For Love of the Game: The Costner Baseball Movie Trilogy

Just a quick celebration. In 1999 the Tigers beat the Yankees in this fine movie, yesterday they swept them for real in the ACLS!!!

Kevin Costner has made three fine baseball movies. The movies create an accidental but powerful arc covering baseball’s myths and narratives. The trilogy also reinforces a basic truth about the power and limits of sport as a way of life. The collective movies are not only enjoyable—especially Field of Dreams and Bull Durham—but they create a counter-narrative about the personal lived reality of a professional athlete. The movies’ dissection of how a professional athlete’s love of sport threatens their capacity for intimate connection and humanity.

For Love of the Game joins an aging pitching star Billy Chapel in the autumn of his career. The aging vet has just learned that his team, the Detroit Tigers, will be sold, and part of the deal includes his being traded to San Francisco. Billy does not satisfy a cost/benefit analysis for the new owners. Billy has spent his entire career and earned his fame and fortune in Detroit. The night before Billy also learn that his estranged girlfriend Jane Aubrey played by Kelly Preston will not reconcile. Recalling an earlier point she made, “You're perfect. You, and the ball, and the diamond, you're this perfectly beautiful thing…You don't need me.”

The next morning dejected and hung over Chapel heads for the ballpark to pitch and must decide about the trade before the game is over. The movie braids his nine innings with his troubled relationship with Jane. The movie unfolds one inning at a time playing in a raucous and hostile Yankee Stadium building to an improbably perfect game opportunity as the scuffed and awkward story of Billy’s adult personal life plaits between innings.

The movie moves slowly. It possesses neither the self-conscious mythologizing of Field of Dreams not the iconoclasm or humor of Bull Durham. Its stately progression led some reviewers to find it boring, and it remains the least favorite of the trilogy. I believe it is undervalued and feels true to baseball and the themes of the first two movies.

The first them unfolds touching  on the the harsh reality and discipline of an aging athlete, an aging star  facing mortality. In one conceit Costner starts each pitch with a mental imperative “clear the mechanism." When he does this the jeering Yankee fans (is there any other kind?), the scoreboard, even his own teammates recede, and he channels his presence and skill. The moment captures the experience athletes or any high achieving professional recount when they arrive at “flow.” Their practice, focus and situational awareness allow them to deploy their skills where the conscious and unconscious blend into a smooth inner consistency and quality. When it fails him in the movie, we know that he has reached his own limits.

The second theme unfolds in the awkward, tenuous and sometimes touching relationship between Billy and a cautious and burned single mother Jane Aubrey and her daughter Jena Malone as Heather. They meet when Billy saves her from a flat tire and ends up taking her to a baseball game against her will.

She points out, “I need a regular guy, not the guy in the Old Spice commercial.” Missing her irony and metaphor completely, Billy reminds her he was in the Right Guard commercial. Jane usually feels like a fish out of water being with a star athlete of a game she knows nothing about among wives and groupies she shares little with. Yet Costner and she stumble into a kind of intimacy and mutual joy. Costner passes the test so many men fail when they meet single moms. He actually enjoys the “family” feeling and likes being a clumsy, almost, sometimes dad.

Chapel grows to enjoy their world together. But both sides remain so wounded and protected that they agree to a “man’s deal” where they can see other people. Of course Jane does not see anyone else, but Costner reminding us of the man-child (a grown up Nuke LaLoosh from Bull Durham?) lurking in so many athletes sleeps with his masseuse. “What about the deal!” he asks when Jane surprises him only to be be shocked by seeing a scrambling nubile half dressed masseuse.

Jane wants more from the relationships, more than Billy has given to anything except baseball. When she asks him “have you ever had your heart broken?” “Yeah, he replies, “when we lost the pennant in ‘87.” She comes to believe he can never commit to love because he is perfect with his ball and game. Perfect on the perfect baseball diamond so enshrined in Field of Dreams. Billy resembles many athletes and high performing professionals. They feel so in command and at home in their professional world that this lures them into a belief in its own moral and emotional self-sufficiency.

