In a sentence: A desperate sports agent goes to India to try to find major league caliber pitchers.
"Two players run to first. They both have the same time, but one has perfect form. The other, lousy form. Which one do you pick?"
"The one with lousy form."
"'Cause teach him the right form..."
"...and he beats the other guy."
The softball team I run was originally run by a chemistry student, and about half the team was from the chemistry department. Over time a lot of them graduated, moved away, had to go wherever the work was. It was always somewhere else. One of those students was a young man named Jean-Marc. As the name may imply, he wasn't from the area: he was from Trinidad, and he had literally never played baseball in any form. But he had tremendous physical gifts. It was amazing watching him swing without moving his legs, just flicking his wrists, and still hitting the ball harder than most of us using all the momentum our stride could give us. Watching him spring down the first base line at top speed, only to awkwardly try to come to a stop at the base rather than run through it.
He was, essentially, a project. The sky was the limit, if we could marry his natural athleticism to mechanics and muscle memory. He got better: by the end, he was catching most of the fly balls he was used to, and hitting more and more line drives. He started to get the bug, the itch. And then, like all the others, he graduated and moved away.
This movie is based on a true story, which it tells us upfront. But I didn't need to be told. I'm a Pirates fan, and remember hearing about the event this is based on when it happened a decade ago. It was presented as an example of the Pirates forward-lookingness, an example of a smart small market team scouring places the bigger teams can't be bothered to, and finding rubies in the rough. And like the events of this movie, it's fair to ask whether any of it would have happened without the added public relations aspect.
When I watch formulaic movies, I don't really watch them the same way I'd watch something better or more ambitious. I start evaluating them based on rote things like sheer execution, or whether they throw the occasional curveball (sorry) to mix it up a little for savvier viewers. I do a similar thing with films "Based on a True Story": I try to figure out which things were the invention of the screenwriters, which things were changed or exaggerated to help reality fit that formula.
This might be one of those stories, though, that really did fit that formula. That has element after element which you would've sworn were tweaked, amplified, or outright fabricated...and
yet they weren't.
I should disclose that I am physiologically incapable of disliking anything Lake Bell is involved with, but the whole cast is impressive and charming. Jon Hamm is overpowered for the role, and Dinesh and Rinku are pitch perfect. And they have to be. This doesn't work if they veer too far in any one direction. They have to seem like adolescents: not fully grown men, and not just wide-eyed boys. It's a real balancing act that mirrors the surreal experience, as a baseball fan, of watching 20 year old kids thrust in front of millions of fans on a regular basis. Almost as surreal as the very first time you realize you're older than one of the players you're watching. I think a lot of you probably remember the first time that happened, or maybe the cinematic equivalent of watching someone younger than you win an Oscar.
Baseball has more international appeal than the other major North American sports, and I'm not sure it's even close. Obviously soccer is
the sport worldwide, presumably in part because of its elegance and simplicity, so it's kind of strange that something as convoluted and arbitrary as baseball would find so much purchase on other shores. It's
massive in Japan and it's practically a way of life in the Dominican Republic and Cuba, where it has the same quality as football in American inner cities: sometimes, for kids in poverty, it's the only way out.
Cuban baseball has its own culture entirely, specifically that its hitters are more free-swinging (and get better at hitting "bad" pitches as a result) than most other places. Or, as it is sometimes put: "You can't
walk off the island."
It seems inexplicable that baseball travels as well as it does, given its convoluted nature. Everyone recognizes that there is beauty in simplicity, but it seems to me there is an inverse beauty in the delicate balance, the house of cards, the set of rules tweaked and shaped over a literal century to compliment and counterbalance each other. In creating a game that only exists with constant human management and assessment. A game that operates like a machine, with every cog linking to the next. Something fragile and precious that nobody else would ever create. A pocketwatch in place of a sundial.
Yes, we love the simple and the powerful. But we fall in love with the quirky and the unique. You love soccer the way you love the sun or the moon. But you love baseball the way you love another person.
It's fine. There's very little of it to speak of. The mechanics of the throwing are good, there's no silly H(B?)ollywoodification where they just pick up a ball and hurl it 95 out of nowhere and everyone's jaws drop. It's a slow, arduous process and they ultimately find people who are merely promising; good runners with bad form.
Yes. But obviously there's no game. One of the tensest scenes in the film, in fact, takes place in the parking lot of a strip mall, which is where Dinesh and Rinku have their first MLB tryout. That, alone, sets this film apart from every other baseball film I've ever seen.
The tryout goes terribly, but they manage to secure another (with fewer attendees) at the location they actually trained out, and of course at this point everyone's given them the requisite emotional support they need to succeed. And they do: the Pirates offer them professional contracts.
Jean-Marc kept playing softball after he moved, and has occasionally kept me updated on it. And he showed up at one of our year-end parties after moving, a personal surprise I found out about only when he arrived. It was a good thing, too, because he had a hilarious star turn in the highlight reel: he was superimposed on Rene Russo's face.
I don't know if he'll keep playing or not. Maybe he'll make good on all that potential, and some team in his new home will enjoy the benefits. I hope so. But I already got all I could want out of him: I got to share the game I love with someone who knew nothing about it, watch him take to it, get better at it, and start to see why it was so special to so many of us.
Neither Dinesh nor Rinku ever pitched in the major leagues. This particular barrier remains unbroken. But so it goes: the person who has to knock down the wall usually isn't going to pick themselves up and keep running with the baton after. That's not their job. Often, their job is to be a human wrecking ball of possibility, knocking down one of a hundred barriers to entry so that some day, a poor Indian boy will pick up a baseball and change his life.
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