there back in the 1920s/1930s -- they didn't even wear helmets when they batted -- but I still don't believe a player would a) be able to crash through an outfield wall, or if he did, b) die from his injuries. 

- A gun makes an appearace in the movie a second time. How many baseball movies have a single scene with a gun, let alone two? Kim Basinger fires a gun at the floor in a climactic scene. Again, another ridiculous moment.

- The movie doesn't care to explain why Hobbs never tried to play baseball seriously again after his shooting injury. It's one of many background details it feels like we should be filled in on, especially when Hobbs seems like he can hit a home run at will. How could you leave that kind of talent dormant? 

- You'd think that Hobbs' home run exploding the light tower at the end would be enough of that kind of moment for one movie. But no, earlier in the movie, one of his home runs also explodes a clock. 

- Hobbs' bat is called "Wonder Boy." He made it himself from the wood of a tree split by lighting. It has existed unscathed, not even a nick, for 20 years, then it breaks in his last at-bat of his career. This is the type of movie this is.

It occurred to me that this also has a lot of parallels with another baseball movie -- actually two baseball movies, if you count the sequel -- that I've watched in the past week. Major League would seem to have based some of its core plot structure on The Natural, as both films feature the vicissitudes in a season of a loser team that becomes a contender, and both have a high-stakes climax involving the owner betting against his/her own team. Maybe if I'd seen The Natural first, I would have considered Major League to be a ripoff of it, but since it was the other way around, I cherish Major League while finding The Natural highly square.

But at least now I know that a 47-year-old baseball player is not such a crazy idea. Until Bartolo Colon finally officially retires, there's still one active baseball player in pro ball who is older than I am. And there's still one active 47-year-old playing third base for the University of Melbourne E team, just hoping to get through this season without injury or plague, and maybe have my own little equivalent of a Roy Hobbs light tower moment, even if it's just hitting a ground ball single between third and short.

This year's opening day psych-up movie

Happy baseball opening day, everyone.

Two teams played two counting games in Japan last week, but now it's time for the other 28 to join them. One of the best days of the year, if you ask me. And you're reading this, so I guess you're asking me.

I do like to tie in opening day to the movies, and I've usually done that in the form of watching Major League, a task made easier by having purchased the film on iTunes. But given that I did watch it each of the past two years, I figured maybe it was a good time to switch things up this year -- at least for one year.

So, Moneyball it was.

This may not be the movie you'd first tap for this honor, at least on the surface. It's about the love of the game, as most baseball movies are, but that love is buried deep within number crunching and philosophies about how to maximize wins from a small payroll.

There is, though, the dramatization of a 20-game winning streak by the 2002 Oakland Athletics, and that's about as sports movie as it gets.

And truth be told, much of my excitement about baseball nowadays is inseparable from my various fantasy baseball interests. So crunching numbers and evaluating players purely on the basis of what they can do for you is certainly on message for that type of thing. (Just so you don't think I'm some kind of soulless baseball fan, I'll tell you that my burning desire for my team, the Boston Red Sox, to win the World Series has been quenched by them having done that four times successfully since 2004, including last year most recently.)

Anyway, I really enjoyed sinking into my beanbag chair with a couple beers and a bag of grain twists for my third viewing of a film that made my top ten of 2011. It scratched the itch and then some.

And in just a few short hours ... play ball.

Insert requisite Cubs World Series post here

I am a baseball fan.

I am a movie fan.

So the day after the Chicago Cubs won the World Series -- a feat they had not accomplished in a by-now household knowledge 108 years -- I should be able to figure out a way to incorporate my love of baseball with my love of movies to honor Chicago's long-suffering team and their fans.

But the truth of the matter is, I'm drawing a blank.

I could call this post The Chicago Cubs' Century Off, a nod to Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I could call it Rookie of the Century, and reference one of the Cubs' great young players as well as the movie Rookie of the Year. I could even call it The Future Is Now and make a Back to the Future II reference.

But the fact is, I'm not feeling particularly clever this morning.

And the Cubs' win transcends movies. It transcends culture in general.

