Now I can Die in Peace by Bill Simmons

I like the writing of Bill Simmons for a couple of reasons: First of all, I think he’s got a biting, witty, easy-to-read style. Second, he’s a Boston sports fan who’s redeemed of his crime of being a Boston sports fan by virtue of knowing just where Boston sits on the great pantheon of tortured sports cities. Third, he’s the best basketball writer I’ve ever seen, which is important to me because after years of fringing it, I’m finally starting to understand the appeal of the NBA and getting into it. I’m learning a lot about the league and the game by reading Simmons. Fourth, he seems to have a firm grasp of why following baseball is getting so difficult. He admitted in a column a couple of years ago that he hated the team his beloved Boston Red Sox were fielding that year, and I know the feeling. I recently wrote in my other blog that my natural team, the Yankees, were boring me to tears and admitted that I’ve hated the automaton Girardi/Sabathia squads from the last few years. I’m firmly in the corner of my adopted Chicago White Sox.

Since the Boston Red Sox were one of those star-crossed teams that could never seem to catch a break when they needed it, a thousand different fawning odes were written to them being the scrappy underdogs during the so-called Curse Era. After the 2004 Exorcism of the Bambino, the number of fawning odes and sappy tributes shot up by about a square root of ten, and almost all of them observed the Red Sox from the view of the torture goggles Boston sports fans always seem to be wearing.

Now I can Die in Peace was one of those odes. It’s a book of some of Simmons’s previously published greatest hits about the Red Sox, from 1998 to 2005. It basically goes from the twilight of Dan Duquette to the crowning of the Red Sox. Saying there’s work from 2005 is a wee bit misleading; there’s one column from 2005, on Opening Day. But it’s there, so I’m counting it.

Simmons writes frequently in frustration or in waiting frustration, even in the good times, like he’s always waiting for the ball to drop. Of course, more often than not in Red Sox history, the ball HAS dropped, so it can be excused in his case. But often, Simmons is able to maintain a sense of perspective about the suffering of Boston sports fans who, before a team title drought of 15 years, enjoyed the Big Bad Bruins and the Boston Celtics of Bill Russell, John Havlicek, and Larry Bird. He also throws in a lot of helpful footnotes which put things in context, or if he’s fascinated with how much has changed since the time he wrote out a particular thought. His most drastic thought evolutions come at the expenses of Nomar Garciaparra and Pedro Martinez, both of whom swept into Boston and appeared for the great pantheon of Boston Sports Heroes to take their rightful places alongside guys like Russell, Bird, Bobby Orr, or Ted Williams. Garciaparra was hated by the end and was traded to the Cubs, and Martinez lost his former dominance.

Given the nature of what the book is, there are times when Simmons appears to contradict himself. He hated Dan Duquette, but in the beginning of the book, he writes that Duquette will be remembered as the guy who changed the way the Boston Red Sox build their teams. I can hear Red Sox fans laughing as I write that, because The Duke is still widely hated, or at least he appears to be. But one of the things I like about Simmons is that he’s able to (mostly) maintain a sense of the things that work and things that don’t, and he credits Duquette for giving Red Sox fans hope again, and even lets him off the hook for getting rid of Roger Clemens. (At the time Boston let go of Clemens, Clemens had put on a ton of weight and lost a lot of his stuff, being resoundingly average the previous few years.) In Faithful, when Garciaparra was traded, Stephen King whined that it was a business move to ship him out of Boston. Simmons came out with the truth of the matter: That Garciaparra was a washed-up and unmotivated hitter who was costing the Sox a couple of spots on their defense, creating some gaping defensive holes.

Throughout the book, Simmons constantly denounces the idea of The Babe spending his free time in the afterlife making sure the Red Sox never win again, and he says that Boston fans don’t believe in a curse. That’s a rare viewpoint these days, given how prominent the Curse of the Bambino is to baseball’s mythology. Still, I believe him, mostly since I read The Curse of the Bambino, the book by Boston sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy that started the whole thing. The version of it I read was a reprinting in about April of 2004, and in it, Shaughnessy seemed a little flabbergasted by the Curse mythology himself. He apparently never expected it to take on such a mindless life of its own.

Of course, there’s the usual Boston fan obsession with the New York Yankees. Yes, Simmons hates the Yankees and obsesses over them, but keeping in tune with his sense of realism, he writes against the popular mythology of the Red Sox being some kind of small-market wunderkind. He is apparently well aware of the truth of the situation, that the Red Sox aren’t a whole lot better than the Yankees when it comes to spending, and it appears to be a huge part of the reason he was upset about the Alex Rodriguez deal. (I’ve often said the Red Sox purposely keep their payroll lower than the Yankees nowadays because it allows them and their fans to maintain a sense of virtue in the face of the Evil Empire. I mean it only with my tongue partially in my cheek.)

It’s pretty impressive to watch the way Simmons evolves from a death and destuction, woe-is-us doomsayer into an optimist. Simmons includes a column about the New England Patriots’s first Super Bowl victory. It reads like Simmons has an enormous burden lifted from his chest, and from there Simmons begins to feel a lot better about the future of sports in Boston, especially once John Henry takes over ownership of the Boston Red Sox. Simmons has a lot to say to the new ownership and a lot of requests to give them, and he marks in the footnotes that the ownership comes through on almost all of what he wanted.

Simmons uses a number of different formats in his columns, including quizzes, bullet points, and lists. He also tackles a lot of interesting subjects: One of his columns says the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry is barely a rivalry because it was mostly so one-sided. (My home for most of my life has been upstate New York, with the exception of a substantial few years in Chicago. Upstate New York is a solid Yankees fanbase – probably around 65 percent of the people here are Yankees fans, with probably another 25 percent cheering for the Red Sox. The Rivalry upstate is very subdued and, since almost everyone also cheers for the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and NHL’s Buffalo Sabres, the Sox had so much sympathy from upstaters that even most of the Yankees fans were cheering for them.) Simmons also writes about how it felt watching his longtime football team win the Super Bowl, why people hate Roger Clemens, and what went wrong with Pedro and Nomar to deny them pantheon status. A recurring theme of his is his relationship with his father and how the Red Sox play into it.

Now I can Die in Peace is a smooth and easy read, and it’s also the most brutally honest book I’ve seen about the Boston Red Sox 2004 championship season.

The Last Boy by Jane Leavy

I tend to dismiss most baseball books that have the word “last” in the title, unless it’s a reference to a last-place team. “Last” in the context of the passage of time is usually a look through the nostalgia glasses by someone saying things ain’t what they used to be, and more and more these days it’s used by people who have no business trying to write about the era in question in such an intimate context. It seems like it happened before those authors were even born half the time, and they’re craving an era of milk-drinking ballplayers who adored their cheering masses, embraced their herodom without question, and lived their lives – both public and private – like they were role models to be looked up to so the parents wouldn’t have to do too much work. I’m so biased against “last” that the only reason I picked up Jane Leavy’s The Last Boy at all was because it looked like the most interesting book available, and there weren’t any books around that weren’t about the Yankees or Red Sox at the time.

