Baseball movies, damn it, BASEBALL MOVIES!

Also, I thought Crash's thing was that he GOT his cup of coffee, and spilled it all over himself.

i don't think i used the phrase 'coming of age' as it's intended and i'm really not sure about 'seminal' but oh well.

i will type for you the classic lines, when i recall them.

Field of Dreams is great, 'about baseball' or not.

The best scene in Bull Durham, without question, is the "DO YOU WANT ME TO CALL YOU A COCKSUCKER" scene.

The Bad News Bears is the best. Apart from the Kelly / Amanda deus ex machinas, which never would have happened in MY little league, it was about as true to life as any baseball movie I've ever seen. And funny and awesome and memorable too.

I've never read the book, but Eight Men Out was awesome.

"The Scout"
"The Fan"
"The Slugger's Wife"

"The Fan" deserves a very special place in cinema hell for this quadruple crown --- horrible performances by DeNiro, Snipes, Del Torro and SMASH YOU OVER THE SKULL direction from hackmeister Tony Scott.

"The Scout" almost gets a half star because Albert Brooks went on Letterman the day of release and claimed he promised a dying boy the film would be number 1 at the box office that weekend.

I guess the kid died.

you're right, i had a crush on her when i was 10, too.

was there REALLY a need to remake the king of comedy as a baseball movie?

you've got to hand it to jerry lewis, though...

Chickenshit Reagan-zeitgeist trashing of a good book.

There's a great sequence in Gregg Araki's new "Mysterious Skin" of teen hustler Joseph Gordon Levitt getting 'service' under the table while he does PA at the local smalltown Kansas beer league games. (And then there's the Little League pedophilia.)

A critic wants to destroy his play
his marriage is ending
and tonight...
His Team is One Game Away.

-> GAME 6

Starring Michael Keaton, Griffin Dunne, Ari Graynor,
Shalom Harlow, Bebe Neuwirth, Catherine O'Hara,
and Robert Downey, Jr.

Directed by Michael Hoffman

Written by Don DeLillo

Produced by Amy Robinson, Griffin Dunne,
Leslie Urdang, Christina Weiss Lurie.
Executive Producers: Michael Nozik,
David Skinner, Bryn Iler

http://moma.org/exhibitions/film_media/2006/Baseball.html

I HAVE seen Headin' Home with Ruth, albeit a crappy print.

http://www.thebasesareloaded.com

Oliver Platt as Steinbrenner
John Turturro (in latex ears) as Billy Martin
Daniel Sunjata (from Broadway's Take Me Out, and way too gorgeous for this role) as Reggie.

I won't paste the whole Times story, but Graig Nettles says Turturro as Martin is "scary."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/sports/baseball/26bronx.html

HARRISON FORD AS THURMAN MUNSON, I DEMAND IT

oh hell no -- Liz Smith via CSTB:

The life story of Dodgers’ manager Tommy Lasorda is reported on the “fast track for development” at Miramax. Al Pacino has “expressed interest” in playing the famously irascible Lasorda with Michelle Pfeiffer a “possibility” as his wife. Translation–don’t dress for the premiere. There’s many a slip twixt the “fast track” and the first day of shooting. Still and all, for the life of me I can’t imagine Al Pacino on a baseball field. But, that’s why they call it acting!

A Ballplayer Seeks a Hit, a Hit Film

By JOHN ANDERSON

WHEN Anna Boden stepped up to introduce her new movie, “Sugar,” to the opening-night crowd of the Dominican Republic Global Film Festival in November, she felt like a rookie reliever staring down at an All-Star lineup. “It was totally nerve racking,” she said. “I was introducing the film and looking out at these huge stars. Sammy Sosa. Pedro Martinez. Big Papi.”

“And the president of the country,” added Ryan Fleck, her co-writer and director.

But even the country’s president, Leonel Fernández, would defer to the star power of his island nation’s leading export: big-time baseball players. Since Ozzie Virgil joined the New York Giants in 1956, the Dominican Republic has provided the American major leagues with talent like the Hall of Famer Juan Marichal, the Alou brothers, Rico Carty, Manny Mota and present-day stars like the aforementioned David Ortiz (Big Papi) of the Boston Red Sox, Manny Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Robinson Canó of the New York Yankees and José Reyes of the New York Mets. Like the N.B.A. in urban centers across America, beisbol for Dominicans is seen as the quickest, most glamorous route out of poverty, which in the Dominican Republic is as hard to ignore as the Caribbean Sea.