There was a thread in my Flickcharters Facebook group last night (well, it was day in Australia) in which people were chiming in with game updates -- their exquisite joys, their moments of temporary heartbreak, their sheer excitement about the spectacle they were watching. Meanwhile, others were continuing to post movie-related threads, seemingly oblivious to the historic and ridiculously exciting extra-inning game that was unfolding in Cleveland.

I pitied those who could not be part of the moment. I pitied those uninterested enough in sports that they didn't have a little room in their hearts or attention spans for being a part of history.

Me, I was maintaining four chats at once while also watching as much of the game as I could -- while also working.

Movies? I wasn't thinking about them much last night.

I was thinking about the Cubs, their fans, and how we all witnessed a sweet and long-overdue moment that will mean so much to so many.

Congratulations, Cubs. Chicagoans, take the next week off from work.

You deserve this.

The Major League viewing that wasn't

It's baseball season again. As this is one of the more cinematic sports out there -- and also my favorite -- I feel compelled to call attention to opening day on my blog every year. Twenty sixteen is no different.

But I did want to more explicitly combine the start of the baseball season with movies this year by scheduling my first viewing since 2012 of the 1989 classic (I'm not kidding) Major League, about a week or two back.

Unfortunately, I was frustrated in that attempt by Netflix's very successful and apparently unbreachable lockdown on the use of VPNs in foreign countries.

I had already both encountered Netflix's tighter security policy, and written about it here, a couple weeks earlier when I attempted to watch Clueless (and actually did watch it on a competing streaming service). So I shouldn't have been surprised when it was only available on the U.S. version of the service, especially since baseball is not particularly big in Australia to begin with. (I'd say it's tiny, except that someone thought Australia was an audience primed for baseball by scheduling two regular season games between the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks in Sydney to start the 2014 season.)

I guess somehow I figured that would make it slightly more likely to appear on the Australian Netflix, not less. I mean, if nobody wants to watch the movie anyway, why not have it available, just because?

That of course operates on the faulty notion that companies like Netflix dangle carrots in front of rabbits (their customers), only to snatch away the things they really want and provide them with a lot of bait-and-switch content they don't want. Giving that unwanted content essentially no value, and therefore no cost, in the free market. Well, that's certainly not the case. It's all about licensing fees and the like, and it probably makes little sense to license a film in a country where most viewers have no interest in watching it.

So my Major League itch went unscratched. Oh well. One could argue I should probably own this movie anyway, given my feelings for it. Maybe this is the impetus I need to do that. It'll have to be a digital purchase, however; finding it on the shelves here is going to be even more unlikely than finding it online.

I'll see if I can't schedule some kind of substitute tomorrow night, when I'll be home (unlike tonight), and when an entire day's worth of baseball games will have been played, rather than just the three that were played on this opening Sunday. (Which is an increase from the one game that has traditionally been played.) Tomorrow (their Monday, my Tuesday) is the real opening day in the old-fashioned sense of that word, and after poring over scores and stats all day, I'll have worked up a pretty big appetite for some baseball on celluloid. We'll see what I come up with.

Until then ... play ball!

Lady's choice: Play ball!

This morning at approximately 3 a.m. Los Angeles time, the Oakland A's and the Seattle Mariners played the first regular-season game of the 2012 baseball season.

No, it wasn't some kind of weird publicity stunt. Well, it was a publicity stunt of sorts, but not the kind you're thinking of. See, it wasn't 3 a.m. in Japan, where the first two games of the season will be played, as they have been a handful of times over the past decade.

The night before this first game, to celebrate the ceremonial arrival of spring that this first game traditionally represents, my wife and I watched Major League.

That probably wouldn't have been her choice -- but that's why our bi-weekly Tuesday night movie series is all about alternating who gets to choose. It's called Lady's Choice Movie Night, but as I've described in the past (and will probably have to again), I serve as the "lady" in this scenario once a month. It's really not worth going into. All you have to know is that it doesn't involve me dressing up in her clothing or anything.