Charles Barkley famously proclaimed that he ain’t nobody’s role model, and he’s right. He shouldn’t have to be. The pressure of having such a high public profile has to be unimaginably pressing enough as it is, because people know who you are, and it allows them to keep their eye on you at all costs, perhaps stalk you, try to imitate you, hound you for attention, and in extreme cases, take advantage of you. Through all that, anyone of big-time renown is expected to play the part of the humbled, friendly, upstanding, straight Christian citizen, no matter what may be of his background, his personal problems and flaws, his politics or religion, and in some cases, the emotion of a moment someone may or may not have baited him into. No one cares about any of it, and if the famous person in question isn’t really the humbled, friendly, upstanding, straight Christian citizen but excels at wearing the mask, god forbid his facade break down for even a second. The Family Friendly cops will tear him to bits for not thinking of the precious, precious children!

Steve Garvey and Kirby Puckett were two instances of the family friendly face being turned over. Classic, great heroes, both of them, now both being kept out of the Hall of Fame because their real selves ruined the show. But the poster child of a great, all-American baseball hero preening and sheening in the spotlight while wreaking havoc off it is The Mick, Mickey Mantle, one of the greatest sluggers of all time, whose number was retired by the Yankees, thought to be a great milk-drinking, aw-shucks family man off the field because the public was blinded by his smile. In The Last Boy, Leavy, author of a classic Sandy Koufax biography, explores the myths and dark sides of Mickey Mantle.

In the Koufax bio, Leavy encloses her narrative in between stretches of Koufax’s perfect game. She basically does the same in The Last Boy, but her deference point this time is a 1983 interview with Mantle that she personally conducted. At one point during this interview, The Mick apparently tried to hit on her, which according to the rest of the book wasn’t exactly an out-of-character gesture for him.

It’s very rare that a biography can capture all of the contradicting sides of a single man. Even the Barry Bonds biography by Jeff Pearlman that I loved so much begins placing way too much emphasis on the steroids controversy through the later chapters. But Leavy gets it exactly right in The Last Boy. Even her Koufax bio didn’t cover all of Koufax’s mysterious sides, but that’s because Koufax is one of the most secretive ballplayers who ever lived. Mantle was thrust into the spotlight in the largest city in the country and turned into an American paragon of virtue, so he got a lot of attention which he didn’t seem to want. The Last Boy covers Mantle the hero, Mantle the lost wanderer in his post-baseball years, Mantle the Copa prizefighter in one memorable night with Whitey Ford and Billy Martin, Mantle the drinker…. In short, The Last Boy is about both Mantle the image and Mantle the man.

Leavy tends to research her subjects more obsessively than any other author I’ve ever read. She tackles myths and figures from every conceivable angle you could possibly think of. To get an idea of just how obsessed she got with Mantle, take the chapter from The Last Boy about Mantle hitting his first-ever home run out of Washington’s Griffith Stadium. She talks about the mechanics involved with hitting a home run, whether or not it was possible for that particular homer to even fly the distance Mantle myth says it did, writes about the origins of the tape measure home run, and even tracks down the person who found it in the streets, picked it up, and carried it home. She even writes about what life was like in the mines of Commerce, Oklahoma, for Mantle’s pop.

Leavy writes with a mix of passion, admiration, and sorrow for Mantle. Her chapters are all based within the contexts of certain dates which represented big events in Mantle’s career, but she plays loose in sticking to what happened on those dates, and so what could have been a very simple bio ends up taking some very deep and cerebral turns. She goes into some intense details about Mantle’s relationship with his kids, Whitey Ford and Billy Martin, his father, and even goes into detail about The Mick being sexually abused as a kid. She writes about how his own alcoholism and depression affected his family. One of the more interesting facets of Mantle’s life is how he got along with star outfielder Joe DiMaggio, who was in his final years in pinstripes when Mantle was just getting started. DiMaggio doesn’t come off well at all in The Last Boy, and would apparently ignore Mantle unless Mantle spoke first. At an autograph session many years after they were both long retired, DiMaggio was rush-rush, get-’em-out while Mantle sat and happily chatted with the fans and answered their questions. DiMaggio got so fed up that he asked Mantle to switch locations, because he was making DiMaggio look bad. (Mantle’s response was to basically tell the Yankee Clipper to suck it.)

The Last Boy isn’t about Mantle’s career. It’s about his entire life, and so after getting the obligatory focus on the career Sportscenter reel highlights out of the way, Leavy proceeds to take us down the very harrowing road of Mantle’s post-baseball life. If, after knowing the truth about Mantle before then doesn’t convince you that he wasn’t some golden boy, this is the part that blows out the idea of Mantle being Mr. All-American. Mantle needed structure in his life, and without the Yankees there to provide it, a lot of what made Mantle MICKEY MANTLE faded away. Mantle comes off as lost, confused, depressed, and angry, and he falls down an emotional spiral. The truth behind his loving father and devoted husband facade is pretty painful. Let’s just say it doesn’t fit what’s written on his plaque at Yankee Stadium.

Among some other little bits of info that get attention are the fact that, during the famous home run chase between him and Roger Maris, Mantle basically conceded defeat after the pressure finally got to him. Much is made about his bad knees, but The Last Boy actually goes into detail about HOW his knees got to be so banged up, and it also goes into details about the Center Field Holy Trinity of New York City during the 50′s: Mantle, Willie Mays of the New York Giants, and Duke Snider of the Brooklyn Dodgers. For his part, Mantle believes he had nothing on Mays.

Lots of biographies go into the details of the who and what. The Last Boy tackles the ambitious subject of the how and why. Jane Leavy is proving to be an outstanding, interesting biographer; her bio on Koufax was less about Koufax than about what he meant to the larger public and the social influence he had. It turned Koufax into one of my favorite players. The Last Boy humanizes Mickey Mantle to an ungodly extent. If you have any appreciation for ballplayers as characters and human beings, this is one to pick up.

Damn Yankees

I’ve never seen a baseball movie that managed to offend my sensibilities as both a Yankees fan and a White Sox fan. As a Yankees fan, I’m used to such treatment; they don’t refer to the Yankees as the Evil Empire for nothing, and if you don’t have a sense of humor about it when your favorite team is one everyone else in the league hates, you get taken down that long road of guilt for winning too often. But Damn Yankees also does something very stupid when a journalist randomly decides that the nickname of the main character should be Shoeless Joe, and everyone acts as if it’s the most original idea in the world. Keep in mind that Joe had not done anything even remotely worthy of inspiring that moniker. It’s not a reference to the way he plays, a reference to his wardrobe choices, or a reference to how good a player he is. It was something the journalist pulled out of the air and liked because it sounded cute. As if to emphasize the point, her and the team she’s covering, the Washington Senators, then sing a song about it. Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, MO! And the postal code is pronounced “moe.”

The Washington Senators are the focus of Damn Yankees, a musical about a guy who sells his soul to become a great slugger for the team because they’re his favorite team and he wants to guide them to the Pennant instead of seeing those damn Yankees win it every damn season.