A talented player, a genuine prospect, is burdened not just with his own future but also that of his entire family. That desperate desire to escape, against almost impossible odds, exposes him to cultural discombobulation and the seamier aspects of the business of baseball. The psychic dislocation that results for the vast majority of those strivers, those that don’t make it, is the focus of “Sugar.”

The choice of “Sugar,” which opens April 3, seems an odd one for Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden. Their previous film together, “Half Nelson,” which earned an Academy Award nomination for its star, Ryan Gosling, was about a drug-addicted New York City teacher. And Ms. Boden was only vaguely interested in baseball. (“My parents were basketball people,” she said.)

Though Mr. Fleck, who grew up in Oakland, Calif., remains an Athletics fan (and still watch games online), it wasn’t the sport that hooked them. It was discovering, after reading an article that referenced the Mets’ Dominican camp, that every major league team save the Milwaukee Brewers runs an academy in the country.

“We thought: ‘There are so many guys who go through this process every year. What happens to the guys who go through the process, and don’t make it?’ ” he said.

The stories informing “Sugar” initially came from places like Roberto Clemente Park in the Bronx, where players who have fallen short of the Dream still play a high level of amateur ball. Many of them, according to Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden, were very open about their “failures.” Others were not.

“A lot of young guys we talked to hadn’t really come to terms with it at all,” Mr. Fleck said. “They tell us, ‘I’m going to go for a tryout with the Yankees,’ you know, some kind of open tryout in Staten Island. They were still optimistic they were going to make it.”

All signs in “Sugar” say the hero is going to make it too. Played by the newcomer (and nonactor) Algenis Perez Soto, the talented Miguel Santos, nicknamed Sugar, survives the player mill of a Dominican baseball academy and is drafted by a professional team. As a result he’s sent to a minor-league team in Iowa, where the non-English-speaking Sugar is given a crash course in Middle American: the members of his host family are older, conservative baseball nuts; the granddaughter is born-again and tries to orchestrate Sugar’s religious conversion. The combination of a new world and a new level of competition disorients the once-grounded player.

Casting an unknown as Sugar “was pretty much a requirement of the role,” Mr. Fleck said. “How many 20-year-old Dominican baseball player-actors could we find?”

But they were out there, on the field.

“My brother told me about some auditions,” Mr. Perez Soto said during a visit to New York from Boston, where he now lives. “But I didn’t go to the casting, because there was a baseball game at the same time.” It was only after the casting call was over, and Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden came to the nearby field where Mr. Perez Soto was playing, that the young man was invited to audition.

“They asked me if I wanted to be an actor,” he said, “and I said yes, but only because I thought that’s what they wanted to hear. ‘Yeah, I want to be an actor.’ But no, not really.”

He has since changed his mind.

“Of course everyone in the Dominican Republic has a plan to come here, even if it’s just to see New York,” Mr. Perez Soto said. “I had a plan to come here, but it was supposed to be because of the baseball, you know? I thought I’d be signed by a team and come here to play, and become a star like the others, but it didn’t happen to me.”

By making the movie he did get to meet some of his idols, as well as the former pitcher José Rijo, who was a consultant on the film. And that connection brought the filmmakers a little closer to the problems bedeviling Dominican baseball than they would have liked.

Last month Mr. Rijo was fired from his job as a special assistant to Jim Bowden, the general manager of the Washington Nationals, amid a continuing federal investigation into whether scouts and executives took kickbacks from signing bonuses promised to Dominican players. Mr. Bowden resigned soon afterward, denying what he called false allegations by the press.

But the high-profile departures have spotlighted the unsavory practices of local talent brokers known as buscones, who sign players as young as 10. (Dominican players are not subject to the major league draft and can be signed by any team when they turn 16.) The brokers have been accused of feeding players steroids, altering players’ birth certificates to make them appear younger (and thus more attractive to teams) and grabbing an exorbitant share of signing bonuses.

In an early scene in “Sugar” one of Miguel’s teammates talks about his own deal, and with a sigh says his manager will be taking 40 percent.

“Thirty to 40 percent is pretty standard,” Mr. Fleck said. “Any industry where there’s a lot of money to be made and there are poor people involved, there’s going to be some exploitation on some level. But we really didn’t want to focus on that.”