But I wasn't just forcing my wife to watch something that would probably hold little appeal for her, because the ground rules of this movie series allow me to. She's not a sports fan, but she's a big fan of sports movies -- a much bigger fan than I am, in fact, so in that sense I was actually kind of throwing her a bone. (For a fuller discussion of my feelings about sports movies, see here.) "It's all about the human drama," she said last night, explaining the genre's appeal to her.

Well, there's plenty of human drama in Major League -- not to mention plenty of laughs, plenty of swears and plenty of actors who are still nearly as familiar today as they were back in 1989.

But let's start with those swears. On this viewing in particular I appreciated how damn much the characters in this movie swear. They elevate profanity to an art form. That's undoubtedly accurate when you're looking inside the locker rooms of professional athletes, but that doesn't mean Major League would be made like this if it were made today. Made today, Major League would be PG-13 and might have a smattering of naughty words. But it probably would not have a single f-bomb. And in fact, as I was discussing on Facebook earlier today, nearly every classic line in the movie contains an f-bomb -- with the notable exception of Bob Uecker's famous quip "Juuuust a bit outside." Forthwith:

"Who's THIS fucking guy?"

"Nice catch. Don't ever fucking do it again."

"If you ever tank another play like you did today, I'm going to rip your nuts off and shove 'em down your fucking throat."

"I say 'fuck you' Jobu. I do it myself."

"Strike this motherfucker out."

You get the idea.

Yet what's so wonderful about this movie is that it's not the least bit mean-spirited. That's just how we've changed as a movie audience in the past 23 years. Major League probably has at least 50 f-bombs in it -- isn't it funny how I'm still saying "f-bombs" even though I just wrote out the word "fuck" five times -- yet it's incredibly light-hearted and fun. It seems hard for us to imagine that kind of balance today. Movies that relied on such profanity would seem to be showing off, or trying to emulate Quentin Tarantino. Unlike Major League, which is just plain realistic.

Okay, not entirely realistic. I could certainly quibble with parts of the movie. Like, how would Pedro Cerrano ever keep a starting job all year if word spread around the league that he couldn't hit a curveball to save his life? Or, in order to pull off his big move at the end of the movie -- spoiler alert -- Jake Taylor would have to show bunt on the brush-back pitch from The Duke that knocks him to the ground. Yet he doesn't.

These things don't matter, and you wanna know why? Because Major League also has one of the tightest scripts around. It's incredibly detail-oriented, yet the details are always there to show us more about the characters and the "inside baseball" (an appropriate use for that term) we're seeing on screen. They are never belabored, and there are numerous short scenes that tell us plenty without even any dialogue. My wife even said that watching Major League gave her ideas about how to make her own script, on which she's stalled around page 40, even tighter. It's a point A to point B to point C type of screenwriting that blows you away with both its efficiency and its unexpected depth.

Let's take Rene Russo's character, Lynn, for example. Stop and think about how many times she appears in this movie. She's in like five scenes. Five! Yet you know a ton about Lynn and her relationship with Jake, because each scene accomplishes exactly what it needs to accomplish. There's no way you get to the end of that movie and realize she may have only had ten minutes of screen time. She feels like a full-on co-star, a fully developed romantic lead. Credit that to David S. Ward, a name I don't really know, who is nonetheless both the writer and director of this wonderful movie.

I also enjoyed realizing how many stars were in this movie, and how they were truly the right stars, perfectly complementing each other in the truest sense of the word "team." You've got the ever-reliable Tom Berenger as the aging catcher with bad knees. You've got fleet-footed Wesley Snipes as the hot shot outfielder who invites himself to spring training. You've got Corbin Bernsen as the primadonna with the big paycheck who will no longer sacrifice his body. You've got Dennis Haysbert, much more famous now than he was then, as the voodoo-practicing slugger who defected from Cuba. And you've got one of the most notorious personalities of the past year, Charlie Sheen, as an ex-con with a bad attitude and a haircut that looks like he lost a fight with a weedwacker. This is to say nothing of the delightful Russo, the hilarious Uecker and James Gammon, the salty old manager, who will be sorely missed after dying in July of 2010. (Odd -- he was 70 when he died, making him only about 49 in Major League. He plays at least ten years older than that.)