Damn Yankees retells the tale of Faust in a baseball context, in a musical format. The role of Faust himself is taken by a man named Joe Boyd, a lifelong fan of the perpetually pathetic Washington Senators. In the beginning of the movie, he sits watching another game, and the Senators of course lose yet again. Baseball fans reading this are probably familiar with the old joke surrounding those old Senators teams of yore: Washington: First in war, first in peace, last in the American League. The real-life Washington Senators enjoyed a brief run of successes from about 1924 to 1933, winning Pennants in 1924, 1925, and 1933 and the World Series in 1924. They also fielded Walter Johnson, possibly the greatest pitcher ever. Besides them, the team was so godawful that after it moved to Minnesota in 1960, the team appears to have taken all possible steps to burn its bridge to Washington. By the time Damn Yankees was released in 1958, Johnson and that 1924 title were long forgotten and the team was nestled comfortably back in its familiar suckitude, much to the chagrin of Boyd. Joe Boyd is particularly frustrated after this latest loss, and he heads outside for a breather, declaring that he would sell his soul to see his beloved Senators beat the Yankees and win the Pennant.

Sales of souls is apparently not a statement the Devil takes ironically, because guess who should show up at Joe’s doorstep literally right out of thin air! That’s right, apparently the Prince of Darkness is a Senators fan himself and just as fed up with the Pinstriped Stormtroopers of the Evil Empire as Joe. The Devil – who in this movie is called Mr. Applegate – cuts Joe a deal: He’ll restore Joe’s youth, so Joe himself can take Washington on a memorable Pennant run! Joe negotiates an escape clause into the contract so he can back out, and once that’s done, he says goodbye to his wife, attends Washington’s training camp, gets signed, and becomes hero for a year using the name Joe Hardy, who becomes a national squeaky-clean icon akin to Mickey Mantle (who, incidentally enough, appears in some of the archived footage in Damn Yankees). Unlike Mantle, though, Joe IS a squeaky-clean icon who misses his wife and keeps considering backing out whenever he sees her. This doesn’t sit well with Applegate, who brings in his hot call girl with fire-red hair, Lola, to pry him away from his wife.

Damn Yankees starts off weak. It also finishes weak, despite some strong scenes in the second half. I wasn’t especially impressed with the array of songs, either. The first few are forgettable. The second half brings much better musical fare, including the famous “Whatever Lola Wants,” but the plot itself seems to be somewhat misguided and made up as it goes along by then. There’s one scene between Hardy and Lola by a pond, and since this is 1950′s America, Lola has of course been swept up off her feet by Hardy’s good-hearted innocence by then. This is a point in which Hardy comes to accept the fact that he has feelings for Lola too, but that whole point is discarded and never brought up again.

I’ll give Joe Hardy this: The actor who plays him, Tab Hunter, REALLY looks the part of an all-American good old boy during the 50′s. As I mentioned, his character evokes comparisons to Mickey Mantle, right down to the crew-cut blond hair and aw-shucks demeanor. My regular readers on Lit Bases – one of the locations where I’m posting this, my blog about baseball books – know I have a hard time swallowing the innocent images of 1950′s America. Maybe it goes with the territory of being an 80′s-90′s kid, but I tend to view the 50′s as a sort of head-in-sand decade and snicker at the imagery that comes out of it in movies or TV. Joe apparently leads such an innocent life that his wife and him sleep in two separate beds! This means the rough edges of baseball jocks are smoothed out in Damn Yankees – I’m even surprised they even let the word “damn” be used so prominently – and we’re given the images of what ballplayers were supposed to be, not a drama about what they actually were. It’s funny to me in Damn Yankees, because the plot would have called for a couple of hints of humanity.

Joe Hardy the man runs around charming everyone he meets, even renting a room from his wife just so he can be close to her. His politeness has everyone giving him the benefit of the doubt, which comes in handy every time the Devil shows up again trying to destroy him. There is a very persistent journalist on his tail named Gloria, and every time a new rumor pops up about him fueled by either Applegate or Gloria, everyone just up and lets him go. Considering what happened to the reputations of guys like Steve Garvey and Kirby Puckett once their own real-world personalities were unearthed, the idea that people would walk into a tribunal and flat-out lie about Hardy in order to protect him seems a little absurd. This is called being stuck for a solution in writing parlance.

Damn Yankees could have been a lot more effective had Gloria been cut out of it. The soul-selling concept is one of the all-time greats of the ages, and while the points Gloria ends up raising are plenty valid, they do nothing but add more subplots which are given some of the worst conclusions I’ve ever seen in a movie. It doesn’t help that she’s the one who creates the ridiculous “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, MO” angle, giving her the most arbitrary song in the movie.

Applegate’s personality undergoes a weird shift too. He begins as a suave, debonair dude. Don’t get me wrong, we know he’s bad news the second he shows up. But when Lola fails her first attempted seduction of Hardy, he suddenly loses his cool and takes on the persona of a desperate criminal, screaming orders at his confused lackeys while surrounded by officers who have cornered him in the bank vault he was trying to rob. There’s nothing of the debonair debauchery which made Jack Nicholson such a hoot in The Witches of Eastwick or the cold, calculating mental cruelty that Al Pacino played to perfection in The Devil’s Advocate. If you actually want to get religious about it, the Devil in most of his religious forms appears as a guy who is in control at all times. The Devil in Damn Yankees doesn’t seem anything like that in the second half.

Damn Yankees used two of the original Broadway actors in its 1958 movie form – Ray Walston as Applegate and Gwen Verdon as Lola, and it kept the choreography of the legendary Bob Fosse. But, except for a brief stretch near the finish, Damn Yankees finishes, well, less like the New York Yankees and more like the Washington Senators.

Three Nights in August by Buzz Bissinger

I’ve been a stalwart champion of the Billy Beane school of statistics ever since I first read Moneyball. I’ve defended the idea that, in spite of never winning a Pennant, Beane’s new method of collecting baseball talent has changed the game in a lot of ways and I see a lot of teams winning Pennants and World Series titles on his mad Sabremetrics, and the fact that Beane’s Oakland Athletics haven’t topped the summit themselves is because the team still suffers from one of the league’s lowest payrolls: Basing a team-building strategy on statistics will only get you far until the richer teams know what you’re up to, at which point, while you’re still forced to bring in a legion of otherwise talent-deprived nobodies, the richer teams will begin stocking their teams with the somebody superstars who put up the same kinds of statistics necessary for the building strategy. The result is the talent gap manifesting itself once again, and Moneyball going full circle – Boston, New York, and others dominating while Oakland languishes because Michael Lewis spilled their strategy.

But I digress. Buzz Bissinger, author of the classic sports book Friday Night Lights, returned a few years ago with Three Nights in August, which is so far the most convincing argument I’ve read so far for baseball being decided by human quirks and instincts. Those like myself who argue for Moneyball tend to overlook the fact that there’s a very human element to sports too, and that baseball is still a sport in which the most clutch of hitters will be considered a dominant, feared player for whiffing seven out of ten times. The human element adds an extra dimension of strategy to be considered whenever Joe Girardi or Ozzie Guillen makes that really dumb move in a tight game which places a bench player into the spot for a superstar.