The movie’s turning point occurs when Billy badly cuts his hand and is told by doctors and the team he is finished. His entire career is in jeopardy. He dreads the loss purpose and withdraws from the relationship to focus obsessively on rehabilitation.

Jane realizes that his identity and love lie with the game, not with her. Losing the game shatters his sense of worth and willingness to love. The love of the game undermines his love of her.

His terror at the loss lies not just in its threat to his self-worth but it reminds him that a professional athlete remains a depreciating asset and no more despite the headlines and hero worship. As long as his skill returns a reasonable benefit for its cost, he will be retained. Bull Durham and Love of the Game, however, make clear, every player lives pursued by younger, hotter and better players seeking to take his place. Every athlete is replaceable.

Billy’s friend and mentor, the old owner of the Tigers, sees the trade to the Giants as a chance to leave with dignity. Billy can retire before the trade occurs at the end of the game. The owner does not want Billy traded and devalued into a painful eclipse that so many fading stars experience. At the end Billy takes the owners advice after reflecting on his life and writes on a baseball that he is leaving "for love of the game."

The three movies unite in their insistence upon the priority of humanity to the allure of sport.

At the end of Field of Dreams, Moonbeam Graham achieves his dream of playing with the greatest players of his time. He loves and glories in it, but when a little girl’s life is threatened by choking on a hot dog, he steps back across the line to rejoin his life as a country doctor. He saves the girl and looks back at his moment with the players with satisfaction but not regret. In Bull Durham Crash Davis plays out his minor league career and sets the minor league home run record. He ends his playing career to begin as a coach. But he returns to Annie where two shopworn but authentic people try to create a life together.

Billy Chapel pitches a perfect game to cap his career. Jane has seen it while waiting for a delayed flight at the airport. He beats the New York Yankees. The game makes clear as all “perfect” games do how critical his teammates are to the achievement. He achieves the pinnacle and at this moment retires.For an ancient Greek this would be the moment to die, at the perfect peak, the moment from which his career can only be downhill. But alone at night, alone at night in his luxurious hotel suite, he cries. He meets Jane at the airport before she leaves and reveals the key truth any professional athlete faces when they sacrifice their personal life for their professional life,

I believe that if you give something your all it doesn't matter if you win or lose, as long as you've risked everything put everything out there…I did it my entire life. I did it with the game. But I never did it with you, I never gave you that….well last night should've been the biggest night of my life, and it wasn't. It wasn't because you weren't there.

Baseball, achievement, sport, profession, even perfection in all its cold beauty cannot maintain intimacy, connection or purpose. The magnificence of achievement and a perfect moment linger but a second. For Love of the Game completes the theme of Field of Dreams and Bull Durham. Sports can be a great and hard profession, even a way of life, but in the end, athletics will not complete a person’s humanity.

The trilogy insists that sports, even baseball, remains a game, just a game. While sport, like all professions, tempts people to confuse it with life, life involves more and wise people learn this.

Bull Durham—the Costner Baseball Movie Trilogy

Well the baseball season has reached the 30.9% mark. Interleague play has begun and the Mariners are on their way to another 90 game loss season. I thought I would celebrate by reminding myself of another great baseball movie and the middle movie of the Costner baseball trilogy—Bull Durham.

Baseball is a discipline of failure. The greatest hitters fail two-thirds of the time, and the greatest pitchers fail to throw strikes half the time. Succeeding in a world saturated by failure takes self-mastery and resilience. The protagonist Crash Davis of Bull Durham, one of my absolute favorite moves, embodies the stoic dignity of failure.

Kevin Costner as Crash Davis, a little thicker, still carries his lanky handsome athletic build and grace (he actually hit two home runs in the making of the movie) plays a professional minor league player. Crash has earned his skill as an accomplished catcher and manager of pitchers who could not quite master major league hitting. He’s grizzled, cynical, self-educated and droll. Unlike the Costner character in Field of Dreams, but similar to his character in For Love of the Game, Crash lives alone with baseball as his path and profession. He has been known to “howl at the moon.”