Oh, and I said something about laughs. Yeah, we were laughing consistently. Both of us. And this was at least my fifth time seeing the movie.

More than anything, though, I was interested to see Major League again because the former host of the Filmspotting podcast, Matty Robinson, unabashedly touts this movie as his favorite of all time. Think about that for a second. He is (or was) the co-host of a highfalutin podcast where, for example, they spent a half-hour dissecting, analyzing and gushing about The Tree of Life. Yet this modest little baseball comedy from 1989 is his favorite movie of all time.

Last night's viewing reminded me that Mr. Robinson might not be so crazy.

Movies supplanted by sports

Many of you reading this are not sports fans.

In fact, an argument could be made that you're movie fans because you're not sports fans, although that would get into questionable territory -- why attribute a beautiful passion to an absence elsewhere in your life? I'm sure some of you never wanted to be sports fans in the first place.

I, however, go both ways. I love movies and I love sports.

And right now, it's time for sports.

Every March, my cinematic focus wanders. In part, that has to do with a natural lull in the movie schedule. The Oscars are done, but the new movie year hasn't really ramped up yet. Sure, there have been one or two new releases worth watching, but on the whole, it's a quiet time of the year for movies.

That works out well, because I'm very focused on baseball and basketball right now. In fact, you could say, obsessively focused.

Which is why I am illustrating this post with a poster for a movie I hate. Even though I think it's a piss-poor movie, Fever Pitch is a pretty good visual representation of the sports-related fever I've got right now. (And yes, it kills me to say such negative things about Fever Pitch, because I'm a Boston Red Sox fan. Shoulda made a better movie, Farrellys.)

Only two-thirds of that fever is related to the upcoming baseball season, however. Here's a complete breakdown of where I'm devoting my mind at the moment:

1) Agonizing over my picks in college basketball's annual tournament, known as March Madness. The first four days of action concluded on Sunday night. I'm still in contention in my pool. A lot of things have to break right for me, but I'm still in it. And oh yeah, I'm also running the pool. So that involved a lot of collecting of money and other logistics.

2) Prepping for my fantasy baseball draft, which begins online at 4 o'clock my time on Thursday. In fact, I'm coming in an hour early that day, just so I can get off by 2:30 and have plenty of time to get ready. In the meantime, I'm scouring baseball websites and reading fantasy baseball magazines.

3) Researching my team for other fantasy baseball league, which is called the Home Run Derby. This involves compiling a team of ten baseball players, according to certain criteria, and following their home run exploits over the course of the season, to put it in its simplest terms. I actually run the thing, so not only am I brainstorming my own lineup, but I'm sending regular communications to the rest of the league, and collecting money here as well. And since this could involve some 80 participants, it's a big job.

So yeah. The little part of my brain that's usually devoted to thinking up blog posts is now devoted to three-pointers, earned run averages and stolen bases. And will be for a bit longer. In fact, throw in the NBA playoffs (which begin in about a month), and my sports focus will remain fairly intense until at least mid-June. Not as intense as now, but still intense.

So if my posting frequency slips from regular to sporadic until early April, you know why. My brain's storms are devoted to sports right now, not to movies.

And on that note ... back to sports.

Pleasant surprises

Warning: The following post contains minor spoilers about The Town. You may choose not to paahhtake in this one if you haven't seen it.

I finally saw The Town on Sunday afternoon, and almost everything about it was a pleasant surprise. I mean, I knew it was supposed to be good, but I actually think it was better than I thought it was going to be.

But there was one thing in particular about it that really tickled me -- and I had no idea how I couldn't have known it was going to happen.

First things first. I'm a Boston Red Sox fan. Have been officially for 24 years, ever since I got anointed by fire during the 1986 playoff run, which ended in such crushing misery for Boston fans. After that, there was no going back. I was hooked.