In Three Nights in August, Bissinger takes us into one of the greatest strategic minds in the history of baseball: Tony La Russa. The setting is Busch Stadium as La Russa’s Saint Louis Cardinals fight an essential 2003 three-game series against their archrivals, the Chicago Cubs. Three Nights in August is written in the context of those three games, as Bissinger goes into Tony La Russa’s head to cull exactly what is going through it at any given play in the game. The result is the deep humanization of baseball strategy and the kinds of unique factors which can worm into a game based so much around statistics. It is so far the best argument I’ve read against sabremetrics.

It’s August in 2003 and the Saint Louis Cardinals are going to arms against the Cubs in a series against a surging Cubs team, with playoff implications on the line. The Cardinals are in a must-win situation because winning this series places them in a good position to get to the postseason. But the Cubs haven’t performed their reliable August folding ritual, and they’ve been in the race the whole year under new manager Dusty Baker, who is trying to change the culture of Cubdom and rub off the stinky loser stench. Ultimately the Cubs played in the NLCS that year and came within only five outs of their first Pennant since 1945.

Bissinger has his work cut out for him. He has to write a book about baseball strategy, make it exciting, and explain the tinkering Tony La Russa does with his team. On the whole, Three Nights in August is interesting, but not engaging. I loved what I read, but I didn’t feel an absolute need to keep on reading. Bissinger isn’t giving us the gritty details of the matchups and showdowns of this series in Three Nights in August; he’s taking you inside the manager’s head, and giving us a modus operandi on baseball strategy strictly from that point of view. There’s aren’t many action scenes in Three Nights in August, and the ones that do exist are treated as normally as anything else in the book while La Russa ponders his options.

Three Nights in August is naturally very prone to sidetracking because of this idea. That’s not a bad thing, because there’s lots of interesting thoughts and opinions on the state of how baseball is played today. Bissinger does give us an awful lot of player biographies, though, and after some time in the book, it feels like they come in the second part of every chapter. They don’t feel out of place, though, because they’re there to provide an idea of each player’s mindset and explain how and why La Russa manages them the way he does.

Bissinger covers a wide range of subjects in Three Nights in August, including just why Tony La Russa is such an unnatural character in baseball, what he does different, what motivates him to do things so differently, and how he developed as a manager. There are also surprising idea on things like video replay, the code of honor which necessitates situations in which pitchers plunk batters intentionally, the development of the sacred rules of pitch counting, and the popular sabremetric idea that clutch situations amount to squat. He also covers a range of players for the Cardinals and also a few for the Cubs, and talks at length about their unusual career trajectories, from Albert Pujols (unimpressive draft pick who was never supposed to make the team) to Rick Ankiel (was supposed to be the next Sandy Koufax, but broke down) to how the death of Darryl Kile affected La Russa and the rest of the team.

In 2010, Will Leitch wrote Are We Winning?, a book about a single game between the Cardinals and Cubs which he attended with his father and friends, a game which set off a reflection of how much baseball meant to the bond between him and his dad. In that book, Leitch, in a mode of sentimentality we don’t get from him very often, deified baseball players when he talked about their athletic gifts. Bissinger does the opposite in Three Nights in August – he explores the pasts and quirks of a lot of players in order to humanize them, and therefore make them more relatable. By going over a lot of quirks and exploring the intricacies of the way various players tick, Bissinger shows why a human element is needed to be a great manager in a period of players who are more individualistic than ever.

There is no climax or culmination in Three Nights in August, as that would go against what Bissinger is trying to do. But it is nearly 300 pages of baseball strategy, written in its most beautiful, poetically humanized form.

A League of Their Own (Movie)

The big difference between cliches that work and cliches that don’t can sometimes be boiled down to simple context. Often, it’s a lazy writer trick. If a screenwriter has an immediate need to connect with the audience, he’ll try to place the values of a main character he’s creating in line with what he believes are the values of the people seeing the movie. This isn’t something we ordinarily think about, but when a writer does it for a period piece, it sticks out. In effect, we have people like King Leonidas from the movie 300 giving his men lectures about the values of freedom and democracy while the historical city of Sparta was run on a caste system whose slaves were routinely killed ritualistically. The writers basically resort to turning their medieval or Victorian-era characters into 21st-century Americans.

It takes great writing to work a character into historical context while still making them forward-thinkers. In that respect, A League of Their Own is a remarkable achievement. A League of Their Own is the story of a women’s professional baseball league set up during World War II. Many of the characters in A League of Their Own are women who wonder about their roles in the country and in life itself, and when someone started up a professional baseball league for them, they jumped at the opportunity looking to break free of their roles. Their euphoria, though, is dampened slightly when they’re informed that they can’t walk around and act like the big, tough, manly ballplayers. They are expected to be dolls, babes, ladies, and so they’re explicitly instructed to act like it. They’re put into etiquette classes and are forbidden to drink, smoke, or chew tobacco. They’re also a bit wary of the short dresses the league commissioner is forcing them to wear, well aware of the fact that dresses would hinder their sliding abilities. There is naturally a bit of unrest among the crowd of women, and ordinarily in a movie like this, full-blown rebellion would follow and the commissioner would repent for the error of his ways. In A League of Their Own, though, there is only some initial unrest, followed by the commissioner taking control of the situation by reminding them that there are a lot of women who didn’t make it into the league, any of whom would play in a bathing suit if he asked it of them. Even though these are clearly strong women, they are forced to concede that point, and so they settle down and seethe on the inside.

A League of Their Own revolves mainly around two characters, Dottie and Kit, who are invited to play in a startup women’s professional baseball league. The year is 1943, during World War II, and those who paid attention in their history classes know this is when women began to break out of their domesticated roles to join the workforce. Warm bodies were needed to go to Europe and do the dirty work, which the men were drafted for. A war tends to need manufacturing to get the war equipment made, though, and so the women were called on to take the mens’ places in the factories to get the weapons and supplies made. One opportunistic onlooker quickly noted that players in Major League Baseball were also in shortage, and seeing the new working women, he decided that perhaps he could get some women to play baseball for a price, too. Dottie and Kit are among the women who are scouted in softball leagues and invited to a tryout for the four-team league. They make the cut and are signed to the Rockford Peaches.

It was a shocking thing to me to see the way the characters in the movie talk to women. Writer/Director Penny Marshall was probably going for accuracy, and she probably has some experience with this kind of prejudice herself, succeeding in a line of work traditionally dominated by men. I understood that social attitudes were a lot different back then, but to have such language and ideas placed right on the screen in front of my face was a little bit jarring for a person who grew up around women who would have killed me for referring to them as dolls or dames. In one scene, one of the members of the women’s team is in a car talking with a kid in his early teens. This kid suggests they go into the backseast so she can “make a man out of him.” He’s unfazed by her suggestion of smacking him, replying by asking why they couldn’t do both. To get an idea of just how different things are in the era, Marshall includes a scene in which a popular radio moralizer (a woman, no less) drones about the “masculinization” of women, causing them to destroy families by leaving their “designated roles.”