Crash lives in the shadows of the glory of the major leagues in the grubby perpetual minors. Annie (Susan Sarandan), the movie’s narrator and muse, upholds upholds baseball’s mythical status. As part time community college lecturer in Durham, she introduces the movie with a reminder, “I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. …I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball...You see, there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring…It's a long season and you gotta trust it. I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.”

At this Triple A graveyard for perpetual veterans and launch pad for hotshots, Annie picks one player each year to initiate into the church through reading poetry and love-making. In Bull Durham she has adopted to mother and play with Eby Calvin LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) an immensely talented fire-balling air-head with the focus of an amoeba.

Crash Davis is approaching the end of his baseball career having once been blessed 21 wondrous days in the show, the Major Leagues.  By a fluke of longevity and talent he needs only 1 home run to achieve the minor league record of 247 home runs. The Durham Bulls bought his AAA contract to tutor the incredibly talented picture and Annie’s protégé “Nuke” LaLoosh. Nuke has just pitched a game in which he walked 18, hit, stuck out 18 as well as hitting the sportscaster, public address announcer and the mascot bull—he has “serious shit.” More to the point Crash announces he has “a million dollar arm with a five cent head.”

As the “player to be named later,” Crash enters just as the manager of the Bulls tells a young player “the organization has decided to make a change,” and a very young player’s dreams end. The movie highlights how genuinely young all the players are and how many will fall by the wayside trying to gain the holy grail, the Bigs, the Show, the Majors.

The cold ruthless culling of all elite sports looms in the background just as the incredibly fine difference between making it and failing. Yet the players are playing a game that flows from joy, fun and intense competitiveness. A desperate player points out it beats selling appliances at Sears. Crash recognizes the man-child in them all. He can still sneak out with the very young players one night to flood the field, slide in the mud and create a rain day. When the manager complains that the team is not paying attention, Crash reminds him, “they’re kids, scare’em.”

The manager follows his advice with one of the greatest explanations of sport in movie history. Throwing bats on the floor in the shower and cowering the team in the shower stall, the manager screams,

“it’s a simple game, you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball .”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is baseball, pure and clean. I mean how hard can it be hit a rotating 2.78 inches ball at 97 mph with a 2.75 inch piece of ash?

You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.

The movie reminds us that at the core of sport is simple, based upon natural human actions. Yet like great baroque music, these singular themes permit infinite variations that demand high skill from players and induces joy and satisfaction in the spectators.

Crash reluctantly becomes big brother to the young players. With Nuke, Crash has to break Nuke of the habit of relying on talent with no discipline and teach him how to learn. In one memorable incident, Nuke repeatedly shakes off his catcher to throw his “heater.” Crash smiles and lets Nuke throw, of course Crash tells the batter what is coming and the batter hits it a mile, a country mile. Crash gloats over how far the home run travelled and alerts Nuke that Crash let the hitter know to prove to Nuke who is boss. Nuke will have to relearn the lesson constantly.

Despite his callow flakiness, Nuke does not have a bad heart but is spoiled by a world that has value his talent and never asked that he grow up or mature. When Nuke tells Crash “you don’t like me.” And Crash lays out a professional’s credo, “Because you don't respect yourself, which is your problem. But you don't respect the game, and that's my problem. You got a gift….When you were a baby, the Gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt. You got a Hall-of-Fame arm, but you're pissing it away.”

Slowly, with pain and wit, Nuke learns these lessons, sort of. He even learns Crash’s famous critique of strike-outs and defense of off speed pitches, “Relax, all right? Don't try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls - it's more democratic.”

The slow comic arc of learning to grow up and take a child’s game seriously is held together by a fun and sexy romance. The movies draws us into the world of aspiring dreams and uneven talent. Not everyone we meet will make the major leagues, in face most will fail. Crash and the movie teach about about resilience and about failure while reminding us, like Field of Dreams, that beneath the game lies the reality and importance of love.

