Dances With Baseball

Dave Paisley

Well, the season is settling down nicely as the Royals succumb to reality in the shape of a sweep at the hands of the Yanks. Elsewhere, the Mariners appear to have found their hitting shoes in Skydome, where they ran up football scores on the hapless Blue Jays three days in a row. But that's not what I want to talk about right now, as much fun as it might be.

While perusing the fare at my local video store I discovered that Kevin Costner's latest baseball movie, For Love of the Game, had made it to the rental market. I didn't bother to see the movie in theaters, partly because I see so few there anyway, but also because it appeared to be something like a cross between The Natural and You've Got Mail, with the emphasis on the latter.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind either of those movies, but the combination seemed to be to be the worst of both worlds. At the time it must have appeared to be a surefire winner, the perfect date movie. Baseball for him, sappy love story for her.

For Love of the Game rounds out a trifecta of Costner baseball movies, following 1988's Bull Durham and 1989's Field of Dreams. I've always liked Bull Durham better, mostly because the "love story" doesn't impede the baseball action too much, and it's just not too sweet anyway. Field of Dreams got a little too carried away with the mystical part a bit too much. I do believe, though, that we can credit the movie with starting the onslaught of modern baseball parks.

First it started with "If you build it, he will come," referring of course to a baseball field in an Iowa cornfield and Shoeless Joe. That slogan was quickly picked up by MLB teams and became "If you build it, they will come," referring of course to flashy new ballparks and high-paying customers. Before long, that had been twisted to "If they pay for it, we will build it," and so to the final rendition: "If they pay for it, we will make loads of money." I think you can figure out who the "they" and the "we" are in those two scenarios.

But I digress. What of For Love of the Game? Costner plays 40-year-old pitching ace Billy Chapman, a 19-year veteran of the Tigers organization. Overall, from my impressions of the movie, I'd peg his career as most like Roger Clemens -- brilliant early on and still very good after that with flashes of brilliance. Billy is a single guy, with no apparent marital history, with a girl in pretty much every baseball port.

It's the end of the season (1999 presumably), the Tigers are out of it (as usual), and they finish up against the Yankees in New York, who are in a heated battle with the Red Sox for the division title. Chapman gets a couple of curves thrown his way the night before he is to pitch in the first game of the series.

First, his girl in New York, an on-again, off-again flame, stands him up. Then the Tigers owner tells him he's selling the club, and that the new owners want to trade Chapman to the Giants. This causes him to brood over retiring, something he apparently hadn't seriously considered up to now (and just how realistic is that?).

Now, the makers of the movie go to great lengths to tell you how much time they spent getting the baseball right in this movie. But in the first five minutes they blow their credibility by making a 19-year veteran, all with one club, a victim of an unwanted trade. Didn't any of their vaunted baseball advisors tell them about the 10/5 rule?

What's worse is that there are realistic ways to use the situation to induce that impending retirement feeling. Let's say his contract was up at the end of the season, and that the current management had been negotiating a one- or two-year extension to keep him in the game. The new owners, however, just want to cut him loose. What could be simpler, more realistic, and just as effective in signaling the end of Chapman's career? I only make a big deal of it because it bugged me through the entire movie, and it might well do the same to you.

Anyway, for the first time, Chapman is contemplating life without baseball as he takes the mound for what appears to be his final game. Of course, even by the time we've got this far, there have been numerous flashbacks to how he met the New York girlfriend. The movie plods along from there, with two-minute slices of baseball slipped in between enormous chunks of ponderous love story.

Of course, as the game progresses, we get the feeling that this game will somehow be special (it is a movie, after all) . Sure enough, as Vin Scully, Steve Lyons and the FOX TV network bring us the game, they make sure to tell us all about perfect games and how rare they are. We also get to see Billy wince as his various arm aches and pains develop through the game. We get to see the scar on his hand, followed closely by a flashback to the little accident where Mr. Hand met Mr. Table Saw up close and personal.

I have to admit the baseball game itself was nicely set up and filmed, fairly realistically for the most part. Chapman's arch-enemy, the Yankees number-three hitter, Sam Tuttle, is even a veteran whiner and complainer, just like the real one. We see him bitching about called strikes, just like the real thing.

Overall, it wasn't a bad movie, it just wasn't a really good one. In the classical film rating system, I'd give it two-and-a-half stars, well behind Bull Durham and a shade behind Field of Dreams. Well worth a $3 rental if you have a free evening and the only other movie left in Blockbuster is Brokedown Palace.

One final note: Costner even threw all his own pitches, numbering hundreds over the twelve days the baseball game was filmed. Apparently he threw well, with a good fastball and curveball, topping out in the seventies, and was able to crank it up into the eighties after filming was over. Just don't be surprised if his arm falls off sometime soon...

about the author

Dave Paisley played the part of the little boy in the Mickey Mantle/Roger Maris pic, Safe at Home. Ask what it was like working with a director who would never work again at drdjp@strikethree.com.