The women’s league has four teams, but Marshall chooses to focus on the story of just one of them, the Rockford Peaches. This helps keep the movie from being cluttered with underdeveloped characters, although Marshall does shortchange us in one other respect of development: Of the members of the Peaches, Marshall only gives pivotal roles to five or six of them, including the manager, Jimmy Dugan. Dottie, Kit, and the characters Marla, Mae, and Doris get most of Marshall’s attention. There are other characters; Evelyn, a soft-spoken right fielder and Shirley, an illiterate left-fielder and Ellen Sue, a former Miss Georgia, have small pieces. But A League of Their Own belongs mostly to sisters Dottie and Kit, who share a sibling rivalry which comes to a tipping point because Kit sickens of the way Dottie keeps overshadowing her. Evelyn is there more to be the character whom Dottie and Kit help out of her shell, and Mae and Doris – rarely onscreen without each other – provide a sort of running commentary.

I found Jimmy Dugan to be a more interesting character than any of the women, to be honest. Dugan was a former slugger for the Chicago Cubs who drank himself out of baseball. He’s half-hoping the women’s league will get him back into the game but goes about at first treating the whole thing as a joke, frequently lamenting that he has no ballplayers, only girls. Tom Hanks plays Dugan with a ton of bombast. It’s a great performance in that none of Hanks’s nice-guy persona is there. When he plays Dugan being drunk, it isn’t the kind of regular movie drunk, a big-hearted tough guy wearing a crusty shell. Dugan is full-on blast-wasted, lurching and screaming at everything around him. He’s not likable at all when inebriated, and he sleeps off his hangovers during games. It’s during one of his tirades that he delivers his classic line “There’s no crying in baseball!” Even when he decides to get his team to rally, he does it for the bonus money.

Women’s professional sports leagues in the United States have famously had trouble finding audiences to play for, and Marshall shines brilliantly while capturing this. The league starts out playing in front of audiences which could be counted on fingers and toes. This of course causes the owners to have second thoughts abot the whole thing, and they remain unconvinced of its potential even after a publicity campaign brings more people into the games. When a photographer from Life Magazine shows up to a game, one of the league owners tries to coax the team into making a spectacular play. Dottie makes a catch while performing a split, which ends up on the cover. By the World Series, there are a lot more people at the games, but the owners still aren’t sure.

Marshall takes pains to remind the audience that the people in the league are women, and it’s in the area that she does the most interesting writing in the movie. When men write screenplays about women, we tend to see the butchie stereotype a lot, who is frequently in the movie as the gender-equal to the men. The women themselves too often play out like male fantasies or ideas of what being feminine is. The women in A League of Their Own find that careful balance, being tough and feminine at the same time, and written into the script with a natural flow are what I can only imagine to be real concerns of women: Pregnancies and periods, kids and mothering, and proper for the time, concern about whether their husbands will be returning from the war. Yes, these women are there to play baseball, but they’re also women, and the writer’s device known as the token lesbian is not in the movie at all.

I’ve previously lamented that all sports movies are going to have cliches, but A League of Their Own at least has interesting, original ways of playing them. First of all, Marshall doesn’t dwell on them. If there’s a cliche necessary, Marshall doesn’t slow to ultra-saccharine slo-mo bullet time to place the dramatic emphasis on it. Apparently she hates sports movie cliches as much as I do, and so she plays them out normal speed with no fanfare or emphasis in order to get them out of the way. My single cliche objection comes after the story ends. This movie is framed within the context of a flashback; it’s an older Dottie reminiscing about the league while attending the opening of the women’s baseball exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Once the flashback – and thus the official story – is complete, Marshall drags the epilogue out in excess. A League of Their Own has more decent points to fade away to credits than The Return of the King, the finale of The Lord of the Rings trilogy which famously protracted about 200 endings before actually ending, or before the audience got fed up and walked out, whichever came first.

I get the sense that in A League of Their Own, Penny Marshall wanted to give a sense of her own story. There aren’t a lot of full-time female directors running around in Hollywood. I can only name four off the top of my head – Marshall, the great Amy Heckerling, the fantastic Sofia Coppola, and Oscar winner Katheryn Bigelow – and I was a film student. In that sense, Marshall knows about the prejudices that go with trying to break through in what is typically considered a man’s world, even in an area which is supposedly a bastion of progressive politics. Marshall knows the territory better than most, and is therefore the person who is not only capable of telling the story, but the right person to tell it as well.

Major League II (Movie)

The funny thing about Major League II is that it appears to have a specific team being used as the primary antagonist. The Cleveland Indians spend so much time playing against and worrying about the Chicago White Sox that you would assume the White Sox appearances were one of Bill Veeck’s stunts.

Major League II picks up the year following the original movie. After winning their divisional title, the Cleveland Indians went into the playoffs and were promptly swept out of it by the Chicago White Sox. When we pick up at spring training, we immediately get the sense there’s something different about the ragtag crew that came out of nowhere to win the division and put the clamps on owner Rachel Phelps’s plans to move them to Florida. Roger Dorn, the aging star from the first Major League, has retired and bought the team from Phelps. But now that the Indians have been successful, all of the talentless characters from last year have decided they have to begin living the high life. There are some new faces on the squad: Jack Parkman, a slugging catcher who believes he’s the only winner on a team full of losers; Isuro “Kamikaze” Tanaka, a sensation from Japan; and rookie catcher Rube Baker, who has the ability to throw left in spite of aiming right.

Problems begin to abound with clashing egos, though. Willie Mays Hayes made a movie in the offseason, performing all his own stunts (and even doing some of his own acting) and spraining his knee in the process. He also has an entourage now. Pedro Cerrano underwent one of his trademark spiritual conversions, going from an aggressive form of Vodun (Voodoo) to Buddhism, and Buddhism, being more inner-peace-and-meditation based, is affecting his drive. Probably the most drastic change is by Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn, whose shoulder chip is now lifted, which is bad because he’s now a yuppie more concerned about his image and marketing potential than anything.

Since Charlie Sheen was nearing the end of what was ultimately the apex of his star potential by the release of Major League II, the movie is more centered around Vaughn than anyone. (While on the subject of big stars, Wesley Snipes, who had played Willie Mays Hayes in the original, was replaced by Omar Epps, Snipes having also become an A-list star.) Vaughn has a new girlfriend, Rebecca Flannery, who is high-class and concerned about her boyfriend/client’s PR. He’s ditched the Harley for a convertible, much to the disappointment of his old crew.

Major League II follows the same formula as the first movie. The team is bad until it’s suddenly good. In Major League II, the instigator of the turnaround is a big dugout fight and the eventual trade of Jack Parkman to the White Sox. (In this movie, who else would it be?) Even though Roger Dorn bought the team, the movie still creates room to put Rachel Phelps back in charge when Dorn prove to be supremely terrible at managing finances and has to sell them back. Phelps still has designs on the big move to Florida, which is a pretty disappointing development because Dorn’s financial mismanagement could have made a more compelling story and really given Major League II its own identity separate from the first movie.

Jack Parkman stands out as a great villain. Every time he pops up onscreen, you want to grab the nearest bat and take out his kneecaps. Hayes’s ego is at least used for good, but Parkman believes everyone else is a loser and isn’t shy about saying so. Even though Dorn spent a ton of money on him, manager Lou Brown still thinks it necessary to trade him to Chicago because of the clubhouse division he causes. So when Vaughn pitches him out at the end of the movie, it’s satisfying to see him eat his words, and yet also dissatisfying because no one clocked him.