Nor did they want to focus on drugs, principally steroids, the use of which is commonplace in the Dominican Republic. What the filmmakers were after was a new way of telling an age-old story, of hopes, dreams and what happens when life throws you a change-up. “I’ve been improving my English,” said Mr. Perez Soto. “I’ve been practicing and improving every day, because I want to be ready when this movie comes out. I want to be ready in case something else is coming.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

no one else seen Sugar?

Seeing it tonight.

Meantime, Vinegar Syndrome just announced this:

https://vinegarsyndrome.com/collections/frontpage/products/bang-the-drum-slowly

Hearing about this for the first time today. Cast includes Bill Lee and Frederick Wiseman; that is truly bizarre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eephus

https://i.imgur.com/3y4dbss.jpeg

Two episodes into The Clubhouse: A Year with the Red Sox. Still amazed that the Red Sox got two Netflix series within a year or so.

I'm enjoying it, although not as much as gyac (why I'm posting here)--I just don't have any special interest in the Red Sox. And that’s been on my mind as I watch, the question of "why this team?" If I could pick any team from 2024 for this kind of series, I'd probably look to the extremes: 1) the hated Dodgers, whose season encompassed the Ohtani signing, the gambling scandal, the 50/50 season, and then winning the World Series; or 2) the White Sox or Athletics, who had all sorts of negative drama.

Anyway, addressing the series that is...The trials of Casas and Duran and Bello have been documented closely thus far, and I’m learning stuff. I always picture starters sitting stoically on the bench between innings, whether they’re pitching well or not; Bello disappears into a special room that seems to be meant for cursing and throwing stuff. The sequence where Cora had to send down a bunch of guys just before the season began was funny: first words out of his mouth every time was “We’re making moves.” Some of the first episode, the segment on Red Sox lore, overlapped with The Comeback. When Casas is doing yoga or philosophizing poetically, he reminded me of Steve Hovely from Ball Four.

So we’ll see where it goes. I did check BRef for a reminder of how the season finished: 81-81.

lol. Context for choice of team was that MLB offered it to numerous teams, Red Sox said yes some years back, blah blah blah legal stuff, it was lined up for 2024. Of course the actual baseball for this season was secondary - though there are some great baseball moments, and not just Sox, and the filming of certain events is really great looking - it’s about the people who play the game and I think that’s more apparent as the show winds on. I found myself thinking at a couple of times “I’d love to know more about what was going on here.” A point to note is that the featured players are largely those comfortable with it - older players or those with families mainly didn’t want to be involved to the same degree.

Great baseball moments in this series:

- every time Aaron Judge hits a home run or steps up to the plate, it’s cinematic. His body, the expression on his face, the sound of the bat. He’s the “villain” in a couple of episodes and if you don’t know baseball you get a good sense of him as this actual monster who’ll turn a game on a swing, like in real life.

- pitcher meltdowns. Bello has an episode about his awful May/June struggles, but there’s also more shown of the faces and expressions of opposing pitchers than you get on broadcast. Tyler O’Neill hits a home run on Opening Day off Luis Castillo in Seattle and as O’Neill rounds the bases you see Castillo dejected on the mound; Abreu pinch hits and drives in a go ahead run off Nestor Cortes who very visibly screams FUUUUUUCK and Yoshida takes Clay Holmes deep in dramatic fashion on the last swing of the game and before the camera sweeps away to follow him around the bases you see Holmes raise his glove to his face and begin screaming into it.

- most of the home runs in this series, whether Sox or not, are gorgeously filmed. And why not?

- The little chats players have on base with each other, like in the opening episode where an unseen Mariner is asking Duran what the deal with the on base celebration is.

Also, Tanner Houck on giving up a home run to Ohtani in the All Star Game

Houck: I thought that was a good pitch! He’s really good huh?
Duran: Yeah
Houck: I kept the sinker down and I thought that was a pop up and it just kept going

Like zero rancour, just straight up admiration that Ohtani really is that guy - and he’s right, it wasn’t a bad pitch at all.

I'm actually going to avoid your posts above on the spoiler principle, but look forward to reading them after the fact. If the offer was put out to lots of teams and it was the Red Sox who accepted, then that explains that--they're entitled to this.