The intensity of my feelings has died down some in recent years, which, when you're someone like me, is an inevitable part of your team winning two championships. I describe myself as a "sports socialist," which means I like to see different teams win championships, giving different fan bases something to cheer about. So when the Red Sox ended their famous 86-year drought without a championship in 2004, and especially when they won another in 2007, I hardly felt it was fair that I kept on requiring them to win championships. I'd had my share of good fortune. So inevitably, until my appetite really builds up again, I have been following the team with a little less urgency. Most sports fans would recognize a direct correlation between your hunger for a championship and the amount you parse the day-to-day fortunes of a baseball team.

This is my only explanation for how I couldn't have known that the final heist in The Town was going to take place in Fenway Park, the nearly hundred-year-old home to the Red Sox.

It's presented perfectly in the movie -- hinted at, then grandly revealed in the form of one of many glorious helicopter shots over the city of Boston, this one directly over Fenway Paahhk. That grand reveal gave me goosebumps -- is actually giving me goosebumps now as I write this.

But I don't think it should have, because I should have known that this was coming. It should have entered my consciousness through the Red Sox zeitgeist, either on Facebook through someone posting about it, or through a story on ESPN.com, or some other way. At the very least, one of my friends who's seen it should have leaked it to me.

But no one did. And so, when that helicopter shot swooped in on the park, and Doug (Ben Affleck) and Jem (Jeremy Renner) case the joint from one of Fenway's most elevated perches, during a game against the Toronto Blue Jays, I was hit with a rush of exhilaration.

I don't have any other point than to say that it's just nice to recognize moments when good secrets remain secrets in the movies. Especially when the secrets seem so unlikely to stay secret. Not only has this movie been out a month, and not only do I know a lot of people who have already seen it, but it also has to do with my favorite sports team, the Red Sox. The team who, because of a wonderful moment exactly six years ago today, in which they finished the unprecedented comeback from three games down to beat the New York Yankees in the ALCS, proceeding to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, has allowed me the luxury to not know every little detail about them, and therefore, to be surprised by this scene in The Town.

And how do I know it was exactly six years ago? Because today is my birthday, and six years ago, they gave me the best birthday present a fan could ever ask for.

It's the same birthday present I'm hoping to get today, when the Texas Rangers play these Yankees with a chance to move on to the World Series themselves. (See, it's almost as fun to root against the Yankees as it is to root for the Red Sox.) Texas had never won a playoff series in its 50-year history until last week, so winning the World Series this year would be aces in the book of a sports socialist like me. Let those Dallas-area fans, conservative though they may be, whoop it up a little bit. Especially if it's at the expense of the hated Yankees.

Besides, the Rangers also wear red. So if I squint, I can pretend it's my team out there, giving the Yankees the whupping they so richly deserve.

That's a sentiment with which The Town's director, Ben Affleck, who's making a quick ascent in the directorial ranks, can sympathize.

Mr. 3000

Stan Ross, the fictional retired baseball player played by Bernie Mac in Mr. 3000, is famous for having collected exactly 3,000 hits in his major league career.

I'm not as well known as his character is supposed to be, but I'm now locally "famous" for a different reason -- I have seen exactly 3,000 movies.

That's right, I pulled that gimmick. I saved Mr. 3000 as the 3,000th movie I've ever seen, a milestone I reached last night.

Like it should be to collect 3,000 hits in a major league career -- only 27 major leaguers have ever done it -- it was a struggle for me to notch my 3,000th movie. I paused it several times to take short naps during the third act, not because the movie was bad (I actually quite liked it), but because it was after 11 p.m., and I start work at 7 a.m. every day.

But I did it. And I stand proud before you this morning.

The parallel with major league baseball extends further. Pete Rose, the all-time hits leader, was just about a month past his 37th birthday when he collected his 3,000th hit. Me, I'm about five months shy of my 37th. Granted, Rose was collecting his hits in a much more condensed period of time than I was watching my movies. But it also didn't take him two hours to collect a hit -- in fact, he might collect three hits in two hours.

It seems like only yesterday that I was planning out which movie would be my 2,000th. In fact, it was September 16, 2005, nearly five years ago. At the time, the movie I was most embarrassed about never having seen was Casablanca. So I chose Casablanca as my 2,000th movie. (And am ashamed to say I didn't see what all the fuss was about. How can I call myself a real film fan?)