Major League II takes a lot of crap for not being up to the standards of the first one, but since the day I first saw Major League II, I’ve been arguing that it’s actually better. I think the first Major League movie is overrated. Yes, it’s very funny, and there’s definitely a lot of effort obvious in it. The jokes are inspired, the writing is solid, and you can tell the people behind were, as they claim, diehard Indians fans sploshing one of their greatest fantasies all over the screen. But I had two huge issues with it the bogged it down for me: The first was the story of Roger Dorn and Jake Taylor having problems with their girlfriends, and the second was that the climactic scene involved just about every possible cliche from every climactic sports game in every sports movie ever, and it probably invented a few of its own as well. Major League II involves the romantic problems of Ricky Vaughn, but the added dimension of Vaughn creating a new image for himself makes his romantic problems look almost like a last-minute, backseat addition. The climax has also been improved. There’s no way to do the Big Game in sports movies these days without doing cliches, but Major League II has less of them, and the idea of Vaughn regaining his confidence and putting players on base purposely just because he personally wants to take out Parkman was a nice touch.

The storyline of Jake Taylor is also a retread, even if it is in a different form. This time, Taylor is hoping to make the team as a coach to his fellow catchers Parkman and Baker.

Tanaka is probably my favorite new character. I love his chemistry with his main antagonist, Cerrano, and the way they try to get into each other’s heads in order to turn each other into better ballplayers is a real hoot. Tanaka believes a ballplayer needs to be a strong warrior, while Cerrano believes in calmness as the best approach to excellence on the diamond.

The one character in Major League II who didn’t change at all is Lou Brown. He’s still grounded, leading his team with a touch of old-school manager grouchiness. There’s a scene later in the movie where he has a heart attack, which puts him in the hospital. He’s forbidden from doing anything baseball-related because he gets worked up over it, but true to his style, even in the finale he’s got his portable radio and headphones on, listening to the game, living and dying with every pitch. In one scene, one of his players goes to visit him, and he specifically tells the player not to go to the stadium and give one of the “win one for Lou” statements because he hates that. What does the player do? Go to the stadium and encourage everyone to win one for Lou.

The first Major League is considered a genuine classic among sports movies. I can’t say I share that viewpoint, but I understand it. My personal preference is for Major League II, less bogged in cliche and funnier. And it seems like the Cleveland Indians may agree with that. When Major League was released, the Tribe was stinking up the league the same way they had done since the Rocky trade. After Major League II, the Indians began a run as one of the most dominant teams of the American League. Just a year after Major League II, in fact, the fantasy evoked in Major League II became real: The Cleveland Indians were in the World Series.

Fever Pitch (movie)

The only material the Farrelly brothers culled from Nick Hornby’s classic book was the title. I suspect the inspiration process didn’t go anywhere beyond reading the title of the book. Even the plot summary contains the words “soccer” and “Arsenal FC.” The Farrellys definitely missed that. Okay, maybe that’s a little bit too harsh: The main character, Ben, finds solace in the Boston Red Sox upon his parents’ divorce, and there is a scene in which Ben gets disappointed when his girlfriend, Lindsay, tries to take him to Paris for a weekend because it would make him miss an important game. In both, the main character is a teacher. Both of them are about top-notch teams in their sports which purport to be underdogs but who have payrolls which make the case that they’re slacking by doing just enough to tease their fans and lose.

I really don’t see what the adaptors see in the Nick Hornby book that they just have to keep trying to turn it into a love story. There is a love story in the book, but that love is between poor Hornby and his beloved Premier League team, Arsenal Football Club. The first movie based on Fever Pitch got the soccer part right, but a good chunk of it revolves around a love story. Too bad I can’t review it. The Farrelly brothers take Fever Pitch and make a story between boy and girl the very centerpiece, and the one question readers can think to themselves is, what the hell? There was very little of a boy/girl love story in the book, but there was a wealth of other material which could easily have had a movie created around it. Why try to turn it into a romantic comedy in which the girl basically gets in the way?

Well, okay. Again. That comment IS harsh. Lindsay is a pretty well-developed character, especially for a movie like this. She is a high-powered businesswoman with real concerns about how her boyfriend’s obsession with the Boston Red Sox is going to get in the way of their relationship, and how her relationship overall might affect her career, and even a concern about how the difference in their income brackets could get in the way. Ben is supposed to be the main character – it’s him the narration centers around, him who has the season tickets and overall obsession – but all we see him do through most of the movie is go nuts over the team. Even by the standards of the completely sold out fanatic, Ben is way over the top. Some of his scenes – his “Yankee dance” scene being one and his appearance on ESPN being another – are genuinely funny. But others, like the one where he argues with Lindsay about missing a great comeback game in lieu of going to a party with Lindsay, are just ridiculous. You can tell in some scenes that the Farrellys simply gave up trying to explain him.

The story is simple: Boy, a teacher, takes some of his best students to an office where he meets girl. Boy and girl get together and begin relationship. Summer begins and boy, with a ton of free time on his hands, spends it at Fenway Park watching the Boston Red Sox, who got him through a difficult period in his life. Girl questions relationship amidst his insanity. Boy is forced to choose between girl and team. This being a romantic comedy, I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying boy gets to keep both girl and team. Red Sox win World Series, since this movie was released in 2005, after they really had won the World Series.

In the middle of the eventful 2004 Red Sox season are Ben and Lindsay. And, well,… That’s pretty much it. It isn’t like they have an important role in regards to the team’s fate that season. The team, on the other hand, definitely plays a role in theirs. Ben is a huge Red Sox fan, but even though his house is covered in Red Sox memorabilia, he’s able to keep himself in check through the winter. But during the summer, he’s a lean, mean, baseball-lovin’ machine who has gone his whole life since the age of five without ever missing a game.

Lindsay meets Ben during the winter, so except for the memorabilia, she suspects nothing except that Ben is merely an extra-passionate fan. Once the income issue is behind her (read: brushed off to the side like she never had a problem with it), she accepts that she’s found probably the greatest guy on Earth. But her friends think the same, and having had similar experiences in the past, they bring up the idea that Ben has some kind of weird problem. Why is he not off the market yet? Lindsay even lampshades the idea when he tries to go into exacting detail, months into their relationship, about how much he loves the Sox. Ben starts taking her to games, and she eventually decides to stop going to so many games so she can concentrate on earning a promotion.

If Fever Pitch played a romantic comedy from the strict angle of how close can a guy get to his team before it gets in the way, it could have worked. But it also relies on a lot of trite cliches, and it tries to wedge the common plot thread about the woman performing double duty between the man and her dream job, which – since Lindsay is a lot more developed than Ben – tends to make Fever Pitch come off like a romantic comedy about the woman torn between man and work with the baseball team just providing an extra wedge. Fever Pitch would have been a lot more tolerable – despite the cliched, overwrought, and downright silly ending – if it had just taken the baseball route.

The Red Sox only take a central plot role close to the end, when Ben throws a hissy about missing a big game against the Yankees which the Red Sox won with a spectacular ninth-inning comeback. Ben’s explanation for his anger at missing the game is too nonsensical to come off as anything other than an obsessed, angry rant. Then the finale involves Lindsay running across the field at Fenway during a playoff game.