Costner provides a tired lonely dignity to a man who has found his path. He purused it with passion, skill and dignity only to just miss. He scored a “cup of coffee” in the majors and remembers it as a shining moment he can share with the rookies whom will never see the promised land,  “yeah, I was in the show. I was in the show for 21 days once - the 21 greatest days of my life. You know, you never handle your luggage in the show, somebody else carries your bags. It was great. You hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains.”

The movie reminds us that desire, effort and practice are NOT enough. A player needs a gift, a talent from the gods. Even that is not enough, you need the talent and the discipline and respect to make it all come together. This becomes the lesson that Crash must hand on to Nuke. In the end Nuke does get called up with his gift and the seeds of maturity that Crash has planted, he may have a chance.

At the end the depth of Costner’s own loss and failure are revealed. After Nuke’s call up, Crash ends up at a bar—alone, drinking, ruing his loss. Nuke comes by to thank him, and Costner explodes in fury at the merciless statistical cruelty of baseball. His monologue spits out that the difference between 250 and 300 is 25 hits. 25 dying quails, flares. 25 hits that’s all kept him from the promised land, and he can only stare with awe and anger at the world Nuke will enter with his gift, a world Nuke neither understands or appreciates.

Throughout the movie the triangle among Nuke, Annie and Crash has unfolded with Annie and Crash realizing they belong together in a relation of mature equals, but they can’t act on it during the season to protect Nuke's own fragile ego and burgeoning success.

In the end Crash experiences what we saw at the beginning, “management has decided to make a change,” his manager tells him as he is released. But the manager also tells Crash that he will recommend Crash to be a coach next season, a perfect fit for Crash and baseball. Crash leaves, picks up with the Ashville Tourists and breaks the record, only Annie notices. The movie ends with Crash returning to Annie to begin a real relationship with a woman he can love.

The movie accepts the mythical sense of baseball’s uniqueness and inner joy but does not fall in bloated allegory like The Natural or reverence like The Lou Gehrig Story. Instead it weaves the joy and beauty of the game with the flawed, loopy and intense folks who inhabit its reality. Crash Davis learns and so does Annie that baseball can sustain you but it cannot fulfill you. 

Crash still loves the game and respects its incredible difficulty. He can hand this wisdom on to the next generation and others have seen this. His manager recommends him for a coaching job even as he must cut him. But baseball will be woven into the texture of his life, not be his life, as he move sin with Annie.

As Annie reminds us, “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job.”

Field of Dreams: the Costner Baseball Movie Trilogy

The Mariner's begin their home season today! They have been on the road for a month if you count back to their opening in Japan. To celebrate the beginning of baseball I would like to meditate upon how we think about baseball as reflected in our national narratives in the movies. Over a couple of entries I will talk about the Kevin Costner baseball movie trilogy--—Field of Dreams, Bull Durham and For Love of the Game.

Costner moves like an athlete. His lanky and lean body moves with grace and surety. As he ages, he thickens and feels more careworn, but careful, but still fluid and competent. He was made for baseball movies, and his presence gives credibility to athlete roles that often actors cannot carry off. He embodies a type of laconic, flawed authenticity that lies at the core of so many American dreams.

Many fans regard Field of Dreams as one of the greatest baseball movies. It’s based upon a fine book called Joeless Joe by W. P.  Kinsella, and the struggles of the movie center upon a vaguely disillusioned and failing farmer living in Iowa with his wife and child trying, not very well, to make her old family farm work.

Costner does not even play a baseball player. The myth of baseball drives the movie, not baseball itself. In the movie a Platonic form of baseball lies just beyond an almost Celtic permeable boundary between planes of existence. Anyone who has experienced the beauty and joy of gazing upon a baseball diamond knows how the space and rhythm of baseball places us one remove from life. A rip in the fabric of space-time permits great baseball players of the past to sneak through to play in a farm field in Iowa. Some like Joeless Joe Jackson emerge from the cornfield for redemption; many others come to play the game.