The fact that I have now reached 3,000, less than five years later, means that I've been averaging more than 200 movies a year in the time in between. My 1,000th movie? I think it was Payback, starring Mel Gibson. Needless to say, I just let that one happen organically.

Three thousand movies may not seem like a lot to you, especially if you are also a film blogger, and you watch as many movies as I do. But consider this: If you say the average movie has a running time of 1 hour and 42 minutes (a guesstimate that comes from nowhere), that means I've spent 30,600 minutes watching movies. Divide that by 60 and you get 5100 hours. Divide that by 24 and you get 212.5 days. That's right, nearly two-thirds of a year of my life spent watching movies. (Okay, it's closer to 58% of a year, if I'm being all specific with my numbers.) And that's counting all the movies I've seen only one time. You might throw in an extra week or two for second, third, fourth and 12th viewings of my favorite movies.

A couple other stats that may interest you, but probably only interest me: Of those 3,000 movies, I gave 1,946 a thumbs up and 1,054 a thumbs down. I also saw 2,070 for the first time on video, and 930 for the first time in the theater.

How do I even know this was number 3,000?

That's a different story. Since the early 1990s, when I must have been in the 300-400 range of total movies seen, I've been keeping a running list of all the movies I've ever seen. In the years since then, I've had plenty of time to add titles I may have missed, and adjust the totals accordingly. So the current list is as accurate as it can be.

But that doesn't mean it's 100% accurate, and in fact, what films I've included on the list -- or excluded -- are purely a function of my own definition of what constitutes a movie. Some of the movies that I added way back when, I wouldn't have added today, but they're grandfathered in as a a permanent part of the list. As just one example, I include Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou on my list, even though it's only 20 minutes long, significantly under feature length. Would I include it today? I don't know.

In Mr. 3000, Mac's Stan Ross retired with exactly 3,000 hits -- in the middle of a pennant race, no less. So when a computational error in the statistics turns up nine years after he retired, meaning he was given credit for three hits he never actually got, Ross chooses to come out of retirement at age 47, to strap 'em on again and try to prove he can get three more hits.

I'm never going to be subjected to the film equivalent. Even if I did include some movies I wouldn't have included today, and even if I did forget to add some over the years, and even if I did make an adding mistake somewhere along the way, Mr. 3000 will stay in the record books as my 3,000th movie. Even if it was actually my 2,997th or my 3,004th.

And I can certainly live with that.

What will number 4,000 be? Stay tuned ...

A controversial viewing

I'm a Red Sox fan. And so it was with great difficulty that I finally watched The Pride of the Yankees yesterday afternoon.

It had been on our DVR since July 5th. That's when MLB Network played the film in order to honor the 70th anniversary of Lou Gehrig's "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech, which he gave upon his retirement from baseball. He was forced to retire in order to fight -- well, to fight Lou Gehrig's Disease, which killed him only two years later. I don't believe they called it that at the time.

Sam Wood's 1942 feature is not really about the Yankees, per se. It's about this man in particular (played by Gary Cooper), and it's an interesting snapshot of baseball in the 1930s, not that they concentrated very seriously on this aspect of the film. One thing I didn't know before watching was that Babe Ruth appears as himself in the film.

But there was something peculiar about watching it, and not just because my eyes were continually drawn to the scrolling baseball scores along the bottom of the screen. I have such a habit of looking for updates in this fashion, my mind didn't grasp the fact that the statistics were two months old. It's kind of like when you have a light bulb out, yet you still keep flipping the switch out of instinct the next 20 times you enter the room.

No, it was peculiar just to be watching a movie called The Pride of the Yankees. It took some amount of physical effort for me to finally do it. It's that same peculiarity a North Carolina fan would feel watching a movie called Duke! Duke! Go Duke! You just can't get behind the idea of having "pride" in your sports world enemy, even though, according to the grammar of the title, it's actually their own pride in their own guy, not our pride in them.