To the movie’s credit, Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore are both lovable as their characters, but they lack chemistry and don’t have the script material to work with. The Farrellys appear to have just wanted to force the story out, something which becomes flat obvious in the final act, when Ben misses the game against the Yankees.

Fever Pitch the book could inspire a mine of decent sports movies, so why people keep getting romantic comedies out of it is beyond me. The American version of Fever Pitch is just bad. The British version at least has a grounding in the original material and is more developed and centered around the main character. If you’re a Red Sox fan, you might be able to find a little bit of redemption in this version of Fever Pitch; for everything wrong about it, you can tell the Farrellys – New England natives themselves – really did try to create a love letter, and their love for their favorite baseball team is genuinely heartfelt. But following your heart’s desire is sometimes a risky proposition which leads to doing some insanely dumb things.

The Benchwarmers (Movie)

” The trouble with catering to the lowest common denominator is that it tends to make the higher denominators cynical.”
The AV Club

I hated, hated, hated, hated, HATED The Benchwarmers. I mean I really, really (expletive deleted) hated it. I hated it so much that not even the presence of America’s Pastime can be tallied in its favor, especially not considering the good guys are fielding a team of all of three players: The catcher, the pitcher, and the center fielder. Even a cameo by Reggie Jackson can’t do anything to lift this movie above the toilet trash flick that it is!

The Benchwarmers is bad. Yes, I understand it’s supposed to be a spoof. But as a spoof, no one will ever compare it to the Marx Brothers, or the Zucker Brothers, or Mel Brooks. Hell, even comparing it to the pop culture grab-bagging of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer would be comparing it to a high standard it doesn’t deserve! You had to know this kind of crap could roll out of the Happy Madison studio and involve the insufferable Nick Swardson as a writer and a star.

Rob Schneider is one of the marquee stars of The Benchwarmers, and – to paraphrase a review of another movie – the more I see of his starring roles, the less I think of Schneider as an actor and the more I look at him like a social experiment. How much can the general public take before we boot the guy from public consciousness? Jon Heder and David Spade – who can’t even come off as funny anymore – are the other two main stars of The Benchwarmers. Jon Lovitz is the movie’s major co-star, playing a kind of good-hearted slimeball. He’s about the only character in The Benchwarmers who didn’t offend me to the very core of my being, but to the movie’s discredit that isn’t for a lack of trying.

Throughout the course of the movie, I do not believe there is a single bodily excretion that isn’t played in the name of “comedy.” There are gas jokes, some of which are in the worst, more possibly vile taste. There is a vomit joke, and another joke which involves a disabled man eating a tube of sunblock. One of the main characters perpetually wears a skateboarding helmet and pads for absolutely no reason. And oh yeah, there’s a character in the movie named Howie who is disabled, with a horrendous wig and a voice played all for laughs. At least I never heard the word “retard,” but then again, I was watching the edited-for-television version showing on FX.

The plot revolves around a trio of people who were unpopular as kids: Gus, Clark, and Richie. One day they chase off a gang of bullies who were pushing around a young kid, Nelson, on a baseball diamond. Soon after, on the field themselves getting a feel back for baseball, they challenge the bullies to a baseball game and win. A few days later, one of the bullies challenges the three of them to a baseball game again, this time with the backing of his team, and the three of them win again.

Nelson’s father, Mel, is impressed with the trio’s wins. He’s also one of those poor nerds who everyone made fun of when he was a kid… And who grew up to become a billionaire! He dreamed up this idea for a tournament, and the winners will be granted access to a multimillion dollar stadium he’s building. So Clark, Gus, and Richie form their official team, the Benchwarmers, and enter the tournament.

Everyone in The Benchwarmers is either a complete moron or an unrepentant prick. In a few cases, they’re both. Writers Swardson and Allen Covert are apparently of that comedy breed who think inexplicable naivety, left-field visual gags (like Clark’s helmet) and no-holds-barred toilet humor are funny. Calling The Benchwarmers a lowest common denominator comedy is giving it too much credit. The lowest common denominator can treat The Benchwarmers like a cockroach. Swardson plays the disabled Howie with an annoying lisp, and watching the way his character works, I couldn’t help but think of Robert Downey and Ben Stiller’s famous “Full Retard” scene from Tropic Thunder. Although Swardson isn’t going for the Magical Retard trope that’s become so annoyingly common in movies with disabled people, Howie is offensive because he manages to combine a decently working mind with a misunderstanding of his surroundings. The result looks like a character who looks like he could understand the world, but isn’t making the effort to try.

There is a jarring hypocrisy in the existence of Howie. One of the precious few good things I can say about The Benchwarmers is that it beats a strong anti-bullying message into your head. But in Howie, the movie is mocking mentally disabled people. The movie is also especially mean-spirited toward Nelson, and to people in general who identify as nerds. Apparently no one sent Covert, Swardson, and director Dennis Dugan that this isn’t the 1980′s anymore, and the online globalization of the world has effectively destroyed the trope of the nerd, at least in the more generalized, negative ways. Yet The Benchwarmers, despite its anti-bullying theme, is heavily reliant on poking fun at just about every aspect of the nerd kids you would frequently find in teen movies and shows from the 80′s.

Mel mentions in passing the his son seems to be extremely prone to, er… Gas attacks. Do ideas and dialogue like that sound like fun? Rob Schneider isn’t known for either comedic or populist sensibilities. (Except for The Hot Chick, which in all honesty was actually very funny.) Schneider once wrote an ill-advised letter to Los Angeles Times critic Patrick Goldstein, mocking Goldstein for never winning a Pulitzer Prize, after Goldstein insulted his movie Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. Schneider’s letter was not just ill-advised, but ill-researched as Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert took the letter and ran with it, listing the prizes Goldstein won, and using his own Pulitzer Prize as a launching point to one of the greatest critical comeback insults ever written. I wish I could do the same to tell Schneider (as well as Covert and Swardson who, let’s face it, are far more culpable in this case than him) that his movie sucks. But as I’ve never won a Pulitzer, I don’t feel qualified, so I’ll just quote Reggie Jackson: “I can’t stand this stuff. Drives me crazy!”

Yes, I’m Still Here

I hope you all enjoyed the baseball season finale! Unfortunately, I’ve been busy the last month, so I didn’t get to write anything. Baseball literature is extremely difficult to access where I now live as it is, and between my desire to catch up on other reading, the fact that I can’t access a decent library, and personal things, I just plump took the month off to myself. Anyway, here’s a quick column of bullet points:

-First of all, I don’t try to show any bias toward books about the Yankees. It’s not because the Yankees are my favorite team and I’m trying to rub it in. In fact, I go out of my way to track down lesser-known books about small teams. I mean, I know the history of the Yankees, and reading it from angle after angle after endless, endless angle gets boring after awhile. I’m bored and don’t want to read about them all the damn time!

-My heartfelt congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinals fans and their incredible team. Watching them in the postseason and their fast, exciting style of strategic small ball reminded me of why they’re one of my favorite National League teams. They may have been out of it in August, but don’t let any detractors say the Cardinals didn’t deserve that title. They fought back hard, climbed back into the race, and defeated maybe the three best teams in MLB. It’s character like that that makes me wish I could be a full-time Cardinals fan.