Costner’s farmis  going broke but he barely seems to notice. His own alienation and the loss of his father haunt him. He remembers his father as broken and sad but who once played as a minor league player. Costner’s character Ray Kinsella rememberers refusing to play catch with his father in pique and rejection and bitterly regrets the action. He seems so preoccupied with his own pain he barely recognizes the pain he is inflicting upon his loving family.

A Voice, yes, a voice, calls him to “build it and they will come.” Later the voice calls him to “ease his pain.” This begins an odyssey where Kinsella over the violent objections of his practical brother-in-law and despite the deep misgivings of his wife risks his family and livelihood to plow up acres of superb Iowa farmland to build a baseball field. The players do arrive, although they will not let Ty Cobb play because everyone hates him. Yet only Ray and his daughter and wife can see them play.

Called to “ease his pain,” Ray  heads on a road trip and kidnaps a J.D. Salinger like novelist Terence Mann, played by James Earl Jones to bring him to Iowa. Mann vehemently denies ever writing or caring about baseball until he truly sees the players in the Iowa field and admits it. The road trip ends by picking up Moonbeam Graham a young player who had only one at bat and ended as a beloved country doctor. Moonbeam later crosses the boundary and returns to his youth to play with the major leaguers he worshiped.

Ray answers the voices and creates a space for baseball players to play amid the Iowa sun, but his farm careens towards foreclosure. His loyal and loving wife has reached her limits with him and is about to see her farm destroyed. His daughter barely understands the tensions in the family and wonders at his absence even when he is physically present. Ray's dreams that baseball will redeem him are destroying his real life, and his brother gloats as he gets ready to take over the farm. 

Ray builds the Field Of Dreams, and they do come. Into that dream space of Platonic truth, players arrive for play and redemption; the novelist arrives to be reminded of his own passion and abandon his seclusion; and Moonlight Graham gets to bat in the big leagues.

In a central moment for the film and American memory, the farm will be saved because Ray built it and people will come from miles away to be there. Terence Mann’s monologue sums up the mythical role of baseball:  

Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person.….And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.

 

The movie portrays baseball as a medium of identity and renewal for people. The combination of individual achievement and integrated teamwork capture an abiding American narrative. The movie highlights how powerfully we Americans link identity and history through sports. Ray Kinsella, Terence Mann and Doc Graham find meaning through baseball that eludes them in other aspects of their life. For many American fans, it matters not the sport, loyalty to team and following the team’s triumphs and failures moors identity and meaning in their lives in powerful and scary ways.

The Costner trilogy, however, insists that sports cannot provide the deepest meaning and importance of life. Baseball brings us together, but the critical decisions involve relations with others. Mann enters the Platonic dimension to rediscover wonder; Doc Graham again leaves baseball to save a human being, but in the end Ray makes the deepest discovery.

He risks his farm, his future and thoughtlessly his wife and daughter for a dream, a dream for him to come and to ease his pain.While reality falls apart and while others find renewal in baseball, Ray discovers his young father playing with the dead guys. He introduces himself, and his father asks, “Is this heaven?”

Ray answers, “No it’s Iowa.” He turns and looks at the house and sees Amy Madigan who plays his wife with his daughter and reconsiders, “maybe it is heaven.”

Ray discovers  sports and our relation to sports makes no sense to us unless it brings us back to the real ground of our humanity—family, friends, and love.

As his father walks back to the Platonic field, Ray hesitantly calls, “dad, would you like a catch?”

His dad replies, “yes I’d like that.”

Only baseball could reveal this insight. Only at baseball can people actually watch the game and talk, converse and deepen friendship. No other sport permits that amid their noise, violence and hurly-burly. 

The movie ends with an endless line of cars moving to the Field of Dreams while Ray and his father play the game of catch that has haunted Ray all these years.