Misunderstanding Greatness: Cobb

“The children of America need heroes.”

In a Santa Barbara bar aptly called The Sportsman’s Lounge, a group of sports scribes sits around a table drinking beers and debating greatness. The year is 1960, and according to the men at the table the best boxer of all time is Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Henry Armstrong, Harry Greb, or Rocky Marciano, the best male singer is Elvis Presley, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole and the best king is King Henry VIII, King James, King Tutt, King David or King Kong. They can’t agree on anything. Not until the leader of their pack, Al Stump, asks, “Who’s the greatest ballplayer of all time?” On this topic the answer is quick, emphatic and almost unanimous: “Ty Cobb!” “Ty Cobb!” “Ty Cobb!” “Ty Cobb!” The only holdout in the group is an obese man with unkempt hair who says sheepishly, “I like Ruth,” an admission that prompts the rest of the gang to recoil in unison. “RUTH!?!” they shout back with the kind of befuddled outrage that five decades later would be reserved for guys suggesting that the greatest Kardashian is Khloe. It’s as if there’s nothing to debate.

Passe Ball: The Bad News Bears

“You’re not supposed to have open liquor in the car. It’s against the law.”
“So is murder, Engleberg. Now put that back before you get me in real trouble.”

One of my favorite moments in AMC’s ongoing series Mad Men comes in the show’s first season when young Sally Draper walks into the kitchen covered head-to-knees in a plastic dry cleaning bag. Her mother recoils. “Sally Draper, come over here this minute,” she says, flicking ash from her cigarette. “If the clothes from that dry cleaning bag are on the floor of my closet, you’re going to be a very sorry young lady.” Needless to say, it isn’t the lecture we expect. And while Betty Draper’s selfish-centered comments hint that she’s never going to win Mother of the Year, the scene says even more about the era in which Mad Men is set – a time when kids did all sorts of dangerous things in the midst of adults who didn’t seem to realize how dangerous they were, or just didn’t care. The Bad News Bears, which is set more than a decade later, is similarly revealing about how times have changed, this time simply by reflecting the era in which it was made. Released in 1976, the movie is about a hard-drinking former professional ballplayer who becomes the manager of a lousy bunch of misfit Little Leaguers for an under-the-table paycheck, and while the movie is designed to make Morris Buttermaker the ultimate in irresponsible mentors, looking back on The Bad News Bears more than 35 years later it’s impossible to ignore just how well he blends into his surroundings.

Pickled: The Sandlot

“I thought you said 'The Great Bambi.'”

The Sandlot is about a kid who loves baseball before he knows a thing about it. Not how to throw. Not how to catch. Not even how to worship the game’s greatest player. One of the film’s earliest scenes and, much later, its major crisis point, are both based on the notion that skinny little Scotty Smalls (Tom Guiry) is the one person on the planet who has never heard of “The Great Bambino,” Babe Ruth. Scotty’s baseball ignorance gets him into trouble, but only temporarily, and when The Sandlot ends, with a scene that’s foreshadowed in the opening, Scotty is all grown up and working as the radio voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Presumably he knows all about Babe Ruth by that point, but apparently neither he nor the film’s writers have ever heard of Vin Scully, the Hall of Fame broadcaster who has been the voice of the Dodgers since 1950. Now 84, Scully hasn’t been the exclusive voice of the Dodgers in decades, so it isn’t entirely out of the question that Scotty could’ve gone on to call Dodgers games, but to a baseball fan Scotty’s adult occupation is all too perfect: the kid who grows up unaware of the greatest baseball player of all time goes on to unknowingly fill the shoes of the greatest baseball broadcaster of all time. Natch.

Past is Prologue: Eight Men Out

“What we shoulda done was waltz around for a few rounds, then one of us hit the canvas, and we split 25 bucks apiece later and nobody gets hurt.”

Few historical dramas are ever so specific about a subject as Eight Men Out. The movie’s original poster promotes the film as “The inside story of how the national pastime became a national scandal,” and indeed that’s exactly what Eight Men Out is, and not much more. Recounting the conspiracy, investigation and trial that made the 1919 Chicago White Sox go down in history as the Black Sox, Eight Men Out is less concerned with understanding why several White Sox players threw the World Series than with chronicling how it happened. Character development is scant. The movie suggests that legendary outfielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson is dim and illiterate, that owner Charles Comiskey is a selfish tightwad and that catcher Ray Schalk will stop at nothing to win – and those are the multidimensional characters. John Sayles, working from a book by Eliot Asinof, doesn’t dive into the minds and motives of these men perhaps because he doesn’t confuse them for protagonists in a Shakespeare tragedy. After all, when professional athletes stand to make far more money by failing than by succeeding, “To cheat or not to cheat?” isn’t much of a question.

Faith, Hope and Love: Bull Durham

“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.”

The opening three minutes of Bull Durham are a masterpiece of thematic development. The film begins with the sound of a female gospel singer and a montage of black-and-white photographs featuring baseball legends at their best: Pete Rose making a headfirst dive; Jackie Robinson stealing home; Babe Ruth soaking in the adoring cheers at Yankee Stadium. “I believe in the church of baseball,” a woman narrates, and with that the camera pulls back from a picture on the wall and takes a Rear Window-esque tour of her home, panning past several more baseball photos, some candles and a bed before finding the narrator herself, sitting in front of three mirrors, one of which has a baseball card tucked into its frame, fixing her hair and makeup. She is Annie Savoy, and her personal introduction includes mentions of Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Isadora Duncan, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Frank Robinson, Milt Pappas, sex, foreplay and light-hitting middle infielders with great gloves. It’s the kind of monologue that’s as revealing for its manner – scattered, worldly and cosmic – as its content, and by the time it ends, with Annie walking into the bright light of a minor league ballpark as organ music plays in the background, it’s hard to think of baseball as anything less than spiritual.