-As for the losers, well, last year they really accomplished something. I couldn’t help but feel bad when they lost the World Series. This year, though, I’m just laughing my fool head right off. They lost two World Series in a row, and now all those Dallas sports fans who made fun of the Buffalo Bills are getting a taste of what it’s like. That and after taking into account some baffling strategic blunders by Ron Washington, I lost any feeling the Rangers deserved it. The icing on the cake would have been to watch them get beat by the New York Mets.

-You knew Tony La Russa wouldn’t be around much longer. He went out in a way most managers only dream of.

-I know Theo Epstein is running the Cubbies now And Albert Pujols is a free agent, but how dumb can newspaper speculation get? The go-to mathematical formula for the fate of Pujols has somehow taken on this look:
Epstein + Cubs = Pujols joining the Cubs
How do you figure? This is a perfect example of people getting caught up in groundless speculation caused by the media not having, you know, a real story. It’s like how everyone last year flogged the Yankees for not getting Cliff Lee when Lee had already stated in plain, clear English that he had no desire to go to the Yankees! Believe it or not, some people are motivated by factors other than money!

-Ozzie Guillen isn’t going to look right in anything other than a White Sox uniform. He’s one of the reasons I identify so closely with the team and cling to them as a part of Chicago from when I was living there.

-Due to my aforementioned lack of library access, you’ll be seeing many more movie reviews and commentaries on other writing. I’ll still write about books, of course, it’s just that the frequency of the other things will increase while my book review frequency will be slightly down. It will only be until I’m back on my feet. There’s no way I’m going to stop writing Lit Bases because people are starting to really take notice of it, and besides, I’m not going to stop watching or reading about baseball.

-My presence as a writer on the internet first came to prominence about seven years ago when I was invited to write about video games for the now-defunct independent website Netjak. Video games are one of the primary things people close to me identify me with, and so between Lit Bases articles, I’m writing an autobiography with video games as the focal point. Kinda like Fever Pitch, but with video games.

Moneyball – Movie

Billy Beane won, you know. He would hate to hear anyone say that since he never picked up a Pennant, but he won. He changed the way baseball is played. Well, maybe not so much played as constructed, but his method proved to win a ton of games in the end. Most teams are emulating his model now, and as the Boston Red Sox say at the end of the movie Moneyball, those not using it are old dinosaurs. Beane’s biggest foe, Joe Morgan, is an old trudging dino these days whom I could probably beat up, and I’m 5’10″, 180 lbs, and have three bad limbs. Okay, maybe that’s going too far, but baseball teams using the building methods older than Socrates are getting left in the dust, and if Joe Morgan beat me up it wouldn’t make him any less an idiot.

Moneyball is an underdog story, but a very different kind of animal in the underdog trope. The Oakland Athletics are a team now known for their lack of convention and disregard for what’s considered standard and normal, and in this way it makes perfect sense that Moneyball is about them. If Moneyball were a fictional story, it would still revolve around the Athletics because no one would buy into the Yankees, Cubs, or Braves being underfunded small-market underdogs. As Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane says, “Here’s the real problem: There are rich teams, and there are poor teams. Then there’s 50 feet of crap. And then there’s us.” Moneyball is the story of how the Athletics bucked the traditional system and won as many games as the New York Yankees on a budget which might pay for half an arm of Alex Rodriguez.

In his review of this movie, Roger Ebert wrote that the real main character in Moneyball is the idea. This is true, but where I disagree with Ebert is in his insistence that the idea is the main character in the movie. The idea was definitely the main character in the book, which is considered one of the sport’s classic pieces of literature. But the problem with using an idea as a main character is that it can go out in so many different ways, none of which will necessarily be taken to their natural conclusions. I read the book and found it to be inconsistent about its subject matter and too prone to jumping around to the point where author Michael Lewis seemed confused himself. He tries to do a million different things in Moneyball and so he ended up doing nothing.

This is the challenge of adapting a book such as Moneyball. Fortunately, Aaron Sorkin was one of the screenwriters, and so the movie does something traditional thinking would deem impossible: It takes an idea – a mathematics-based idea, no less – and creates a small group of fully human vessels to convey it through. Billy Beane was a once-promising draft prospect with the New York Mets who got up to The Show and blew it. We are given a series of brief flashbacks in Moneyball to give the tale. Unlike most other ballplayers who try to weather out their careers, Beane eventually accepts the fact that his baseball career will never amount to a Cooperstown resume, and so one day during his stint with the Oakland Athletics, he goes to the front office and asks for a job as a scout. The team owner is suprised by the request but complies. Honestly, I didn’t like the flashbacks. They do explain why Billy seems so morose at times, but his divorce could have done that job just as well.

Anyway, after a long time as a scout, Beane lands in the General Manager’s seat. It’s the 2001 ALDS the first time we see Beane, in the deciding fifth game against the Yankees. Oakland loses, and their three big guns, Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen, are of course off to free agency and big bucks. Beane needs a monetary break to replace that kind of talent which the front office just doesn’t have. One day while he’s in Cleveland trying to work out a trade, he meets Peter Brand and is impressed when the Tribe’s GM takes his advice. He flags Peter down and picks his brain, trying to learn what make’s Brand’s baseball side tick. Peter, who is ostracized in Cleveland for his unconventional team-building views, finds his niche in Oakland, where he is exactly the kind of radical thinker Beane needs.

The relationship between Beane and Brand is the real crux of the movie. In humanizing an idea based on a subject few people understand, we come to learn a lot of essential character details about them both. Beane and Brand are played by Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill respectively, turning Moneyball into an odd variation of the buddy movie. They bounce off each other and are one of the better duos to pop up onscreen in recent years. Beane playfully teases Brand a lot, but even at his worst he’s still respectful of Brand’s ideas because he knows Oakland’s turnaround sits inside the supercomputer brain of his math-loving, Yale grad new Assistant GM.

The Athletics go from worst to first, as do so all underfunded, talentless teams from sports movies. In this respect, Moneyball is both definition and subversion of that particular storytelling trope: The Athletics have no funding or talent, and are just this odd bunch of folks who learn to come together as a team and surprise the entire league. But the only focus on the players is strictly on their presence as components of a bigger whole and not on their cute little quirks. It’s the GM duo who have to convince everyone on the planet that their team can play well, most of all manager Art Howe, who refuses to play the players Billy suggests. When Oakland is sent home from the ALDS again, Billy feels it hard because he knows idiots like Joe Morgan are going to denounces him as a fluke, while a World Series win would get everyone to acknowledge the change he brought to baseball.

There’s a certain somberness to Moneyball, probably because it’s so grounded in Billy’s failures as a ballplayer and his divorce. We do have to put up with a handful of slow, boring scenes which don’t really include a whole lot of the main story. But even so, Moneyball is easily the best baseball movie of the last 20 years. If it weren’t for a couple of technical issues, it would have dethroned Eight Men Out as my favorite baseball movie. Moneyball is an outstanding drama which shows us statistics in a humanized form. You can only hope Billy Beane will win the World Series after seeing it. Hey, other teams are doing well on his ideas.