Highlight of E3 for me was definitely the story of 32-year-old rookie Cam Booser--genuinely moving. I see he's with the White Sox now and pitching sort of okay...There's a funny moment when they give Casea the in-game mic, and when he starts in on a long story about his dad, the guy in the booth flashes a bemused look to everyone else as if to say "Is this going to last the full inning?"

One thing...don't hate me here, gyac...is that baseball players tend to speak in cliches, and there's a lot of that here. In Ball Four--my frame of reference, can't help it--Bouton is always there to comment on the cliches. The difference between a book and TV show, I know, but you don't have that here, just the cliches.

Would love to have seen Stroman's reaction when the Red Sox were stealing bases left and right, often without a throw from Trevino.

Casas, sorry--typing and watching TV.

definitely the story of 32-year-old rookie Cam Booser--genuinely moving.

Post by Roman Anthony gets on his horse (gyac) from things I learned about in baseball this week/how i learned to stop worrying and love baseball on ILX - things I learned about in baseball this week/how i learned to stop worrying and love baseball Cam Booser game.

The funniest part of that episode is when they’re trying to tell him he’s called up and his brain actually can’t believe it, he doesn’t hear what they’re saying and they have to repeat themselves.

Would have been great to have been there...I will periodically keep tabs on how he's doing.

E4: The Jarren Duran episode. (Perfect timing--I looked at mlb.com a few minutes after finishing, and Duran was the front page photo.) So great that I got to see the Jays melt down and blow a 6-2 lead; I can't even hide on Netflix. (Managed to erase that game from my memory, I guess--no recollection.) I wonder if they softened Duran's relationship with his father a bit. They make it clear how hard he was on him, but it just felt like they held back somehow. Just idle speculation.

Surprised that "Holy fuckballs" has never caught on as a popular expression--it's so euphonious.

They definitely held back - Duran said this (to mlb.com!) and I’m definitely bringing my own stuff about authoritative father figures to it but…as Tyler Glasnow astutely pointed out in an interview a year or two back, baseball is full of these characters.

I thought it was an incredible episode. I couldn’t believe how candid he was.

https://www.mlb.com/amp/news/red-sox-prospect-jarren-duran-could-make-an-impact-in-2021.html

Sorry, this quote:

As a 5-foot-6 student at Cypress High School, Duran said he was “the small guy who had to work twice as hard as everybody else.” A growth spurt helped. The guidance of his parents, Octavio and Dena, mattered even more.

“I owe so much to my dad,” Duran said of his father, who has advanced from field work to a management position at PepsiCo. “My dad was my discipliner and my mom was my caretaker. My dad would be tough on me and then my mom would (say), ‘Oh, it’s OK.’ Then, sometimes I’d have both of them critiquing me and I’m like, ‘Hey, Mom! You’re supposed to love me when Dad gets on me.’”

Surprised that "Holy fuckballs" has never caught on as a popular expression--it's so euphonious.

It's awful! I was doing my Addison DeWitt impression there...Going to try to watch E5 tonight (juggling The Handmaid's Tale and Better Call Saul, too).

I liked hearing the Pixies, yeah.

E5: Mostly Brayan Bello, plus the AS game.

I'd be interested in some large-scale study on whether there's a link between success as a pitcher and how well you're able to control your emotions. Give pitchers a number from 1-10 on how visibly they show their emotions--anger, frustration, joy--based on personal and anecdotal observation. Maybe impossible to eliminate subjectivity there...Pitchers I think of as cool: Maddux, Rivera, Jimmy Key. Emotive: Eckersley, Stieb, Stroman. Maybe you'd find nothing. All of those guys are good to great--different things work for different people. And players change over time.

Watching Bello--the club seems to agree--you get the impression that his biggest obstacle is letting his emotions get ahead of him. But maybe he in fact needs that, like Al Pacino in Heat, who tells his wife he has to be Al Pacino to be a good detective. I have no idea, but it's an interesting subject to me.

You'd have to eliminate knuckleballers from the study, because they're not really human.

A lot of guys who performed at a high level as well and pitch hot do it well - Buehler, Scherzer, Skubal is very emotive during a lot of his starts. Should be pointed out that Bello is only 24 and dealing with some huge issues per the episode. Pitching with/through emotion seems to be as individual as the person and quite often they can channel anger as energy in a productive way. With Bello it’s very difficult to say because his pitches have changed a lot over time too; his changeup used to be his best and now it’s terrible. The best Bello starts to my eye are when he’s looking loose and relaxed and having fun out there. Just like the person he appears to be off the field.