My Red Sox have actually had a leg up on the Yankees the last couple years. The rivalry that burns so intensely has favored the guys from Boston ever since 2004, when the Red Sox turned the tables on the Yankees in the playoffs, stormed to an unprecedented comeback, and won the franchise's first World Series since 1918. The Red Sox won again in 2007, while the Yankees haven't made it out of the first round of the playoffs in their last three appearances, and didn't make the playoffs at all last year.

But this year, things are coming up Yankee again. The team currently holds an 8 1/2 game lead in the standings over the Red Sox, looking to win its first division title since 2006. And while the Red Sox are still positioned to make the playoffs as things stand now, they're being hotly pursued by the Texas Rangers for the wild card spot. It's certainly conceivable that the Yankees could win their first World Series since 2000, and the Red Sox could watch the entire playoffs from home.

So I figured, I better watch The Pride of the Yankees now, before the decision to do so becomes that much more burdensome.

So what did I think? Well, it was made in 1942, which makes it a bit hokey. See some of my previous discussions about adjusting your expectations for films made in such a different era from the one we live in. You kind of have to give it a thumbs up, even if you weren't technically enthralled by it, and gave in to the powerful impulse to nap somewhere in the middle.

And even though I thought Gary Cooper's performance was a bit broad at times, he did make it clear that Lou Gehrig was indeed an incredible athlete, gentleman, and ambassador for his sport. More than being the pride of the Yankees, he was really the pride of baseball. I'd even say the pride of America, if it didn't sound goofy and jingoistic.

And heck, he was the pride of the Yankees too. As it so happens, on the very day I watched the movie, Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter eclipsed Gehrig's record for most hits as a Yankee. A record that had stood, as mentioned above, for 70 years. Seventy years of talented baseball players who wore the Yankee uniform.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the movie never ripped on the Red Sox, or their fans.

Thank heavens for small favors.

Baseball vs. movies

It's baseball's opening day. This is a wonderful thing.

But it does mean that my movie watching, which has taken a noticeable dip from "frequent" to "infrequent" in the month since I moved, is about to take another dip.

I most frequently watch movies socially, with my wife or with friends, on a weekend night or occasional weeknight. But to keep up with my ambitious viewing schedule, I've got to fit them in at other times, and my next most likely time slot is the afternoon, after I get home from work. Three days a week, I can be back to my house by about 4:20-4:25, and since my wife usually works until 7:30 or later, that gives me plenty of time to tick a flick off my list.

Well, not anymore. Now that time is devoted to baseball. If it's not on TV, I'm happy enough to follow it online. And with the arrival of the MLB Network -- which as far as I can tell is free, and plans to show plenty of games -- there'll be more televised baseball to appreciate than ever before.

Bye bye, movies.

It's a sickness born of playing fantasy baseball. Since the two championships won by the Red Sox this decade have lessened some of my rooting intensity for my home team, my two different fantasy baseball leagues, one of which I run, are happy to fill that void. And especially at the beginning, when the mere return of the sport makes a fan like me giddy, and anything is possible, I'll just sit there online, messing around on facebook, and waiting to see when my next hitter is coming up to bat.

It's an enjoyable sickness, but it's a sickness for sure.

Of course, movies will not totally fall by the wayside. I'm just too passionate about them for that to happen. But my greatest dueling passion is now upon us, and will be for the next six months. Lord help me.

Here's what'll really happen. I'll still watch movies in the afternoons, only slightly less often than I do the rest of the year. But I'll watch them with my laptop on my lap, or not far away. And I'll pause the movie 17 times for little check-ins on the day's baseball happenings. So a 90-minute movie will take the full three-plus hours from when I get home, to when my wife calls it a day, and would like to kick back with some TV watching of her own, which usually does not involve either baseball or the movie I'm half-heartedly plodding through.

How thoroughly are you really absorbing a movie if you pause it 17 times and have one eye on a computer simulation of a baseball game? Not very thoroughly. Fortunately for me, a lot of the movies I tick off my list during these afternoon windows are movies a person doesn't need to watch very thoroughly to review. Just don't tell anyone, okay?

It does trouble me a little, but today I won't worry about it. At least for today, the first day of the baseball season, I will bask in the ceremonial start of spring, and in the return of my second great non-human love.