Sale obviously a hot blooded guy on the mound as well.

Famously set fire to his uniform, getting him a ticket out of Chicago...The episode makes it clear that his family's absence was weighing on Bello.

Excuse me, he cut that uniform up with a KNIFE, please respect the crazy Sale lore. Yes it does. I was really surprised that the team doesn’t help players with that stuff.

Been a while...I think I'm sticking with my embellished arsonist story.

Or I could go with the time he cut a teammate up with a knife.

Frank Kogan used to say that every song title ever automatically became better when you tacked on "with a Butcher Knife" at the end. Probably true of baseball lore, too.

Got sidetracked by a Better Call Saul rewatch, but picked this up again with E6 (two more to go). A lot of Craig Breslow, who strikes me as a real Jimmy Olsen/Boy Scout type and not all that interesting. There's also a fair amount of time devoted to the dynamics of the trade deadline--buy vs. sell, today vs. tomorrow, etc.--that I would assume most people who watch this are already familiar with.

Some good minor league stuff early in the episode, including a great juxtaposition of the team's owner hyping their dedication to the fan experience and a profanity-laced, umpire-baiting rant from the manager. I also, for some reason, found the support group for guys on the IL funny.

Yeah they all looked incredibly bored the whole time so it must be compulsory

Exactly what I thought. I'm sure it really is a mental strain being on the IL for months at a time, but my impression was that the players preferred method of dealing with that was informal banter with their teammates.

E7, primarily focused on two things: 1) the Jarren Duran suspension, and 2) the season starting to slip away, culminating in a nightmarish loss to the Rangers (up 4-3, tied, go ahead 7-4 in the bottom of the 8th, botch a double-play in the 9th, 7-7, lose in extras). Very good use of Three Dog Night's "Shambala" and Jonathan Richman's "That Summer Feeling"; funny throwaway dugout chatter, I think from Jason Varitek: "It's National Give-Your-Fucking-All Day."

E8: E7 already documented their slide, so they were left with not a whole lot for the last episode. Joe Castiglione's retirement--nice scene of him reciting A. Bartlett Giamatti as his on-air farewell--Casas' return, and a reprise of Boston's storied past (which, between the two series, I've kind of had enough of by now). Also an informal monthly gathering of writers where Bill Lee (guest or regular, I don't know) says that if the Red Sox had brought Roger Moret into G2 of the '75 series--loved hearing that name; I use him on the grid all the time--he'd be president today. (Meaning Lee himself, not Moret.) Not sure I follow the logic--a side-swipe at Trump, I think--but my favourite moment anyway.

E7, primarily focused on two things: 1) the Jarren Duran suspension, and 2) the season starting to slip away, culminating in a nightmarish loss to the Rangers (up 4-3, tied, go ahead 7-4 in the bottom of the 8th, botch a double-play in the 9th, 7-7, lose in extras). Very good use of Three Dog Night's "Shambala" and Jonathan Richman's "That Summer Feeling"; funny throwaway dugout chatter, I think from Jason Varitek: "It's National Give-Your-Fucking-All Day."

Yeah this was a brutal episode. They don’t give you the clear timeline in this but Casas returned mid August but was not there for that Texas series. What were your thoughts on this? I thought it was a good illustration of a particularly awful stretch of the season.

I didn’t see that Bill Lee moment, because I can’t stand Dan Shaughnessy and I skipped the whole segment. What did you think of Carlos Correa in episode 8? Seems like a nice fella. I like seeing players talk when they get on base.

I got in the habit of calling Vladdy greeter-in-chief, like he worked at Walmart (especially when he wasn't hitting); he can share the nickname with Casas. I see Grissom isn't doing too well these days--he turns up right at the end. I was so convinced that was a great trade for Boston. Still only 23, though.

Yeah impossible to know but I think he’s 24 now. Did you like the Jays when they show up? I know Vlad has a supervillain style home run moment in the series but can’t recall which episode, I think it was a bad Bello outing. Grissom is also the guy in the IL support group and telling Casas he could outwrestle him in the dugout.

There was some Jays stuff, yeah, but I don't remember any big moments. Fair amount of Danny Jansen after the trade, though--but I was surprised they didn't make note of the freakish two-teams-in-one-doubleheader story.